WITH Hextol Towers lying within a few minutes‘ drive of the darkest skies in Europe, one would have thought we would have got one of the best views in the land of last week’s spectacular Perseid meteor showers.

So it was only with the mildest of protests that I was persuaded by Mrs Hextol after a hard day at the office to ignore the siren call of the bedsheets last Wednesday night to head for Kielder.

Even under the Bellingham street lights, it was apparent that the sky was ablaze with heavenly bodies, so just before 11pm we jumped into the car and headed north.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but having fond memories of the Hale-Bopp Comet’s spectacular if sedate progress across the night sky in 1997, I imagined something rather smaller but infinitely quicker whizzing by.

I was secretly hoping for a blazing ball of molten lead the size of Hexham Abbey to come scorching its way across the sky, sucking all the water out of the Tyne and trailing smoke and flames with such urgency that Morgan Freeman would be called upon to make a pronouncement from the steps of a smouldering White House – but sadly, it wasn’t to be.

My knowledge of the celestial wonders doesn’t extend much beyond the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper and Orion’s Belt, but there is something serenely majestic about all those millions of twinkling lights high above.

I often wonder if there is a little green man peering up at me, nodding one of his three heads and saying in a Dalek voice to the shimmering cloud of purple gas that is his wife : “All this talk of life on other planets is a load of guff, Fizzigog.”

We were enveloped by inky blackness the moment we passed the “Welcome to Bellingham” sign but the car headlights meant we couldn’t get full value for our night out whilst in motion.

We decided to head for the Elf Kirk viewpoint just past Tower Knowe visitor centre on the shore of the great lake, hoping for better luck than our last visit to the rocky promontory.

That was a couple of years ago, when an excited man on the telly told us there was going to be a mind-blowing display of the Aurora Borealis that very night.

Up to Kielder we went, beneath a sky of such brilliance that you could hear the stars twinkling, where we sat for three hours staring upwards until our eyeballs ached. We saw the International Space Station sail over, were frightened by a huge owl and spotted innumerable aircraft star-trekking by to destinations unknown, but the Northern Lights remained resolutely out.

A number of other cars pulled up at various points during the evening, so I locked the doors in case they were dubious folk hopeful of canine diversions, but we eventually left unfulfilled, only to be told the next day there had been an eye-searing display of heavenly pyrotechnics. just down the road at Corbridge.

We reasoned lightning wouldn’t strike out twice at Elk Kirk, especially at the dead of night, but sadly, we were wrong again.

As we headed up the C200 we were joined by a cavalcade of cars, many of which followed us up the rocky track to the car park.

And when we got there, it was already full of other vehicles, occupied by people tucking into sandwiches and flasks of coffee, with bawling children, lively dogs and a constant procession of still more cars, vans and even minibuses lighting up the “darkest skies in Europe” like Piccadilly Circus.

Headlights, interior lights, mobile phones and torches all contributed to the candlepower, and finally one vehicle ran off the road into a ditch, necessitating the switching on of hazard warning lights which seared the retina so thoroughly that Captain James Tiberius Kirk and the starship Enteerprise, pursued and a whole fleetsof Klingons could have passed by unobserved.

I did see a flash of white streaking across the heavens, but my shriek of triumph was cut short when I realised that far from being a chunk of ice from a distant comet, it was a large moth attracted by all the lights.

We eventually gave up, and headed back to Bellingham around 1am to get some much needed sleep, and as I was gratefully drifting off, Mrs Hextol came rushing into the bedroom to declare gleefully: “I’ve just seen a shooting star through the conservatory window ...”