Dog-friendly Warkworth

A stone pub on Castle Street with benches at the front and a sheltered yard behind that the landlord calls the yar-den. The inn describes itself as dog friendly and does bar food and B&B rooms, all en suite. It does not state whether dogs may stay in the bedrooms, so ask before booking.

Daytime cafe and courtyard in the middle of Warkworth, good for breakfast before the castle opens. It is dog friendly, but the dog-friendly tables are a limited set: say you have a dog when you reserve, because they are subject to availability. The courtyard is the pleasanter half in fine weather.

Three flat miles in an hour and a half round the loop of the Coquet, from the castle gate down to the medieval bridge and upriver to the rock-cut Hermitage before returning on the Mill Walk. Park in the pay-and-display car park below Warkworth Castle on Castle Terrace, or use the free spaces on Dial Place if you are early. Dogs are welcome on leads in the castle grounds but not inside the keep, the riverside path is fenced from the water for most of its length, and the field section above the Hermitage is grazed.

Three and a half miles in an hour and three quarters, over the dunes to the sand and north along the beach to the rock scars at Birling Carrs, returning by the links path. Start at the Warkworth beach car park at the end of Beal Bank, a charged council car park that is the only parking on this side of the river and fills on the first warm Saturday of the year. Dogs run free on the whole beach with no seasonal ban anywhere in this parish, and the Coquet mouth is a good swim on a calm day, but the dune grassland is grazed and the estuary end holds roosting terns in late summer.

A mile and a half round the loop of the Coquet that the village sits in, from the Market Cross at Dial Place up Castle Terrace to the castle gate, round the grass of the Butts under the keep, then down to the river and back over the fourteenth-century fortified bridge into Bridge Street. Short, mostly paved and lit, which makes it the walk to do last thing from one of the village pubs. The county dog control PSPO carries no exclusion here and requires a lead of no more than 1.5m on the classified road through the village and in St Lawrence's churchyard. The Butts is open grass and unfenced from the road.

A small riverside site on Morwick Road for tents, caravans and campervans, with a walkway down to the Coquet that suits an early dog walk. The site takes well-behaved dogs as a matter of course. Warkworth village and castle are a mile and a half north.

A family-run hotel on Bridge Street that puts its dog policy in writing room by room: all of the first-floor bedrooms take dogs, and the room pages say which ones do and do not. Warkworth Castle is a two-minute walk uphill and the beach a mile the other way. Rooms are plain, comfortable and quiet.

The Percy stronghold above the Coquet, its cross-shaped keep still climbable for the view down the village street. English Heritage lists the castle among its dog-friendly properties, with dogs on leads. The Hermitage, the chapel cut into the rock upriver, is the exception: dogs are not allowed there at all.