To the astonishment of absolutely no one, I planned for one of my extra tourism days to coincide at the spot where I first conceived this goofy plan: Housesteads and Vindolanda. They were amazing enough that when we visited Scotland with friends a decade or so after our first visit we made sure to bring them so they could see what I’d been waxing rhapsodic about for so many years. Housesteads probably hadn’t changed much – as far as I know it is no longer an active dig site, just a preservation/heritage one – but Vindolanda has multiple work parties ever year where passionate amateurs get to supplement the work of archaeologists to dig out more and more of the site. (These places always fascinate us when we visit; it’s impressive whenever we see evidence of people working on things that cannot possibly be finished in their lifetime.) Point being, on top of being interesting enough to absorb multiple visits in any situation, there’s every possibility of seeing something new each time you go.

So, go I did.

Given the distances I’m walking these days, technically I was within walking distance of Vindolanda from my lodging. That said, I was (perhaps overly-) protective of the mileage I was putting on my feet, so I arranged a ride from the same people that took me from the trail to the lodging the day before. 20 minutes later I was there. The overall vibe of this part of the country is “bucolic” and it’s no different as you approach the site. One thing that is a bit unusual about Vindolanda is that it is part of neither the National Trust nor English Heritage; it was found by a Reverend Anthony Headley in the 1830s, got serious work done in the 1930s, and then went into its own trust in 1970. Is this a problem? Not really; my biggest disappointment was that their refrigerator magnets weren’t formatted the same as ones I’d been buying at other Trust/Heritage sites. Alas.

As we have documented extensively, the entrance is unassuming. The treeline, whether on purpose or by design, blocks any interesting views of what’s to come. You pay your money in a teeny tiny ticket office, walk through one of those “through the years” photo montages and explanatory illustrations and then step through the facility and out into the site proper.

Gosh I love this place. There’s just something about the out-of-placeness of it all, and the sheer scope of it rivals anywhere we’ve been short of, like, Pompeii. The purpose of Vindolanda was reinforcement of Hadrian’s Wall as well as the usual, defensive hard-point in occupied territory kind thing. It was fortified for a couple hundred years, and they’ve found remnants of multiple versions of the fortifications as they’ve excavated. Serious changed were made to the layout of the place over time.

Two other historical tidbits combine to make Vindolanda particularly interesting. First, because it was a permanent location it may have been a military installation but it was also a town; plenty of civilian industry going on to support he fort and also just, you know, maintain life and sanity for the people living there. This means that all sorts of interesting stuff would have happened there, if only we could know what… Second, when Vindolanda was finally abandoned in approximately 370 AD, the order was given to gather up any documents and burn them… after which the officers promptly rode off, safe in the knowledge that their orders would be followed. Yeah, problem is that those Roman soldiers had been living in Northern England for who knows how long and wanted to get moving south. So, since how could it possibly make a difference, they dug a hole, buried everything that they were supposed to burn, said “opus perfectum est” (basically “job done”) and left. 1700 years later, thanks to the anaerobic nature of the peaty soil of the region, we have the greatest collection of Roman writings found anywhere outside of Italy, and damn few sites within Italy are any better. You can see the collection here.

It was a lovely day and a nice bit of refreshment to not have to think too much about keeping pace or reaching particular destinations. Tomorrow will be a ride back to Housesteads for a quick passport-stamping stop and then back on the trail.

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.

On the last night of this trip, we four friends sat at dinner and chatted amiably about the week that was. Lisa and I broke out one of our go-to icebreakers between the two of us – what was your favorite part of the week? Lisa and our friends each recalled favorite moments, or locations, or times spent out together. Very lovely thoughts one and all, and it was fun to go over them again even as fresh as they are. My answer? I gave a little self-deprecating and entirely true preamble before saying “I’m just glad that after 10 years of telling the same story over and over again, Vindolanda didn’t disappoint y’all when you finally saw it.” Yeah, I live in my head more than you might realize. Eat your heart out, Quentin Tarantino, I’m time-jumping this thing like scriptwriting Evel Knievel. Explain, you say? But of course.

