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...
Sounds very nice! Especially the cows.
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