Via the temple and Vallum crossing at Condercum, being the Ides of May, 2763
Today is my birthday and I’m in need of a little extra treat before the walk, so I head back to the Hancock Museum after breakfast, pace up and down the model wall again and attend a ritual at the little virtual Mithraeum. After this I’m just in time for a show at the museum’s planetarium: ‘Dawn of the Space Age’, a film about the early history of space exploration. This is paradoxically apt: Hadrian’s Wall marked the northern limit of European civilization for three centuries, and in its shadow grew some of the world’s earliest railways and long-range ballistic missiles, whose name fittingly derives from the Latin ballista (‘catapult’). The Romans ruled the world with the help of their roads and their engines of war, and doubtless they would have followed these developments with interest.
After tea and cake, I finally get going, and a short metro ride takes me back to Central Station. I pass a surprisingly intact stretch of the mediaeval city wall — almost certainly built with stone ‘borrowed’ from the Romans. A tramp eyes me warily while I survey the masonry: I’ve often noticed how territorial they are around ancient monuments which, having long since passed into public ownership, they regard as their own.
Just around the corner is Westgate, an unremarkable city street until you realize Hadrian built its foundations and that you’ve been walking on it all day and haven’t changed course so much as a fraction of a degree. Immediately it begins to climb out of the town and soon reaches a ridge with occasional panoramas of the Tyne Valley below. Though the wall has disappeared altogether here, its ghost is almost palpable in the street itself, and no better vantage point to watch over the river to the South and the barbarian lands to the North can be imagined. With heavy walking boots on my feet and a large rucksack on my back, I get a few curious stares in this dilapidated commercial district. Some eastern gentlemen call out a friendly, ‘Hey, habibi!’ from their van as they drive by, perhaps descendents of the Tigris boatmen of Arbeia who never made it back to Mesopotamia.
At the highest point of this stretch lies Benwell, from Old English Bynnewalle, or ‘within the wall’. It is the site of the third of the wall’s forts, ‘Condercum’, of which nothing remains but a few curiosities hidden in the housing estate to the South. Tucked away almost in someone’s back garden are the foundations and replica altar stones of the Temple of Antenociticus. The head and limbs of this probably native British deity (due to the torc around his neck) were found here in 1862 and are now on display in the Hancock Museum. I offer a libation of wine (a tiny one, so as not to stink up the temple) in honour of this now rather lonely god, and to give thanks for my fortieth birthday. A local man and his young son arrive after me. They are quiet and respectful; the man recounts to his son how his own father brought him here when he was a boy. I am moved.
A short walk takes me to another suburban garden and the only surviving ‘Vallum crossing’ on the wall. A six-meter-wide and three-meter-deep ditch with two large banks on either side, the Vallum at its best is almost as impressive as the wall itself, and was probably built to protect the militarized zone in front of it and to deter the thieving Britons from stealing horses. There were many crossing points over this formidable barrier, one every mile originally, but these seem to have been reduced at some point to one for each of the sixteen major forts, such as here at Condercum.
The site is fenced off and a sign quaintly directs the visitor to an adjacent house for the key. The man and his son arrive soon after me, generously volunteering to do the honours and knock on the door indicated. The portly, bearded guardian presently answers the summons and hands over the key. He remains standing in his doorway, watching over us and answering a great many unasked questions while we look around. A cat is sunning himself on one of the massive stone blocks that remain of the gateway, but slinks down to ingratiate himself as we enter the enclosure.
“The road was resurfaced several times,” the Guardian of the Keys announces, repeating what it says on the information plaque next to us. “You can clearly see the different levels,” he adds, as though offering his own learned opinion. The man nods politely, interjecting the occasional ‘really?’, though he obviously already knows. I, however, ignore the guardian and play with the affable cat.
“Oh yes,” the gatekeeper goes on from his pedestal some ten feet above us. “It’s quite unique, you know. This is the only Vallum crossing left and the entrance to the fort ran right through my garden…”
The man and his well-behaved son continue to listen and nod, and so the gatekeeper continues to lecture. I hate being a captive audience and continue trying not to listen to the regurgitated factoids, statements of the obvious and uninvited bragging. The cat takes full advantage of my captivity and flirts shamelessly while I squat down to take pictures.
“I’ve been meaning to excavate my garden for years, but I can’t seem to find the time…”
I’m about to yell at him to shut up, but something in my body language may have already conveyed this and he abruptly breaks off his monologue and slinks back inside. It’s a great relief to chat with the man afterwards, with someone who appreciates this monument with humility and for the right reasons, for the sense of the enormity of history under our feet. He wishes me well with my journey as we part and the cat returns to his sun bed on the gatehouse until the next visitors arrive.
