Birdwhatnow? Hadrian’s Wall, Part 5

Let’s just get this out of the way. I was dropped off in the Housesteads car park around 9AM, ready to strike out for the day. Before departing, however, I just needed to get that passport stamp thingy stamped. I tromped up the hill, through the sheep, and arrived at the gift shop… which opens at 10AM. I pondered for a very brief moment and decided “to hell with it” and hit the trail. I’d already had to backtrack once for a stamp and, while I haven’t mentioned it before I was actually stamping them in the wrong order and at this point hoping the powers that be wouldn’t notice. On top of all that, one of the stamp sites was some place I’d never heard of and didn’t know where it was. Heck with it, I’ll know I did this walk with or without a badge. I didn’t even poke around in Housesteads proper, since the gate would be down until 10 as well. You can circumvent it but the last thing I needed was to be arrested for trespassing. Well phooey. On we go.

I can actually press “fast forward” on the next couple of days. It was lovely and panoramic but there were no landmarks worth spending a lot of time talking about. Part of the reason for that is that the most famous landmark along the entirety of Hadrian’s Wall was Sycamore Gap. Nestled in a saddle between hills along the Wall, a sycamore tree had been growing for more than 100 years, becoming an impressive specimen. Combined with the wall remnants up at the tops of the neighboring hills it made for a picture-perfect scene and, in fact, was the subject of thousands of amateur and professional photos over the years. And then, in late September of 2023, two dingleberries cut the tree down for no reason other than, to quote Michael Caine, to watch the world burn. They were sentenced to prison (one is still there, the other is home on an early release scheme with ankle bracelet monitoring). The small bit of good news is that green shoots have been observed on the stump that remains; fingers crossed for future generations. All this is to say that I actually trod through the Gap without even knowing it; another hiker mentioned it in passing and I realized what had happened. Not worth going back for, alas.

A couple of days down the line I had set out on a gray-ish morning thinking that the agenda was just a straight-ahead walk for five or six hours. About 30 minutes on the trail, though, I see the familiar English Heritage sign, here announcing “Birdoswald Roman Fort.” Interesting. Well, embarrassing and interesting. I’ve never claimed to have done “the most” research for this trip, but to be caught completely flat-footed by a whole fort was just… well anyway. Since I had no idea it existed I certainly didn’t know what to expect. I poked around in their gift shop while I pondered buying a ticket, then saw a sign announcing that the daily 10 AM tour was about to start. Kismet! Fate! Redemption, whatever. I hung out in the courtyard and waited to discover what, exactly, this place is.

Birdoswald, it turns out, is one of the best-preserved Roman forts in England. It wasn’t a specialty operation, it was your “typical” expression of imperial, occupational force. It maintained the presence of the Romans in land they claimed. We don’t have the luxury of Vindolanda’s trove of records so much must be inferred, but it looks like the fort was abandoned by the mid-fourth century. So while we don’t have the narrative treasure of places like Vindolanda, what we do have is the aforementioned well preserved remains.

It was a lovely bit of bonus history, and the last serious “stuff” aside from your typical wall remnants. In another day or so I started leaving behind the meaty historical center of the route and moved into the final stage of the trip. Still, there were a few days to go and as this day proved I didn’t necessarily know what I was in for. I had my trail well marked on my navigation tools but, as they say, the map is not the territory.