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| The
wall by Housesteads is the longest and most spectular
section. |
Walking
Hadrian’s Wall—Conclusion
Allen Johnson — 3 July 2005
“According to legend, Sir Launcelot of King Arthur
fame lived in this castle 1,500 years ago,” I told Emily
and Jessica as we toured Bamburgh Castle north of Newcastle.
“I didn’t think they had electric lights and
running water that long ago,” Jessica said.
“They didn’t. The castle has been rebuilt and
modernized many times since then.”
We took one day off from our walk after the first 50 miles
and toured some of the other sights of the area. Excavations
around Bamburgh Castle revealed that the site had been occupied
since the first century BC and a royal center since AD 547.
Roman pottery found during excavations indicate the Romans
occupied it about the time of the building of Hadrian’s
Wall, AD 121. The castle changed hands dozens of times until
Lord Armstrong purchased it in the 1800s. It still remains
as his family’s residence, but parts of it are open
to the public.
“This says the dragon was really a beautiful princess,”
Emily said as she read the story by the picture on the walls
of Bamburgh Castle of a knight about to slay the Laidley Worm
(dragon).
“That’s right,” I said. “The King
of Bamburgh Castle unknowingly married a witch after his wife
died and the witch turned the princess into a dragon. The
dragon ate all the sheep around Bamburgh Castle until a knight
named Child of Wynd heard about it and came to slay it. Just
as he was about to slice the dragon’s head off a voice
told him about the bewitchment and that he must kiss the dragon
three times before the sun went down to turn it back into
a beautiful princess. He lowered his sword and kissed the
dragon; it turned back into the beautiful princess. The knight
and the princess married and lived happily ever after.”
“Did that really happen?” Jessica asked.
“I don’t know, but it’s a nice story anyhow.”
We started the sixth day of our walk back at Housesteads
Fort. This remote area has the best-preserved parts of Hadrian’s
Wall and the Roman forts. The Housesteads fort is perched
high on a ridge overlooking the Northumbrain countryside and
conveys the spirit of the past as well as the beauty of the
present. The five-acre fort housed 1,000 cavalry and infantry
in Hadrian’s time and a large civilian village developed
on the hillside outside the fort to support the needs of the
soldiers.
After a 400-foot climb from the parking lot to the wall,
we started out along a six-foot high section of the wall.
This section of the wall continues unbroken for three miles
from Housesteads to Steel Ridge and is the longest and most
spectacular section of the entire wall. It is a series of
steep hills with no flat sections.
“There are two swans,” Emily said as we trudged
up Highshields Crag.
The pair of swans sat on their nests at the edge of Crag
Lough (lake) with their heads down.
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| Emily
disappeared in the root of the tree. |
“See if you can make them raise their heads so I can
take a photo,” I suggested to Emily and Jessica. The
girls started whistling and calling to the swans. Alternately
one swan would raise its head and then put it back down as
the other swan raised its head. Finally they both raised their
heads at the same time and I took my photo.
“This is Robin Hood’s Tree,” I told the
girls as we stopped in Sycamore Gap by a lone sycamore tree.
The 70-year-old tree got its name when Hollywood decided to
use it as the backdrop for the film, “Robin Hood, Prince
of Thieves” staring Kevin Costner. The first 20 minutes
of the film take place around this very tree.”
“Can we eat lunch here?” Emily asked.
I took the cheese, crackers, yogurt, carrots, apples and
cookies out of my backpack. We ate and relaxed in the shade
of Robin Hood’s tree.
After lunch we passed several quarries the Romans used to
get stones for the wall. They quarried one million stones
for the face of the wall and several times that amount of
rubble to fill the ten-foot section between the faces.
The seventh day of our walk covered a much flatter section
of the wall, but still included a number of 100-foot high
hills.
“I don’t think we’ll see any of the wall
today,” Emily said as we walked across bare fields with
no sign of Hadrian’s Wall.
“I’ll bet you a pound we do see some wall today,”
I said.
“Okay, it’s a bet,” Emily agreed.
About an hour later we encountered a mile castle and section
of the wall at the edge of Gilsland village.
“I lose,” Emily admitted. “Here’s
your pound,” she said as she poured a pound of stones
in my hand. “You need to use more nouns, Grandpa.”
