Flat caps on, mufflers knotted, a cough and off we trudge on the Lowry Trail around Berwick-upon-Tweed, where the artist took his holidays from the mid-1930s until his death in 1976.
“He used to sit in the bar and sketch,” says Amanda Herbert, the housekeeper at the Castle Hotel, where he often stayed. “He sometimes sketched on napkins and gave them away. A lot of locals will have had little sketches that are worth thousands now.”
Berwick is England’s most northerly town, a frontier place bristling with military history. It has been batted between England and Scotland a dozen or more times over the centuries. It may now be English but, as residents like to point out, its football team plays in the Scottish League.