The name Beadnell comes from the Anglo-Saxon Beadan-halh, meaning 'Bede's nook' or 'Bede's hall' - referring most likely to the Venerable Bede, the eighth-century monk and historian of Jarrow whose writings shaped the English understanding of their own origins. The earliest written reference to the village dates from 1161, so the name was already old by the time it first appeared on parchment. The parish church of St Ebba sits at the heart of the village, named for Saint Aebbe the Elder, a seventh-century princess of Northumbria, daughter of King Aethelfrith, and founder of the great abbey at Coldingham further north. The current church is mostly a nineteenth-century rebuild of an eighteenth-century chapel - in 1902, a clock was added to mark the coronation of Edward VII.

Tucked inside The Craster Arms public house is a sixteenth-century pele tower - a small fortified stone building of the kind that dotted the Borders during the centuries of cross-border raiding. Pele towers had thick walls, narrow windows, and a single defensible entrance; they were essentially private bunkers for families who lived near a fluid and dangerous frontier. The Beadnell tower is now built into the modern pub, its stonework a part of the bar and lounge. You can drink a pint inside a building constructed to keep Scottish raiders out. The continuity of that arrangement - serious medieval defensive architecture quietly absorbed into nineteenth-century leisure - is very Northumberland.

On the headland that shelters the harbour stands Ebb's Nook, the ruined site of a small medieval chapel. The name remembers Saint Aebbe again. In 2012, the Channel 4 archaeology series Time Team came to Beadnell to investigate the site, digging trenches and producing one of their characteristic three-day analyses. They found evidence of the chapel walls, the floor, and traces of the use the site had been put to over the centuries. The ruins are still visible today, weathering quietly on the headland with the North Sea beyond them. Bernard Cornwell referred to Beadnell as Bedehal in his Saxon Stories series - the same fictional landscape that has the village in continuous conversation with Bamburgh and Lindisfarne, just as the real village has been for over a thousand years.

Today, Beadnell is a small village - 545 people at the 2011 Census - whose economy runs largely on holidaymakers. Holiday homes have replaced most of the year-round houses; two large caravan sites and several campsites cluster around the village. A small amount of fishing still works out of the unusual west-facing harbour. The beach is one of the long sweeps of pale sand that defines this stretch of coast, running south towards Newton-by-the-Sea and Dunstanburgh Castle, and north towards Seahouses and the Farne Islands. The village sits four miles south-east of Bamburgh, three miles south of Seahouses, well inside the Northumberland Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty - the protected landscape that runs from the Tweed estuary to Amble, holding the whole medieval coast together under one designation.