Back on the line of the Wall, the busy road begins a long slow descent into a valley. At the bottom of Benwell Hill, the Wall suddenly appears: first a few stones poking through the pavement, then a short stretch of little more than foundations, and finally a good hundred feet of it in all its glory, only a few courses high, but at the full width of ten feet. Here too is the first of the surviving ‘turrets’ — square watchtowers positioned at equal distances, two per Roman mile, along the full length of the wall. This one has its ladder platform intact, a stepped base on which to place a ladder for access to the upper floor of the turret, and presumably also, though this is yet to be proved, to the wall’s walkway. Hutton mentions Denton as the first substantial stretch of the Wall to be seen, so evidently little has changed since 1801.
The wall, of course, continues on the high ground, but these are the last of the visible remains I’ll see until the end of today’s walk, so I turn south into the wooded dell of Denton Burn with the intention of rejoining the official route along the river Tyne. At some point the path beside the burn ends and I have some difficulty finding my way through the maze of typically identical English residential roads. Eventually though I emerge onto the official Hadrian’s Wall Path, which has kept low since Newcastle and continues along a non-descript disused railway with little in the way of views over the countryside opening out for the next few miles. I find this a rather cowardly decision of the route planners: while there’s so much to see up on the ridge, those sites are in a fairly run-down area of Newcastle and along a busy road. For my part I would rather risk being mugged and run over than traipse through a faux-rural, post-industrial cityscape, if the reward is to experience the topography and relics of one of the world’s ancient frontier systems.
However, the dreary part is over soon enough and the path emerges on the north bank of the Tyne. River rambles are always restful, and today’s is sorely needed, for although I haven’t walked far, there was much dawdling, and dawdling is tiring. The view opens out on the pleasant wooded banks and, as with yesterday’s walk, it’s hard to believe one of Britain’s largest conurbations is so close. I pass Newburn Ford, site of a battle between Scottish Covenanters and English Royalists in 1640 that some say precipitated the civil wars. The Covenanters, vexed at being forced to accept a new prayer book, marched here, beat the Cavaliers and occupied Newcastle. No doubt Cromwell got ideas into his head when he heard how this band of zealous commoners challenged the might of the crown and won.
The path continues by the riverside a few more miles and then enters a wood. I am now on the ‘Wylam Waggonway’, a railway line built in 1748 for engineless trains. The route eventually turns up the hillside towards Heddon, but I walk a little further to see the birthplace of George Stephenson, ‘the Father of Railways’. It fascinates me to think of him, born in this little cottage in 1781, watching the horses pull the wagons along the track right beside his front door. Thanks to his work, in his lifetime he would see that little track begin to stretch across continents. Another hundred and forty years and it would run under the English Channel, and lately there has been talk of a railway line across the Bering Straits. How glorious if one day you could get on a train in Wylam and travel around the world without ever leaving the track, arriving back at this cottage where the idea was first born.
Though there are twenty minutes until the small museum’s closing time, the National Trust employees have already fled. This dereliction of duty is becoming tediously predictable.
I have an early supper by the river, the last of M.’s steak and mushrooms and the Spanish wine, before turning north across a golf course and up the steep hillside towards Heddon-on-the-Wall. My ‘official’ destination, the fort of Vindobala, is a mile further on, but offered no accommodation, so my lodgings for the night are the bunkhouse in Houghton North Farm. The light is fading by the time I’ve thrown my bag down and washed, so I head out to see the stretch of the monument that survives within the village. Here the wall is three hundred feet long and the full ten feet thick. It also seems to have grown since Newcastle — tapering downhill impressively in the dusk light. The first time I walked this way in 2760, I took the bus back to my lodgings one evening and overheard two Southern professional men complaining bitterly how little of the wall was actually visible and how they felt they’d been cheated by the brochures. ‘What fools these consumers of history are,’ I thought, ‘suckered by the marketing they probably helped to create.’ The chief delight of this remarkable monument is watching as, little by little, it rises out of the ground in Newcastle’s suburbs, grows to magnificence on the wild Northumbrian moors and then slowly fizzles out again in Cumbria. The Theodosian Wall in Istanbul is immeasurably grander and more imposing, but city walls tend to blend in with their surroundings; they don’t clash intriguingly with them, haunting wildernesses and back gardens alike, as Hadrian’s does.
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