Day 6: Once Brewed to Gilsland

It started raining overnight. As I'm having breakfast, I look out the window to see horizontal rain. Great -- this is what I get to do a tough part of the trail in!! That's what I'm thinking as I finish breakfast...

I get myself packed up and go out to start the walk for the day, and it is really raining. And the rain is blowing straight into my face. And I look up to the ridge line where the trail is and I don't see the ridge, the trail, the Wall -- it is obscured by the clouds. Great. I can wait for the weather to clear... it is supposed to clear by noon... in that case, I'd have to haul @$$ to make it to my next stop... along a very tough, very slippery, very muddy section of the Path... Just great.

I make a strategic decision to walk to the nearby visitor's center for the Northumberland National Park, which overlaps with Hadrian's Wall Path for a short distance. While there, I run into two women from Alaska who are walking the Wall and who are looking for a ride to their next destination. So the three of us agreed to split the cost between us and solved the problem. I was very grateful for the solution!!

And so I spent the cold, windy, rainy, miserable day at my next stop, the Samson Inn in Gilsland.

Day 5: Housesteads to Once Brewed

This day has been an especially nice day. The weather was cool but beautiful, and my walk was shorter than usual.

The day started at the Roman fort at Housesteads. It was easily visible in the distance as I approached it, and pretty striking against the blue sky. This is a wonderfully well-preserved fort, with nearly every aspect of the little soldiers' village within the fort easily discernible.

Beyond the fort lies the most beautiful scenery yet! The Wall follows the ridge line of the hills and crags, and the view from the top is magnificent. In this part of the Path, there are actually two trails -- one at the top right along the Wall which follows the undulations of the land via rock steps, and another a little lower, which isn't as steep going either up or down but is pretty muddy in places.

My stop for the day is in the town of Once Brewed. Legend has it that when a general stayed at an inn here in the mid-1700's, he found the beer to be so awful that he ordered it to be brewed again. This legend explains the name of the town, as well as the name of the inn: Twice Brewed.

While here, I meet an American woman who is 10 years older than me who is an extremely experienced backpacker. She is the first lone woman I meet on the trail, and she is hiking it in the direction opposite to me. She tells me that the piece she just walked -- the piece I will walk tomorrow -- is one of the toughest she has encountered! As I finish my supper and my pint, I start reading up on what to expect for the tough day ahead...

Day 4: Wall to Housesteads

About as soon as I leave Wall and get back on the Path, I see a little trail down to the shores of the river North Tyne. This goes down to the ruins of a Roman bridge. Across the river from this bridge is my first planned target for the day, Chester's Fort. I can see the ruins of the Roman bath right on the river.

Chester's Fort was originally named Cilurnum, or "Cauldron Pool", which no one has been able to explain yet. It is different from other forts on the wall. Usually, the north wall of a fort is Hadrian's Wall, with the north gate being a portal through the Wall and into the fort. But for this fort, the Romans tore down part of the Wall and built the fort to straddle the Wall. Much of this fort, and in fact many of the Roman ruins in the area, were excavated in the 1800's by John Clayton, who dedicated his entire life to recovering the history of Rome in the area.

From Chester's Fort, the trail is more and more pasture land. This is not easy hiking by any stretch of the imagination -- in fact, it is pretty taxing. English mud is some thick, black stuff. When cows or sheep step in this mud, they leave behind little post-holes. And, of course, these little holes are everywhere, and if I don't both step carefully and look carefully where I'm going, I could easily twist an ankle! So I stop to look around from time to time and enjoy the cool breeze in my face. And, on one occasion, I happen upon a stretch of Hadrian's Wall in the pasture I'm traipsing across.

The Wall is often very near a Roman ditch just to its north. At the northern-most point of the Wall, called Limestone Corner, the ditch is filled with boulders of whinstone, a super-hard basalt rock. The Romans apparently tried to remove that rock while carving out the ditch, and use that rock -- carve it up into bricks for the Wall -- but failed miserably and had to give up. Interestingly enough, the ditch stops here, too.

At one point in the trail, maybe 3 miles from my destination, I was met by quite the welcoming committee of cows. A whole herd of them saw me approaching the ladder into their pasture, and all of them came over to greet me. By that point, my feet were hurting pretty badly from being unable to take a normal stride because of the mini post holes, and I didn't relish negotiating my way through the welcoming committee. And it was starting to rain. So I shifted over to the roadway to finish the day's trek. The welcoming committee did follow me down the road for quite a ways -- on their side of the fence, of course!

I stayed the night at Beggar's Bog Farm. The owners are a young couple with a 3-year-old. The wife works in Newcastle as a speech therapist (her specialty is stammering -- stuttering -- and she had read some of the work of my good friend Anne Marcotte!!), and the husband runs the farm and bed & breakfast, which is located in what used to be the farm's stable. This is easily the nicest place I've stayed at yet, and the shower was especially wonderful.

The other couple staying there happened to be from Atlanta! What a small world it is sometimes...

Day 3: East Wallhouses to Wall

Okay, more English countryside! But this time, it has morphed from farmland to pasture. Sheep (Baaa -- that's what sheep said!). Small forest (Fanghorn, or Sherwood?). Roman earthworks. I wish some of the pictures I took could show the depth of the landscapes that surrounded me.

The hiking is SO MUCH MORE ENJOYABLE without that darned pack on my back! I was not meant to be a beast of burden...

