Gaining Elevation: Hadrian’s Wall, Part 2

The first two days of walking, physically, weren’t so bad; the preparation I had done for the past few months did enough to get me ready. Mentally, it had me a little off-kilter. I was in a city for most of it, only getting a little suburban towards the end. I never got far enough away from traffic not to hear road noise. I did have some nice interactions in the beginning with trail walkers going the opposite direction; I could encourage them with news that they were only a few hours from the end, depending on when I bumped into them. I didn’t see too many people, though. Conventional wisdom says you should a) start later than this, to hedge your bets against the weather, and b) go west-to-east so you walk with the wind instead of into it. I had reasons for going the other way, which I’ll get to. In any case, after a good night’s sleep and navigating English breakfast – I’m a cereal guy, and all the beans and tomatoes just don’t do it for me – I walked back through the industrial park (where I met a lovely couple of women who were a little lost and were trying to find the trail, albeit going the opposite way), crossed the river again, and headed out for Day 3.

Almost immediately after starting back on the trail, it began to change. First of all, I finally started going up. Northern England is characterized by its weather and its hilly terrain. Walking along the river had spared me the second, but now I was moving away from the Tyne. So, in addition to moving east I was climbing hills. Not big ones but it was consistent for a few hours; it added up to about 300 meters of elevation. On the other hand, while I was leaving suburban housing developments behind, what I transitioned into was an honest-to-gods golf course. You know, reeeeeeaally getting back to nature. (Although as always the British/English commitment to walking is fascinating. Fancy golf course, carts, manicured greens etc… and yet very clearly marked out was the route for the Path, and nobody said boo about my scruffy self trudging through. Nice.) I walked through two or three holes and edged along the driving range.

Eventually I was past the golf course and in to some proper rural areas; although not deserted by a long shot. Now it was farms and other homes of people who just prefer to be out in the countryside. I went through a little village called Heddon-On-the-Wall, even had lunch there in the inn, but if there was a section of actual wall I couldn’t find it. I talked to some folks and apparently there’s a teensy bit of “probably Hadrian’s Wall” a way off the path; I never saw it. I ended the day at the Robin Hood Inn. Before you ask, I have no idea how Robin Hood figures into things up there, I imagine the innkeeper just likes the stories. The Inn is actually stop #2 on the Hadrian’s Wall Passport trail. I popped in, had a pint at the bar (I mean, 0% cider, but a pint’s a pint) and asked about the stamp. A nice lady dug the stamp and ink pad out of a drawer, which wasn’t really an auspicious sign, but hey I got it. Two down. This was also the first time I hooked up with my transfer, which was a cab company that shuttled me from the parking lot of the inn to the Angel (Inn) of Corbridge, in (wait for it) Corbridge, and then came and took me back the next morning. It’s really an odd thing. Like, I knew I was never going to be roughing it, but something about getting in a car and driving three times the distance that I had walked that day in about 10 minutes, to do it all again in reverse the next morning so that I could continue with my oh-so-precise trail along the site of Hadrian’s Wall… it was odd. I have to admit there were numerous times when I would see a sign along a road I was hugging, indicating that a bus traveling to my destination for the day would be along any minute, and I’d pause, but I never actually did it. Because if I do that, why did I even bother packing a bag and getting on a plane in the first place?

Anyway, the Angel was a lovely place, which is good because this was the first of a few extra nights I had plugged into the itinerary to be an actual tourist on this trip. Corbridge actually derives its name from, or at least can trace the origin back to, Coria Roman fort, which was long thought to just be an ancestral memory but, as these things go, turned out to have left quite a footprint that you just need to dig for. Not a part of the Wall proper, Coria was about 2 and a half miles south of it, instead protecting the intersection of the River Tyne and a Roman road. Still, old stuff is cool and honestly it was by far the closest thing to my raison de marcher. Poke at it I did, and enjoyed it; not just for itself but also as a refresher after three days of not-much. (No offense, England, you were beautiful, but that wasn’t the point this trip.) Aside from Coria, Corbridge is a lovely village with, as far as I could tell, one small high street that nonetheless had a proper bakery on it; delish. I took the time to rinse some laundry and generally get myself sorted straight for the next day. A day of tourism and mood stabilizing later, I returned to the Robin Hood Inn and tallyed ho.

A bit about the weather. All the advice I got, read, was sent, or otherwise received cautioned that the weather in mid-May could swing wildly from sunny and warm(ish, like 70s) to hail or rain and darned-near freezing temps. Egad. In preparation for this I had stocked up at Decathlon. (Note to my North American readers, this is a sporting goods chain.) I had a serious poncho, gaiters, rain pants, a couple different grades of warmth layers for my torso, and then sun screen, hat, and short sleeve/shorts stuff for the warmer sunnier days. Each day I’d start dressed for what the weather currently was, and had some change-ups in my backpack. Well. As Lisa and I like to say, “I packed my umbrella”, which is short for “if you want to guarantee no rain, just bring your umbrella to the picnic.” Sure enough, I could have left most of that stuff at home or, even better, on the shelf at Decathlon. For the entire two+ weeks I basically had Seattle late-Spring weather only with no rain. Seriously, I got drizzled on a little bit on the last day. Otherwise, the whole trip was just overcast and mildly chilly; the one difference is that once I got up in the hills there was quiiiite a bit of wind.

I’m an audiobook guy, so during the trek started I had queued up “The Wall” by Alistair Moffat for some mood listening. By day 4 I’m in a part of the book that describes some of the mule-headed practices of Roman construction; for example, milecastles were placed exactly 1 (Roman) mile apart from one another, even if that meant constructing a fort on an impracticably-steep slope. They could have moved a castle 50 feet to the left but, no, that wouldn’t be a mile. Ye gods. Anyway, he’s at a part where he’s describing the infrastructure needed to move so much construction material into odd places, and he’s describing a bridge that was built in a place where, if the road hadn’t needed to be straight, they could have curved around a bit and just forded the small river in the area. But, no, hilltop to hilltop they were going, and so a bridge was built. Now known as Chesters Bridge, undoubtedly because some dude named Chester found the remnants, namely the abutments that stabilized the construction. You can still visit overlooks that sight the abutments – you could visit them until 2016 or so, when flood damage made that unsafe. As I’m listening to that section of the book, I reach my accommodation for the night at The George Hotel in Chollerford… which is about 50 feet from the abutments. It was kismet I tell ya. The narrator is going through the description of the terrain and I’m looking around thinking “that sounds suspiciously familiar…” Yep yep, suspicion confirmed. In any case, another day of elevation climb of 215 or so meters plus the 16km of distance was enough for me to plop into the hotel, grab a meal, and settle in for the evening. There still had been precious little in the way of, you know, the Wall; that was going to change soon.