Via the City of Coria and the fort at Onnum, being the sixteenth day before the Calends of June, 2763Breakfast in the bunkhouse is rustic: a mountain of bread and a giant tray of eggs, from which I choose a huge, double-yolked one, the biggest I’ve ever seen. Afterwards we are invited to feed the lambs, which I immediately succeed in letting escape. Our host, the farmer’s wife, is quite the comedienne, telling me not to feel bad about this ‘desperate bid for freedom’. When the lambs are recovered, I feed one its milk formula. It gulps down nearly a pint inside a minute, as greedy as I was with my double egg. Our host tells us that the Wool Marketing Board sets the price of a fleece at fourteen pence, but that the seasonal labour to shear it costs a pound fifty. You don’t need a degree from the London School of Economics to perceive the absurdity of an agricultural economy dependent on subsidies and tourism. The Romans weren’t averse to planning and controlling the economy, but I wonder what they would have made of this.
Afterwards, a sprint north along a green lane and then a short cut down another, overgrown and blocked with a mountain of tires (according to the country habit), gives me my first glimpse of the unexcavated Vallum, visible as a deep depression in the field to my left. A dash across the ferocious A69 and I’m back on the official route for a short while before arriving at Rudchester Farm, where Hutton rummaged in the barns for Roman walls in 1801. Here the fort of Vindobala is visible only as a grassy platform, but the real treat for me lies in the adjacent woods. A little foraging and fence-hopping reveals a large stone basin hidden in the undergrowth — a Roman cistern that once supplied the fort with water. For me, such banal little domestic relics of life eighteen centuries ago are just as interesting as the big monumental ones, especially when you have to hunt for them in the woods.
The next couple of miles are a long, slow ascent beside the ‘Military Road’ to Harlow Hill. The walk through undulating farmland is pleasant enough, but somewhat soured by the knowledge of the destruction of the Wall done by General Wade. In the wake of the Jacobite uprisings in the eighteenth century, he commissioned the building of roads throughout Northern Britain to facilitate the movement of troops. The road from Carlisle to Newcastle made infamous use of the convenient foundations and building materials offered by Hadrian’s Wall. I’ve always suspected there was something more to Wade’s demolition than military expediency alone. There were roads enough in the area affording quicker and easier improvement. Consider, though, the part that Hadrian’s Wall must have played in the development of Scotland’s nationhood: well into Anglo-Saxon times, there was a cultural and linguistic continuum, with no abrupt geographical boundaries, from the English Channel to the Highland Line. The Romans’ arbitrary placement of the empire’s boundary between the Tyne and the Solway changed that forever: thenceforward a person was born either north or south of it, and conflict between Northerner and Southerner was continuous for seven centuries. The Irishman Wade was one of the midwives at the United Kingdom’s painful birth between 1707 and 1746. Was his destruction of Hadrian’s Wall a symbolic destruction of the divide between the two kingdoms? The removal of a mental as well as a physical barrier? A case of ‘Mr. Hadrian, tear down this wall!’?
There’s a fine panorama at the top of Harlow Hill, but the sky is darkening. I descend to a group of reservoirs and it starts to rain. For the next few miles the path climbs slowly again towards Carr Hill and the rain gets heavier. The Vallum is more in evidence now, but only as more frequent dips in the fields. At the top of Down Hill the sun peeps out, though it’s still chilly. A snack wagon miraculously appears, and my gratitude knows no bounds at receipt of a mug of tea and a bacon roll. The proprietress tells me a sorry tale, all too familiar, of local council bullying. She has provided this inestimable service to walkers for years, but for almost as long, the authorities have demanded that she apply for ‘planning permission’, as, absurdly, they judge the wagon to be a ‘permanent structure’. The application is, as usual, costly and almost certain to fail. The good lady is seventeen centuries late with her small business venture: the frozen soldiers stationed on the wall, though surely taking a cut of her takings for ‘protection’, would have been as glad as me for a cup of hot wine and water and some cured pork on a day like this.
I cross the road into the field and suddenly the Vallum plunges almost to its original depth. Sheep intermittently disappear without trace into the deep ditch, and the mounds on either side are clearly defined. Considering the food, wine, horses, cattle, carts, tools and wages of thousands of soldiers that must have accumulated along the frontier, it’s hardly surprising the Romans saw the need for an extra fortification as deep as the wall was tall. The Vallum must have been a bitch for making off with stolen goods, but generations of Brigantes, the local tribe, no doubt died trying.
