No cute preamble this time, ladies and germs. I got up from an adequate night at The George Hotel (which, honestly, the hotel was lovely, on a river with a lovely outdoor sitting area, but there was some kind of weird staffing issue going on in the restaurant and it was the only place to eat for miles around so it was a grin-and-bear-it situation twice, sooooo meh) and hit the trail. I tightened up the straps on my pack, fixed my hat firmly on my pate, and girded my choice bits for the long trek ahead. 15 minutes later, I arrived at Chesters Roman Fort, and enjoyed a nice bit of antiquities-based tourism.

Arriving at the Fort a half hour before they opened, I circled the property and pondered a question that crops up every time I/we travel to England to see the historic sights, namely: is it worth it to join the English Heritage? There are 400(ish) sites under the protective umbrella of English Heritage, most with ticketed entry. So if you think you’re going to pop into a goodly number of them in a given year, the £84 for a solo (or £149 for a couples’ membership) could very well pay for itself. There is a catch, however, which is that along with English Heritage there is also the National Trust, which has a similar but distinct mandate. It’s been our experience that even on a history-intensive trip like the ones we like to take, our plans include sites from both groups, meaning we’d need two separate memberships and at that point the math never works out. Broadly speaking, “[i]f you like ruins, remains, very old sites, burial grounds, burnt out monasteries etc = English Heritage. If you prefer your houses with roofs and full of antiques + formal gardens and the odd nature reserve = National Trust.” (hat tip to user “AF_II” on reddit.) We tell ourselves that some day we’ll join one of these organizations for a year and plan trips specifically to take advantage, but that day was not this day and so, when the facility opened up, I bought my day ticket and entered through the gift shop.

Chesters is the remains of a Roman cavalry fort and is in really good condition; even without the explanatory signage you can get a nice feel for the place, and like most English Heritage sites it is in fact very well signed. For what it’s worth these sites often include tailored experiences for children so if you’re traveling with tykes you’re usually in good hands. The grounds are well-maintained and not too uneven so it’s an easy stroll to boot. In typical Victorian fashion there is also an old house that has been converted into a “museum”, by which I mean “what your garage would look like if you lived in the same place for 200 years and were only interested in rocks.” It wasn’t uninteresting, but it was borderline inscrutable. Still, having been as starved as I had been, to date, for some meat on the historical bone this was a great way to start the day.

Leaving the grounds was an adventure in itself, thanks to a woman sitting at a little outdoor table next to the cafe who had my dog, Sasha, sitting next to her. I mean, obviously not, but also … yeah. A spitting image of our black Labrador retriever. Even “better”, it turns out this woman had just adopted this little girl from a breeder of this very sort of black lab. I was 5 feet from someone who could give me contact information for a reputable breeder of these dogs. I goosed myself into motion and hit the trail before I made any hasty decisions.

That one sunny break in the morning aside, it was another cold, windy, and overcast day, but it was also a day where I was finally trailing along actual remnants of Hadrian’s Wall. I think I explained this before, but just in case: giant stacks of pre-cut masoned stone were never going to be left alone in any place where humans actually wanted to build anything. Houses, walls, whatever – if there was human activity the wall was going to come down. So, where does it actually still remain? In the most godawful, uninhabitable terrain of course! And so it is that as we get out into some hilly, obnoxious land that nobody would want to live on, the Wall abides.

I actually passed another fort and didn’t even get pictures, because when I got there the wind was nasty enough that I was just in head-down-keep-moving mode. That said, while Brocolitia Roman Fort is mostly still unearthed, there’s a car park so you can poke around, and they have excavated a temple to Mithras. (Note that the naming conventions of these places is a little… haphazard? So links take you to places with different names sometimes. I promise I sent you to the right place. Probably.)

I ended the day at the place where this all began: Housesteads Roman Fort. That said, I was pretty pooped, so I made contact with my driver who would shuttle me to my lodging for the next couple days. Housesteads is actually stop #3 on the Hadrian’s Wall passport thingy but I was pooped, there was a decent crowd in the gift shop, and I figured I’d just get the stamp when I came back to resume my hike. Foreshadowing(tm)(c). In any event, the ride to my digs was uneventful and I had a good night’s rest. This was another of my tourism down days, as I was currently within spitting distance of one of our all-time favorite destinations: Vindolanda.

