The Point. Hadrian’s Wall, Part 6

I’m three-quarters done with the Hadrian’s Wall Path at this point in the story; of the total 84 miles, I’ve knocked down about 60. I have finished with the portions of the path that actually includes visible sections of the Wall. To get that far, I spent months raising my step goal by 1,000 per week, topping out around 27,000 steps a day. I started walking up to Bom Jesus and Sameiro to get some practice with gaining elevation. All of this was in service to a random whim I was struck by 14 years ago. It does lead me to wonder, and maybe you as well, just what the point of all this was?

The last few days of “prime” trail walking looked like this.

To the extent that any of this had a point to it, this was it. All I was doing was waking up, walking for a few hours in gorgeous and unique terrain, and then powering down into low-think afternoon/evenings of writing a little bit, reading a little bit, maybe playing games a little bit, and then going back to bed. I never consciously thought of it as some kind of meditation retreat, and gods know I wasn’t chanting a mantra as I walked along, but I still think there was something about resetting my brain down to the core operating system that did me some good. And, doing that while walking amidst the perfect-for-me mixture of green rolling hills + ancient historical ruins just made the whole experience a pleasure.

Anyway, the last two points of interest were Carlisle and then the end. Carlisle is a modest city in northwest England. It’s a nice town and relevant to this story because of its cricket club where, thanks to heavy flooding several years ago that prompted some serious renovations of the pitch, they basically tripped over a Roman palace. Baby palace, apparently, but the emperor was coming for a visit to inspect the wall and nothing less would do. Because the site of interest is smack dab in the middle of the city they are only able to do any excavation work for two or three week periods a couple of times a year, and each time they cover everything back up when they’re done because modern life marches ever onward.

This was another Birdoswald event where I had no idea what I was stumbling into. I had at least heard tell of doings at the Carlisle Cricket Club but nobody was ever very specific, I guess because they had only ever visited when things were all covered up. Ole better-lucky-than-good John happened to arrive on the last day of a dig period before they started covering everything up, so I got many eyes full. Carlisle just gets added to the list of stuff I’d love to see completed some day but will probably continue well past my own lifetime; a mixture of humbling and irritating.

After Carlisle the terrain smoothed out almost entirely. There weren’t much more in the way of bits of wall sticking out, and I strolled through pleasant-enough scenery – with more livestock than I had ever anticipated before setting out – as I approached the end. For as big a deal as this was to me, and anybody else who hikes this path in either direction there is surprisingly little fuss made out of it. I hit the last little town, Bowness-on-Solway, at midday and had to hunt through a couple of alleys and back yards to find the official trail marker. I kid you not; you can see the rubbish bins behind me in my “official” end of trail picture. The final indignity was that the little path to stamp the passport thingy, the one that I had given up on days and days before, was missing its stamp. If I had been trying to keep up with it I would have been screwed. As it was it merited a tired eye roll.

So that’s it. I spent the last night in a let’s-call-it-modest accommodation before making my way back to Carlisle by bus (a 30 minute drive that took me most of three days going the other way, I couldn’t help but notice), to catch a train to Edinburgh, and thence by plane back to dear old home. Not transformed into a new man or anything so grand, but at least knowing I could accomplish something beyond anything I’d ever done. Who knows what that will lead to next.