As we stopped to rest and put more sunscreen on, a British
Air Force fighter jet came screaming overhead about 100-feet
above us. Jessica, who had just poured a puddle of sunscreen
in her palm, slapped both hands over her ears to muffle the
noise. It took me several minutes to clean all the sunscreen
out of Jessica’s ear and off her neck.
A little later we came to the River Irthing and the abutment
of the Willowford Roman bridge reconstructed in the drawing
I included in the introduction article about our walk. The
river makes a sweeping turn here and has eroded the far bank
so its present position is 100 feet from the bridge.
We stopped for lunch at Birdoswald Roman fort. Connie, Linda
and Gloria had driven to Birdoswald and ate lunch with us.
I took a photo of Gloria knitting on wall of the fort, supposedly
where the farmer dropped his clew (ball of yarn) and discovered
the cave in which King Arthur slumbered in enchantment. We
didn’t find the cave or a slumbering King Arthur.
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| Our
Hadrian's Wall walk participants and support team. |
Gloria, Connie and Linda waved goodbye to us on the eighth
day of our walk as we started out along Hadrian’s Wall
path from Walton. We made great progress for an hour, hiking
over pleasant hills on the sunny, cool morning.
“D--n!” I said as I felt in my pocket and realized
I had the keys to our van. “You girls sit here by the
stream while I run back to the van with the keys.” I
took off at a jogging pace and made it back to the van in
about 30 minutes.
“Your ears must have been burning,” Gloria said
as I handed Connie the keys. “A lady who was walking
by offered to take us down to Newtown to intercept you and
get the keys. She just got back with her car and we would
have been gone in another minute if you hadn’t gotten
here.”
“Sorry,” I apologized. We drove the van to Newtown
and I followed the wall path back to where the girls waited.
“You’re back too soon, Grandpa,” Jessica
said. “We’re making something with the grass and
aren’t ready to go yet.”
We started up the trail and soon came to the Old Wall Cottage,
a quaint white stone cottage set back into a wooded lot.
“There’s a cat,” Emily hollered as she
approached the cottage.
“And two more,” Jessica yelled as she hurried
ahead to pet them.
“Hee-haw, hee-haw, hee-haw!” a short burro bellowed
as the girls petted the cats and ignored him.
“Look how fuzzy he is,” Emily said as she walked
over to scratch the burro’s neck. The burro had hair
six to nine inches long over most of his body. He quieted
down as Emily continued to scratch his neck and tell him how
cute he was.
“I’d like to take the donkey home,” Emily
said.
“I don’t think your mother nor the people who
live here would approve.”
More and more cats came out of the open front door of the
Old Wall Cottage. In all we counted nine cats, an old whippet
dog and a fuzzy burro. Quite a menagerie.
“Look at all the cars on that farm,” Jessica
said as we passed a barn with hundreds of cars in the field
and on auto carriers. “How come they are parked there?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
We walked on to Linstock and found our van waiting for us.
At the hotel I asked about the cars on the farm.
“That’s from the flood here in Carlisle,”
the lady receptionist said. “Over 5,000 cars were destroyed
in January by the flood waters. Those cars are awaiting salvage.”
“How deep did the water get?” I asked.
“The river rose about 30 feet,” she said. “Just
the tops of the traffic lights stuck out of the water at the
roundabout near the bridge.”
“Do you have floods like that every winter?”
I asked.
“No. That’s the worst flood in over 100 years,”
she said. “People blame it on the curse.”
“What curse?” I asked.
“As part of the Millennium celebration, the Carlisle
City Council commissioned an artist to carve a 16th century
curse on a 14-ton granite boulder,” she said. “Since
the completion of the curse we’ve had an outbreak of
hoof-and-mouth disease that wiped out almost all the sheep
and cattle in the township, a major fire that destroyed over
20 buildings, the worst flood in 100 years and our football
(soccer) team has played so poorly they were demoted to a
junior league. People are talking about destroying the curse
rock.”
Our English friend, Hannah, joined Emily, Jessica and I
for the ninth day’s walk. The traffic in Carlisle was
so bad that Connie didn’t think she could drive the
van through to pick us up at the end of the day. I drove the
van and dropped Hannah, Emily and Jessica off at Linstock,
the starting point of our walk. Then I drove the van to Burgh-By-Sands,
our end-of-the-day point. I planned to take a taxi back to
Linstock, but there were no businesses open in Burgh-By-Sands
on Sunday morning to call a taxi from. While looking around
for some signs of life where I might make the call, a man
came out of his house and got in his truck just across the
street from me.
