A wonderful day’s walking over undulating pastureland climbing gradually as we moved further away from the coast. Beautifully sunny with just enough breeze to stop us getting too warm (apologies if it’s been raining in Shirley!). Great views behind us of the Lakeland fells, to our right of the North Pennines and to our left of the Border country. Before leaving Brampton we visited the Parish Church where we saw the Burne Jones windows which, unlike Birmingham Cathedral, are not obscured by scaffolding. Then a 3 mile walk along paths that are clearly not used very often before rejoining the wall path where we left it in Newtown. After about 5 miles we finally caught a glimpse of some of the wall! Up till now the far western sections had been turf walls which had disappeared, then sections where stones from the wall had been repurposed to build houses, barns, churches and even Lanercost Priory (re-use and recycle clearly has a long pedigree!). The wall bec...
Today we said goodbye to Carlisle and headed east following the line of the Wall. This area has been farmed for hundreds of years and there are no obvious signs of the Romans – at least to the uninitiated eye. Every so often we passed a signboard explaining how archaeologists had identified this ditch as part of the Wall complex, or that that hill covered the remains of.... something. As the day and the miles passed, the rain stopped, the clouds began to clear – and finally the sun came out – just as we reached a causeway across the fields which the signpost announced as the remains of the wall. Soon after we passed Blea Tarn (our header picture today) which was formed from the quarry which provided the stone for this section. The signboards told us the entire wall was built in around 10 years. Impressive – until we read the next paragraph which explained that the workforce was provided by slaves, and we considered the human cost of this great feat of engineering. To...
After a wonderful evening meal, a comfortable bed and a fine breakfast we are ready for the final stage. A taxi takes us back to the Three Tuns Pub in Heddon on the Wall for us to resume the walk. We begin by seeing a surprisingly long section of surviving wall remains – we are told this is the last section we will see on our walk and no one is quite sure why it hasn’t been plundered over the years. Clearly it’s well known as we had to wait for a coachload of overseas tourists to move before we could get the photo below. In fact there was one more tiny section still to be found - but that was still 16 miles away. Our route took us through the village of Heddon – very much a transition village between rural Northumberland and the ever advancing urban sprawl of Newcastle – and down to the banks of the Tyne. The path continued on a greenway (the trackbed of an old railway line) towards the city centre. Along the way we met two ladies walking their dog who spoke (amongst other things...
Comments
Post a Comment