In a few days (as of this writing) I’ll be leaving my lovely home in Portugal and making my way to the wilds of northern England, not-so-coincidentally along the border of Scotland, to begin a two-week walk along Hadrian’s Wall. I’ll be starting in Newcastle upon Tyne, hugging the eastern coast of England along the North Sea. I basically put my feet in the sand, turn west, and start walking. Thing is, I’ve never done anything like this in my life. I don’t do religious pilgrimages, I don’t even participate in charity 5k run/walks. This in no way fits the “John” profile. So just what the #*@(! am I doing?

Good question.

I don’t know when I first heard of it, but I know I first saw Hadrian’s Wall in early May of 2012. It was a sight-seeing stop in the early days of our honeymoon – we were married about a week at the time – and I just loved everything about it. We went to Houseteads, which is probably the best-preserved bit of the entire Wall at this point, and really enjoyed poking around for awhile. And while we were poking around, we noticed that people were approaching the fort from a direction other than that parking area. In fact, they were coming out of what we thought was the wilderness on the other side of the fort! And this is when we heard about the Hadrian’s Wall Path for the first time.

What that is, is a “National Trail” maintained by Great Britain, one of many such trails maintained by the State for the benefit of everyone. I didn’t know much about it at the time beyond the fact of its existence, but something about the hills and the ambiance and… just the romance of the honeymoon maybe?… anyway I said, out loud to my blushing bride, “I’m going to come back here and walk this when I’m 50.”

WHAT??

See, I turned 40 a little more than a week after the wedding. In other words, I would be turning 40 the day after this visit, and I think the whole sense of time passing, life changing etc… just stirred something in me. At the time, it just made sense; set a goal for my 50th year that would require me to maintain some amount of fitness and discipline, plus it would be an adventure worth an iconic anniversary. That being said, the romance of the notion papered over ideas like “I’ve never been particularly fit,” “I’ve never done the least bit of hiking”, and “I have no clue what this would actually encompass.” “I’ve never even walked a 5k.” PHAW, those would be problems for another day. Besides, anybody who knows me knows that I say stupid/whimsical shit all the time! This was no big deal.

The weird thing was, though, that this stuck. Year after year went by, and I would still occasionally think “I’ll be getting ready for the walk in few years.” “I should probably start losing weight if I’m going to make it across England.” That sort of thing. The montage of calendar pages flew past, and I never quite dropped the idea of it. That said, in my 49th year we decided to up and move to Portugal, so spending any energy on the idea of another big project was just ridiculous. There was also this big trip we planned for shortly after we arrived in Portugal as sort of a reward/incentive to ourselves for COVID got in the way of doing this in my actual 50th year, and there was a false start the year after that, but schedules conspired this year so that Lisa and I would be separated at the end of May anyway, so it seemed like the opportunity to do something on my own had presented itself.

And so, a few months ago, I set my pedometer thingy to 10,000 steps. Then, a week later, I set it to 11,000. And every week after that if I succeeded in hitting the goal at least 5 out of 7 days, I added another thousand. Just before we left for Marrakech my benchmark was 24,000 steps a day, which – according to a combination of napkin-backs and the internet – seems to be the median distance I’ll be walking on my chosen route. I’ve done a reasonable amount of research on how to be prepared and have equipped myself appropriately. In a bittersweet turn, my recently deceased father-in-law gifted me a nice set of walking poles many years back when he heard about my hiking goal; an incredibly thoughtful gift, showing that he was paying attention when we spoke. I’ve used them a little on my practice walks and I expect to get good use out of them very soon.

As I finish writing this blog post I am on a train taking me from Leeds (where my flight from Porto landed) to Newcastle, where the beginning of the Hadrian’s Wall path is. Tomorrow morning I’m setting off, to discover if hiking is my new passion or, just possibly, I hate it. Fingers crossed!

