Wee Wall Walk Last Day: Returning Home

 

Our morning started with meeting this fabulous Shaun the Sheep outside Newcastle Cathedral as we arrived for Morning Prayer. He’s one of many around the city raising money for the Children’s Hospice – you may remember a similar project in Brum a few years ago? 

 

After the service we chatted to the priest who had been leading worship – he is the lead for the Lantern Initiative run by the Cathedral. High in the tower is a lantern that used to be lit to guide ships safely up the Tyne – a real beacon of hope and safety for all. The Lantern Initiative seeks to make the Cathedral once more a beacon of hope for the community – all the community including those who are often forgotten – the homeless and the prisoner. One very practical thing it does is in the Cathedral café. It is staffed by ex prisoners and some others on day release from prison – real jobs and real experience. All the bakery goods are purchased from the prison bakery where inmates are trained in new skills that will help them when released. We were pleased to buy our sandwiches there for our lunch on the train. And very delicious they were too!

 

So here we are – safely back at home after our adventure. Now we are unpacked and the first load of washing is just about done, what are our impressions of the past week?

 

For me (Kate), it’s the range of landscapes we’ve walked, the people we’ve chatted to on the way, and sheer amazement at the audacity of building a Wall 84 miles long, across an entire country, in something between 7 and 10 years! But above all, the sense that this countryside which is now so serene was, for hundreds of years, a very real border between different peoples, different traditions and different ways of understanding life. There is ‘history’ here from just about every period from the Romans until now – most of it bloody. And yet people are people whether they come from north or south, east or west. We all have our stories to tell, and they are all worth listening to.

 

The Wall must have been seriously imposing, but I realise that I’m glad that it’s no more than three or four stones high at the maximum. I prefer having good relations with the Scots!

 

And for me (Paul) some thoughts about whether history is just to be looked at, or learned from. Our guidebook referred on many occasions to the wall having been vandalised when stones had been removed to be built into new structures – houses, roads, churches or whatever. Along the walk there were many opportunities to look at remnants of the wall and reconstructions of the forts – all very interesting but hardly life changing. Maybe the things that have changed lives are where the stones from the wall have been incorporated into new things.  Perhaps this illustrates well the way we should learn from both the good and the bad in the past and build those lessons into the way we live today.

 

And finally – a thank you to all of you who have taken an interest in our walk, and especially to those who have sponsored us so generously! We will be calling round for the money (when our feet have recovered!)