Dog-friendly Wooler

Wooler's main coaching inn, seventeen rooms and a bar with a real fire, and the obvious base for the Cheviot hills and St Cuthbert's Way. For ten pounds per stay dogs are welcome in all areas except the restaurants, and some bedrooms are kept dog-free while others take dogs. The self-catering Garden House takes them too.

Six and a half miles and 560 metres of climbing in four hours, over the granite tors of Housey Crags and up the long grass ridge to the 714-metre summit of Hedgehope Hill, the second of the Cheviots, returning down the Harthope Burn. Start from the informal roadside pull-ins in the Harthope valley below Langleeford; there is no car park, no toilet and no phone signal, and the lane from Wooler is single track for four miles. Genuinely remote walking where the nearest help is a long way off: the burn gives water low down and nothing does above, the tors have short scrambly steps a big dog will need helping over, and sheep and ground-nesting birds mean leads on open ground from March to July.

Eight and a half miles and 587 metres of climbing, four and a half to five hours up the Harthope Burn past Harthope Linn to Cairn Hill, along the Pennine Way flagstones to the 815-metre summit of The Cheviot and down over Scald Hill. Start from the roadside parking above Langleeford, at the end of the single-track lane from Wooler: there are perhaps a dozen informal spaces along the valley and none of them are a car park, so early arrival matters. Water in the burn for the first two miles and nothing above it, deep peat hags on the plateau that a dog will disappear into, no shelter at all on top, sheep on every field and open fell, and ground-nesting golden plover and dunlin from March to July when leads are asked for.

Five and a half miles and 290 metres of climbing in about three hours, out on St Cuthbert’s Way over Gains Law to the Iron Age hillfort on Humbleton Hill and back by the old drove track to Wooler Common. Start from the Padgepool Place car park in Wooler, which is free with around 60 spaces and never full, or drive the mile up to the small free Wooler Common car park to cut the climb. This is sheep country from end to end, with the National Park asking for leads through the lambing season, ground-nesting curlew and lapwing on the hill ground from March to July, and only the Humbleton Burn for water, though the forest edge at Wooler Common gives an off-lead stretch.

A holiday park on the Wooler Water with lodges and caravans, and its own dog-friendly bar and restaurant on site, which spares you the walk into town in bad weather. Marketed squarely at dog owners. Handy for Humbleton Hill and the Harthope road into the hills.

A whisky distillery and Anglo-Saxon museum built new on Wooler's South Road, telling the story of the royal palace excavated at Yeavering nearby. Dogs are welcome on the outdoor patio seating overlooking the garden, but not through the museum or the indoor restaurant. Worth an hour when the Cheviots are in cloud.

A single-track road runs south-west from Wooler into the Harthope burn, ending in a valley of bracken, sheep and crags with Hedgehope and the Cheviot either side. Verge parking only, no facilities, no shop and patchy phone signal: this is the remote end of Northumberland and should be treated as such. The national park asks for dogs on leads here, with lambs and ground-nesting curlew and lapwing on the ground.