I have a weird sense of writing about the next couple days, largely because we’ve done it before. Not just traveling to the places, but even blogging about it. Here, on this very site. Well, kind of. (We used to call this “Sasha’s Doghouse” and here’s a pro-tip for aspiring blogger types – don’t name your blog after a pet who will eventually pass away, unless you want an increasingly obscure title that you’ll have to explain to people.) That said, the people we were on our honeymoon vs. the people we are today are almost completely different ones, measured however you like. Add in two brand new people to the trip… I mean, new to the place, we didn’t abduct two babies… and it was like introducing my friends to an old acquaintance that I hadn’t seen in years only without embarrassing childhood stories I wished they hadn’t remembered.

Back it up a bit. We had the good sense to lay in provisions the night before, so we had a good night’s sleep timed entirely to when our friends felt human again after their flight; it was still only mid-morning so no problem-o. Lisa had done her usual fantastic job on finding lodging and in the morning we got a better look at the village of Bellingham. People there probably aren’t keen on words like “quaint” but it’s the first one that comes to mind – a small neighborhood serviced by a clutch of businesses and several taverns. It also hugs a small nationally-protected park so it’s even more lovely then usual.

Pastry nibbles and coffee and we were on the road, following the pretty simple directions (there are only but so many roads in this stretch of country). In less than half an hour we were in the carpark for Housesteads Roman Fort.

As Lisa likes to explain it (and she’s not wrong), the Romans moved up through Britain, just a-conquering away, until they reached the southern fringe of what is now Scotland. They took one look at the Scots and said “nah, we’re good.” (The Scots, meanwhile, were consumed with the eternal conflict between them and their mortal enemies, the Scots. (ba-dum-dum!)) And so it was that during the reign of the emperor Hadrian, a wall was constructed, 73 miles long and stretching from one coast to the other, an impenetrable barrier separating Roman society from those they deemed barbarians. It was a monumental defensive structure or, as the Chinese would have called it if they ever saw it, “a fence.” Because the Wall is made out of the same stuff the Saxons (and later the Normans and so on…) make their little-w walls out of, and those walls are critically important to the sheeps industry, once the Romans receded from Britain the locals made extensive use out of all that beautiful pre-cut stone that was thoughtfully left all stacked up for them. As a result, while you can certainly follow the path of the Wall, there are plenty of stretches that are only vaguely observable – mostly as the furrow in the ground left by other hikers, honestly.

Housesteads is not just the Wall, though. Along the Wall were regularly spaced watch towers and, less frequently, garrison forts for the men stationed at this Northern outpost. Housesteads is the remnant of one of those forts. It doesn’t look all that different from the numerous archaeological sites that you might visit in Italy, Greece, or Turkey (to pick three examples). What makes it really stand out is that… well, it’s in the rolling green hills of the Borders. So, we ramble (woo, drink!) through the foundations of barracks and bathrooms and the palatial quarters of the commanding officer, and read signs about how the army conducted itself, and meanwhile there are flocks of sheeps just grazing away. I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but it’s a heluva experience. Put it this way: I spent a day here in 2012 and spent the next 10 years talking about coming back to hike the wall. If you’ve ever met me, you know that this is not my usual idea of a good time. Until then, “take a hike” had only been in my vernacular as outdated slang.

A day amongst the rocks and sheeps worked up quite an appetite, so we made for the Battlesteads Hotel for what promised to be a lovely meal. Well… promise broken. Nobody takes pleasure in belaboring a bad time, so it doesn’t need a blow-by-blow breakdown. And also, maybe it was just a bad night? What it boiled down to is that we were attracted to the place by a very promising-looking menu with creative presentations of local specialties. Unfortunately, everything was just… meh. Like, it wasn’t an “F” meal, but they really set themselves up as an “A+” experience and the whole thing was like… “B-/C”. So, not awful but we all know how the expectations game is played, right? Still, it couldn’t put a real damper on what had been a lovely day, and back we went to our digs. Tomorrow would be an even more robust site… hubba hubba.