The Heritage Lottery Fund supported a communty project led by the Berwick Slow Food group to explore an celebrate the food and drink heritage of Berwick and the surrounding district, past and present. Click here to find out more..

Many of the villages and hamlets around Berwick have Old English names that show that food was produced there even in Anglo-Saxon times. For example:-

Berwick = bere-wic (barley farm)
Bewick = beo-wic (bee farm)
Beal = beo-hyll (bee hill)
Swinhoe = swin-hoh (pig hill)
Buckton = buck-tun (the village where deer were kept for venison)
Elwick = ell-wic (eel farm)
Cheswick = ces-wic (cheese farm)
Goswick = gos-wic (goose farm)

Barley has been grown in the area since Anglo-Saxon times and still plays a major role in the local economy today. The fields are filled with golden barley in the summer months and the great grain silos and flour mills are prominent structures in and around Berwick. Some of the best quality barley is malted in Tweedmouth to supply the Scotch whisky trade.

During the 18th an early 19th centuries, farmers from all over England visited Northumberland to see how famous men like George and Matthew Culley had developed their farms with new crops, improved breeds of animals and new methods of land management. The results of the work of those “improvers” can still be seen in the area’s farms and fields today.

In 1804, at the height of the Napoleonic wars, over seven million eggs were exported by sea from Berwick, mainly to London. There is still an egg wall in nearby Lowick dating from this period. Today, free-range eggs are produced using more modern, but sustainable, methods in farms around the town. Several of these egg producers are, or will soon be, certified as organic.

Salmon-fishing is another age-old industry in the area. The coastal waters off the Northumberland coast and the tidal stretch of the River Tweed were divided into individual fisheries in the early Middle Ages. Those same fisheries continued to be worked until the latter part of the 20th century when most of them were bought out and closed down to preserve the salmon stocks for the lucrative leisure activity of rod-fishing that takes place further upstream in the Scottish Borders. One fishery at Tweedmouth and another at Paxton still operate in the traditional way, using nets shot from small rowing boats called cobles. Look out for them during the salmon-fishing season (mid-June to mid-September) – they are the last of a centuries-long tradition.

Local harbours like St Abbs, Eyemouth, Berwick, Holy Island, Seahouses and Beadnell were once full of fishing-boats that harvested the waters of the North Sea. The 19th century was the heyday of the herring-fishing industry, when each year a huge fleet of herring-drifters followed the shoals of herring as they migrated from the North of Scotland to East Anglia. An army of fisher-lasses shadowed them. Stopping for a while at each small port where the herring were landed by their men-folk, they gutted and cleaned the fish and packed them in barrels of salt or packed round with ice. The industry collapsed after the First World War and some of the old herring-boats were turned upside down on the beach at Holy Island and serve today, almost 100 years later, as storage sheds for fishing gear.

It is said that Seahouses was the first place where herring was cured and smoked to produce kippers. A traditional smoke-house is still in business in Seahouses today. Together with another famous smoke-house at Craster, a little further down the Northumberland coast, they produce some of the finest kippers, and other smoked fish and shell-fish, that you will find anywhere.