Allendale Tar Bar'l
At midnight on New Year's Eve forty odd guisers carry blazing barrels on their heads to a bonfire in the Northumberland market square, then turn to first foot the year in.
A handsome North Pennines stone market village with a working Co-op, its own bakery, a brewery, and the annual Tar Barl fire festival to its name - modest in scale but genuinely self-sufficient and worth the detour from Hexham.
Cottages, B&Bs and hotels near Allendale, Northumberland.
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"A classic upland agricultural show on the Allendale showfield celebrating the livestock, horticultural, and rural craft traditions of the North Pennine Dales."
Allendale Show
"A beloved North Tynedale agricultural show at the heart of Northumberland's most remote market town, celebrating 100 years of Kielder Forest in 2026 with inter-farm challenges, vintage vehicles, and livestock classes."
Bellingham Show
"Deep in the Northumberland countryside, a riotous one-day festival with terrier racing, live bands, Northumbrian piping, traditional wrestling, a dog show and fell racing, with the 2026 theme celebrating 100 years of Kielder Forest."
Bellingham Show and Country Festival
"A border shepherd's show in the shadow of the Cheviots, one of Northumberland's most traditional agricultural gatherings, with Cheviot sheep, cattle, horses and the Border hills right there on the horizon."
Glendale Show
"A tiny Northumberland hamlet between Alnwick and Craster springs to life each August Bank Holiday with a scarecrow trail quiz, tombola, sausage sizzle and refreshments raising funds for the village hall and church."
Rennington Scarecrow Festival
"Five days of classical music, recitals and choral performances in and around the magnificent 7th-century Hexham Abbey, one of the finest ecclesiastical settings for live music in northern England."
Hexham Abbey Festival of Music and Arts
"A tower of rushes twelve feet high is pulled through the Pennine villages of Saddleworth by a hundred Morris dancers from across the country, a weekend of dancing, singing, gurning and walking on the edge of the moors."
Saddleworth Rushcart Festival
✦ Weird and Wonderful"A sixteen foot thatched rush cart pulled by sixty men in whites and clogs winds between the pubs of the Calder Valley, morris sides dancing it from inn to inn over a September weekend."
Sowerby Bridge Rushbearing
✦ Weird and Wonderful"The Malton showground in the Ryedale market town hosts this September traction engine rally where working steam engines from across Yorkshire and the North compete in road runs and working demonstrations, the last major steam show of the Yorkshire summer season."
Yorkshire Traction Engine Rally
"The North York Moors market town famous for its steam railway goes fully Victorian for a winter weekend, with staff in period dress, lantern-lit streets, costumed carol singers and a steam train pulling out of the station into the winter darkness to the sound of period band music."
Pickering Victorian Christmas
"Each spring, wild Narcissus pseudonarcissus carpets a seven-mile stretch of the River Dove in Farndale Nature Reserve, drawing up to 40,000 visitors to a dale with a resident population of around 200."
Farndale Daffodil Walk
"A privately owned Grade I Palladian hall throws open its formal and woodland gardens each May Bank Holiday to display over 6,000 tulips across more than 100 varieties, planted as the northern show garden for Chelsea gold-medal nursery Bloms Bulbs."
Constable Burton Hall Tulip Festival