Inspired by Jenny Uglow's biography of Thomas Bewick, we spent Saturday morning following in the engraver's footsteps along the banks of the Tyne, from Wylam to Newburn. The path, now part of the Keelman's Way that leads cyclists and walkers into Gateshead, is one he would have followed often from his home at Cherryburn to his teenage apprenticeship in Newcastle. Then, even in the late 1760s, some rural parts of the route were rapidly becoming industrialised. This was once grim coal-mining country, much of it now reclaimed by nature.

Walking downstream, we skirted riverside woodland, golf courses and Ryton Willows nature reserve, glimpsing goosander, herons and cormorants on the river. Bewick illustrated all three birds but probably wouldn't have seen goosander, which were 20th-century colonists, on this river. Further downstream near Newburn he would surely have delighted in the blue and yellow flowers of sea aster, a coastal plant that colonises the Tyne's banks here.

After a pause at Newburn at the Boathouse pub, marked with a datum for the flood of 1771 that swept away all bridges down to the sea, we headed back along Wylam Waggonway, now a wooded cycle path through farmland but in Bewick's day a railway, first horse-drawn and then hauled by the first steam locomotives, carrying coal to Tyne keels moored downriver. So what might the master engraver have chosen to illustrate in his vignettes if he'd been walking with us today? Most likely people at play: cyclists, walkers, rowers, canoeists, a water-skier, golfers, bird-watchers, joggers, fishermen. This stretch of river, once industrial, is now a safety valve for urban dwellers, walking or cycling out of the city to enjoy the pleasures of countryside that Bewick so painstakingly engraved into his boxwood blocks.