Here I make a detour back down to the Tyne Valley and the pre-Hadrianic frontier. After a mile and a half I arrive at Aydon Castle, a mediaeval fortified manor house perched romantically above a ravine. It’s past two o’ clock and time is pressing, but I can’t resist a look around. The castle is solid, grey and gaunt — typical for this ‘Border Reiver’ country. With the gradual establishment of the national border beginning in the tenth century, these parts were rife with bandits and feuding clans fleeing the law on both sides. Walls had to be thick and windows small.
I drop down into the ravine that the castle overlooks, then emerge to go over a hill for the descent into Corbridge (Coria or Corstopitum). This was a frontier town before the Wall, and the road which ran from here to Carlisle, the Stanegate, was the original border, considerably less fortified. Coria also lay on the course of Dere Street, the road from York, which in time would pass through the Wall on its way to Edinburgh and further to the smaller and shorter-lived northern frontier, the Antonine Wall. Dere Street crossed the River Tyne to get to Coria and the massive stones of the bridge’s ramp can still be seen on the south bank, but unfortunately I haven’t time to make that excursion today.
A dash across the murderous A69 (again) and a trot through Corbridge’s northern suburbs brings me to the ancient site — small and quaint now, but what a swinging city it must have seemed, back in 200, to the soldiers on leave from the Wall and in need of a little action! As usual in Britannia, the ruins are at most chest-high, but seem well preserved and integrated here. The Stanegate runs very obviously through the centre of the town, and beside it are the intriguing remains of a colonnade, which today sit well below street level, due to repeated resurfacing of the road. Also in clear view are the massive foundations and complex ventilation system of the granaries, a municipal fountain and a network of dubious alleys between the buildings. The museum, though small, is crammed with statuary, tombstones, plaques and domestic objects.
As I leave Coria, I notice an overgrown green lane heading north, back towards the Wall, and which in a few hundred yards merges with a busy dual carriageway. This is a fragment of Dere Street, and it would have been fine to walk on this needless-to-say straight road back up the hill, but the automobile has robbed me of this pleasure. Instead I have to wind along Anglo-Saxon lanes, past some enormous, conical eighteenth century pottery kilns, over a ford and up the hill to the small castle at Halton. The fort of Onnum (or Hunnum), the Wall’s fourth, lies in the grounds of the castle, but is only visible as a raised platform, though even this is confused by centuries of ploughing. Here and there are suspiciously square blocks of cut stone, and it would be surprising if they were not Roman, given the systematic robbing that has gone on for the last thousand years.
A little further along there is a grassy platform in the field that bears witness to one of the Wall’s seventy-nine ‘milecastles’, but I’ll leave the account of these until the ruins become more substantial further on. The Vallum, though subtle, is also visible here, but the local cows object to my inspecting it. Shortly afterwards I arrive at the crossing of Hadrian’s Wall and Dere Street, the ‘Portgate’, the point at which I would gave emerged had I continued along the green lane and risked my life on the dual carriageway, and where probably a monumental arch in the wall stood. Now there’s just a roundabout and a pub, and the black tarred road shooting southwards as straight as an arrow is all that remains of Rome’s glory.
The Vallum becomes more obvious as the path continues uphill, through a forestry plantation and past the likewise more pronounced outline of Milecastle 24. After this the path crosses the road, and another feature of the frontier system appears unmistakably. As if the Vallum and the Wall weren’t already enough, a ten-foot-deep, V-shaped ditch was dug immediately to the north of the Wall along most of its length, only disappearing where an escarpment renders it superfluous or solid rock makes it too difficult.
The path continues alongside the Ditch for the next few miles and gradually the terrain becomes more rugged. I pass the site of another battle, ‘Heavenfield’, this time between rival Anglian and Welsh kings in the seventh century. The Wall at that time must have loomed large over the armies and probably constrained their strategies too.
The path now drops again towards the Tyne Valley. Over the road is the first visible stretch of the Wall since Heddon. Here, the massive foundation stones are the full ten feet wide, but the wall itself is a couple of feet narrower. The Romans planned big, but were quick to scale back their enterprises when they realized they had overstretched themselves. Here at Planetrees, for the first time, the Vallum, Wall and Ditch are all visible together, and the magnitude of the monument in total suggests there was no shame in this ‘scaling back’.
The path continues through woodland and then turns left down a lane towards the concretely named village of ‘Wall’ and my lodgings for the night: ‘The Hadrian Hotel’, naturally enough. Back in March, when I came to see the Wall illuminated by torches at dusk, I sat by a roaring fire at this old inn to eat my rabbit stew and drink my ‘Centurion Ale’, but God only knows what I’ll get tonight; dusty wayfarers must ever roll the dice. I only hope it’s not lamb.
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