For the most part, the trail is following the B 6318 highway, which is also called the Military Road. In 1745, General Wade was chasing Bonnie Prince Charlie, who was pillaging his way from Scotland into England. Wade made a critical tactical error and planned to ambush Bonnie Prince Charlie in Newcastle. The Bonnie Prince, however, was over on the other side of the island making his advance. So Wade's army had to speed-build a road to move the troops to intercept the invaders.

This military road was built with Roman wall stones, right ON TOP of wall's path, for several miles. The roadway stayed, and ultimately modernized into the current B 6318. So today's Hadrian's Wall Path goes alongside of this highway, but not right on the road -- just a few yards from it, inside the fences of cropland and pastures.

Ultimately I come upon another piece of Wall at Planetrees. And what a neat piece it is -- it shows very clearly where the Romans shifted their building style from a wide foundation and wide wall (requiring lots of resources and manpower), to a wide foundation with a narrow wall (requiring fewer resources and less manpower). Resources have to be conserved somewhere, even if you're the Roman Empire...

And finally, I come upon my quarters for the night -- the Hadrian Hotel in Wall. (I took the picture of it the next morning, after returning the SD card to the camera).

Day 2: Newburn to East Wallhouses

(For the next couple of days, I've forgotten to put the SD card back into the camera, so my pix for these next two entries will be added once I have found the appropriate USB cable!)

Not far from my station for last night, the trail begins to turn into farmland. Something in the cultivated land is blooming now and turning entire fields into swathes of yellow. It is quite beautiful. Also not far from the inn is a golf course!

But it doesn't take long before farmland takes the place of yesterday's urban scenery. And today, in the town of Heddon-on-the-Wall, I get my first sighting of real, honest-to-goodness, Roman wall!

The pictures I take are scenes from cropland and (semi) rural England. Exhausted, I get to my second stop, the Robin Hood Inn.

Up to this point, I have walked with a backpack. In talking with other walkers who are using the same guidebook I am, we strongly agree that the distances are under-estimated, and the times quoted to cover those distances are meant for 20-somethings who are walking as a super-fast clip!! We commiserated in our aches and frustrations.

And so on this day, I see clearly and study closely that vast gray area that lies between "stubborn" and "stupid". Since "stupid" is something I actively try to avoid, I have decided to support the local economy and drop the 6 British pounds (BP) per day that it takes for someone to take my pack to my next destination. Many parts of my achin' body will thank me for this!! If you laugh at me and you're over 30 years old, then me an' you 's gon' scrap.

Day 0: To Wallsend

After a 6.5-hour direct flight from Atlanta to Manchester, a 3-hour train from Manchester airport to Newcastle Centre, a few minutes to figure out the Newcastle metro while dog-tired, and a 10-minute ride on that metro to one stop past my starting point, I have arrived at my hotel for the night, aptly named Hadrian Lodge. I was impressed with the cleanliness and quietness of the place, in spite of the industrial-ness of the neighborhood. All those cranes in the background? Newcastle is a major port and shipyard.

Day 1: Wallsend to Newburn

To get the trek under way, I need to jump back on the metro and go one stop back in the direction I came, to Wallsend (yes, I stayed in the town of Wallsend, but just a different metro stop).

Most major transportation signs in Europe have at least two languages, one of which is English since it is so ubiquitous. In England, though, signs tend to be in only one language, so I was surprised to see what was clearly Latin as a second language on the signs at the Wallsend metro stop!

Just a very short walk away was the first exhibit of Roman habitation on my trek -- Segedunum, or "Strong Fort". Though this was the end of the Wall-proper, it was not the end of the defensive mechanism that the Romans had set up. It is on the river Tyne, and there were forts across the river which served as look-out posts.  Those Caledones were not going to cross the river at this seemingly-weak station! This fort consisted of a commander's residence, as well as troop residences. The troops lived very close to their horses! Of course, there were separate bathhouses (one being a private one for the commander). The second picture shows how close this fort was to the river Tyne, and how important it was to guard this river...

Newcastle became important very early in history. It is a great port due to the depth of its waters. It is very near lines of coal, so collieries sprang up in the area. Eventually, once trains were invented, they ran straight to a site very near these ruins to deliver their loads of coal. Newcastle also became an extremely important shipyard: among the many ships built here include Mauretania and Laconia I and II, which would become very important for their parts in World Wars I and II.

The walk to the city center was mostly pleasant -- it did go through what otherwise would have been urban blight and industrial areas, but those were not very visible from the trail due to the vegetation planted along it. There was a lot of trash scattered along this corridor, which thankfully proved to be unusual even for the rest of the Path through Newcastle.

When the trail first met up with the river Tyne, the industrial bleakness was pretty clear. The shores of the river were restricted-access because a tar processing plant here had left some nasty chemicals in the soil. It offended several of my senses.

The trail followed the river Tyne for a long way beyond the city, but near the city center it went through what appeared to be a social heart of the city. The path was nicely bricked and lined with pubs and restaurants. Along this was one could clearly see the seven bridges crossing the Tyne and connecting the parts of Newcastle. The Millenium Bridge was especially cool.

Getting to the other side of Newcastle, I had to traverse yet another industrial zone, but this was nicely hidden by the Denton Dene, something of a nature preserve in the middle of it all.

After that, the trail was just a walk in some nice suburbs of Newcastle. My accommodation for the night, the Keelman's Lodge, was near a public boat ramp and children's playground.