Many moons ago, when we were newly-wed, Lisa and I covered much of this ground on our honeymoon. “The story” that has been told over and over is that we first went to Housesteads for the morning and then made for Vindolanda, a site only minutes away. Lisa, however, was absolutely exhausted. When we pulled into the carpark for the Vindolanda Archaeological site it was… well, modest. A tidy little building flanked by a tall screen of trees that didn’t really do more than hint at there being anything behind them. She weighed that first impression against her heavy eyelids and told me that I should go on, she would take a nap. (If you don’t know, this is nigh-unto apocalyptic, for my bride does not engage in naps as a rule.) I of course told her that was fine, grabbed her camera, and made for the building.

One enters the modest premises now and then to be greeted by a little ticket-selling/ticket-taking counter, and past that there’s a nice table model along the lines of “what Vindolanda looked like back then!”, with little audio recordings you can queue up with spotlights indicating the different buildings being described. Cute. So then it’s through a door, where there are a couple of little statues presumably recovered on the site, and then you ascend a hill . . . and SEE IT.

Vindolanda is huge.

No, really. It’s an enormous archaeological site, bigger than anything we’ve seen outside of Italy; not that we’re all-time world travelers but we’ve seen a few things. Imagine expecting to see a dozen buildings or so like you had just seen an hour earlier, only to be confronting a town bigger than most of the ones we stayed in during our visit. (Ok, they’re more like villages, but still.) On that first visit I was gobsmacked. I barely took in the scope of it, never mind the details, and that was before I saw the museum. Oh yes, the museum. As the story goes, when the fort was decommissioned and the Romans moved on, some clerk or other was tasked with gathering up all the accumulated documents on site and setting fire to them. Near as anyone can tell, the pile was gathered and a fire was lit, but probably the weather sucked (safe bet) and the man in charge said “enh, good enough” and left. The fire quickly went out, the pile was left to be swamped by time and tide, and nearly 2000 years sitting in an anerobic swamp meant that the documents were remarkably well preserved. One of the best finds anywhere, up to and including Italy. I took all of this in during a scant two hours, about the longest I was comfortable leaving Lisa alone in the car. Returning to the car, she woke up but was still so groggy that we just decided there was no point trying to rev her up to take the whole thing on. For the first of what has been many many occasions we said “next time!” and moved on.

And so it came to pass that eleven or so years later “next time” finally arrived. The site is, unsurprisingly, much the same, but not entirely. Vindolanda is an active dig site, so groups of volunteers cycle in and out every couple of weeks. Newbies/rank amateurs who want to help out clearly start on “dirt duty”, digging out top soil and filler and wheelbarrowing it away; there’s a lot of that action going on. Folks with more experience get to dig near where the cool stuff is, before giving way to supervisors who are vetted to actual handle the good stuff. Watching this in action is always fun, and it reminds me how lucky we are to visit places like this multiple times. To paint the picture with a little more detail, Vindolanda was a fort but, having been in place for quite a long time, a significant civilian infrastructure grew up around it. So, you have formal military structures with barracks, latrines, stables and so on, but then outside of the walls you have the much more informal day-to-day life. Again, all of this remains only in bits and pieces; most foundations don’t get above your knees. Still, seeing the remains of such a robust fortification is just magnificent.

On the far side of the fort from the entrance point, and down a long set of stairs, is an old house that has been converted into the gift shop, cafe, and museum. The museum is more than just an afterthought like at some places (I didn’t even bother describing the museum at Housesteads, it’s about the size of a modest living room), since the weather and other conditions made so much recoverable. Just to be clear, much the walls there isn’t much still around in what you’d call “good shape”, but after 1800+ years the fact that you’ve got clothing, armor, and even correspondence in any condition whatsoever is a near-miracle. The museum has numerous good examples of the remains of the fort and is absolutely worth your time. And bonus tip – if you’re planning a day of these sites up in the Borders then Vindolanda is probably a good place to plan your lunch break. Not the food is “great” but it’s more substantial than your usual sandwich-and-chips fare, with nice outdoor seating to let you catch your breath.