“Good morning,” I said, walking up to the truck.
“Is there somewhere to call a taxi to take me back to
Carlisle?”
“There are no taxis out here and I doubt if one would
come all the way out from Carlisle to pick you up,”
the man said. “I’m headed for Carlisle and I’d
be glad to give you a ride.”
“Great. My name is Allen.”
“I’m Joe Sealby,” the man said as we started
out for Carlisle.
“What kind of work do you do?” I asked.
“I’m foreman for a steel fabricator,”
Joe said. “We put up the steel farm building you see
around.”
Joe let me out at the bridge in Carlisle and I jogged up
the bike path two miles to Linstock. There I found Hannah
telling Emily and Jessica about the plants and insects that
we had been seeing. The four of us walked the bikeway back
to Carlisle and stopped at the Sands Sports Center to get
our Hadrian’s Wall passport stamped. The passport has
six blocks for stamps to be collected along the path. Carlisle
made our fifth stamp and the end point would be the sixth.
We continued along the river path to the edge of Carlisle
and then followed the line of where Hadrian’s Wall used
to be. In some places, the remnants of the defensive ditch
the Romans dug in front of the wall could be seen, but none
of the actual wall remains.
“Look at the hole in the roots of that tree,”
Emily said as we approached a giant tree with gnarly roots.
“Can I climb in there?”
“Sure,” I agreed. Emily squeezed in the small
opening feet first until only her head was visible. Then she
wiggled out and Jessica squeezed in the hole. After playing
in the root for a few minutes, we continued the walk.
“What’s the foam on the weeds?” Jessica
asked as she stopped to examine a half-inch diameter glob
of bubbly foam on a tall piece of grass.
“We call it cuckoo spit,” Hannah said. “It
is a defense mechanism the froghoppers uses to protect their
larvae.” Hannah took a blade of grass and carefully
probed the foam until she located the froghoppers’ larva.
A tiny one-eighth-inch long larva with a dozen feet wiggled
across the blade of grass to escape. Hannah buried the larva
back in the cuckoo spit foam and put it back on the weed.
As we walked through the village of Beaumont, Jessica stopped
to examine a patch of clover. A minute later she came running
to catch up with us.
“I found ten four-leaf clovers,” she said as
she handed me the evidence. All four of us went back to the
clover patch. Hannah found her first-ever four leaf clover,
Jessica found four more, Emily found three and I found one.
It must have been a nuclear waste site to produce so many
mutants.
 |
| At
the successful completion of the 100-mile walk. |
The tenth and last day of our walk started out sunny and
cool. Emily had been complaining the trail always went up
hill and never came back down. This day we started out 100
feet above sea level and went down hill all day to the sea.
We again saw evidence of the defensive ditch, but no wall.
As we approached the tidal basin we walked over to the shoreline
and examined the little tidal ponds.
“There’s a crab,” Emily said as she prodded
it into motion with the end of a feather.
“And some little fish,” Jessica said.
At Bowness-on-Solway by the Irish Sea we found the wooden
shelter that marked the end (or beginning) of the walk. Emily
and Jessica clasped their hands over my head as we took the
obligatory end-of-walk photo to prove we completed the entire
100-mile-long path along Hadrian’s Wall. Then we walked
to the King’s Arms pub to get our passport stamped and
our certificate.
What did the girls learn on the adventure? Excerpts from
Emily and Jessica’s journals:
- They use a 24-hour clock in England.
- Their pancakes are thin.
- They have lots of castles and forts and people still
live in their castles
- They have lots of beautiful wild flowers.
- They have a lot of four-leaf clovers.
- I got to hold a 2,000-year-old piece of pottery they
just dug up.
- They don’t have many channels on their TV and no
cartoons.
- They open the windows to cool off because they don’t
have air conditioning.
- A little bug makes cuckoo spit.
- It was amazing that Emily and I was kind to each other
most of the time.
- The Romans had flush toilets a long time ago.
I’m so proud that I finished the whole walk. I’m
going to have my shoes bronzed!
End
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