GlaD1 Posted October 10, 2023 Posted October 10, 2023 ‘I slept in ditches and dreamed of marauding raiders’: a wild walk on the Hadrian’s Wall path The vandalism at Sycamore Gap may have hogged the headlines, but walking the length of the national trail puts these borderlands into thrilling historical context adrian’s Wall has perhaps the most single-minded personality of all the National Trails, tracing as it does the 84 miles from Bowness-on-Solway to Wallsend, which represented the north-west frontier of the Roman empire for nearly 300 years. It was built by the Roman army (the soldiers dug the ditches, quarried the stones and laid them) on the orders of the emperor Hadrian after his visit to Britain in AD 122. The Hadrian’s Wall path celebrates its 20th birthday this year. I’ve now walked all 17 National Trails, including the Coast to Coast path and King Charles III England coast path (officially opening in 2024 and 2025 respectively). I’m not sure why it took me so long to get round to walking the Hadrian’s Wall trail; perhaps it was a perception that it was too busy or that there was too much road walking. All my concerns proved unfounded. I undertook the walk in the same style as my 6,800-mile walk around the coast of Britain, The Perimeter: carrying 15kg of camera and camping gear, primarily wild camping (pitching late, leaving early and staying out of sight) with a few nights in a hostel or B&B to clean and charge up. Throughout the route, there’s such a wealth of archaeological remains that it’s impossible to ignore the Roman influence, even away from the central section where the wall is most impressive and intact. The trail starts in the expansive landscape by the Solway Firth near Anthorn Radio Station, a matrix of antennae and cables that crisscross the sky like a line drawing, used to communicate with submerged submarines and to transmit the UK’s time reference signal. It seems this landscape is destined to be marked by structures of control. At Bowness-on-Solway, the system of ditches and wall met coastal forts that stretched along the Cumbrian coast and prevented the wall from being outflanked by sea. Although the Ordnance Survey map evocatively states “Hadrian’s Wall (Course of)” and “Vallum (Course of)”, I found it hard to make out anything on the ground. At this point, the Scottish border is only a few miles away; it’s historically an ambiguous and lawless land – home of the Reivers, the band of raiders who marauded along the frontier from the 13th to 17th centuries, conceivably set in motion by the Romans. As a result, many farmhouses here are fortified – more castle than home. After leaving the expanse of sea and sky, the path follows the River Eden to Carlisle past the imposing Norman keep. The first castle was built in around 1100 on the site of a wooden Roman fort built 1,000 years earlier. As a border stronghold between two kingdoms, the castle has been besieged 10 times – more than any other place in Britain. This shows in its ruthless, architecture with a definite “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough” vibe where barely a stone has been placed for any purpose but to kill or defend. As the trail starts climbing on to higher ground, 23 miles along at Old Wall, the earthworks of the wall are very clear, and there’s a panoramic view back to Blencathra and Skiddaw on the Lake District fells. I’d become so fixated on the wall, I was momentarily surprised and delighted to be reminded of somewhere else. Despite the ditch being evident, there’s still no visible wall as the stones were “borrowed” to build Lanercost Priory and other nearby buildings over the following centuries. A few hours later, with views across to the northern extent of the Pennines, I pitch my tent. Hiding behind the trunk of a wind-blown tree, I imagine myself avoiding reivers and legionaries that once roamed these lands. Approaching Birdoswald, the foundations of the wall become thrillingly intact. A soon-to-be familiar pattern also becomes evident here: the remains of a milecastle with two turrets in between. Fourteen large forts like the one at Birdoswald were also distributed along the length of the wall, all with their granaries, hospitals, barracks, headquarters and commandants’ houses. The wall was as much a linear city as barrier. Walking past Gilsland, where the trail leaves Cumbria and enters Northumberland, the wall is now more than a metre tall with perfectly cut facing stones as it emerges on the north-facing scarp of the Whin Sill. These are the images of the imagination, where a sinuous wall winds through a rugged moorland landscape. It feels inconceivable that these stones could have survived up here for 1,900 years. It’s hard enough to walk the route, so the gruelling nature of the construction project really becomes clear. https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2023/oct/10/a-wild-walk-on-hadrians-wall-path-trail-sycamore-gap
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