Via the Stanegate and the forts at Aesica and Magnis, being the fourteenth day before the Calends of June, 2763I wake in a state of nervous excitement. In some respects today’s walk will be the high-point of Hadrian’s Wall; from the pivotal frontier township of Vindolanda, whose corpus of mundane documents revolutionized our view of everyday life in the Roman Empire, to the dizzy heights of Winshields and the best preserved stretch of the Wall at Walltown Crags, this unlikely no-man’s-land has yielded inestimable knowledge of the Roman world. Another unexpected development was the sudden announcement, received by radio telegram yesterday, that I would be joined today by the elusive Miss T. We have arranged to meet this afternoon at the Roman Army Museum at Carvoran.
After a leisurely breakfast, I leave the hostel and head south until I reach the ‘Stanegate’, the Roman road from Corbridge to Carlisle. I turn east along it and shortly arrive at the stump of a Roman milestone, one of only two in Britain surviving in situ. The arrow-straight road, though unfortunately tarred, is a pleasure to walk on in the cool morning sunshine. The ridge surges up to the north like an enormous wave that never breaks, the Wall snaking along its crest. After about a mile I arrive at one of the forts that defended the original, pre-Hadrianic frontier — Vindolanda, or probably ‘Gwyn Llan’ (‘The White Fortress’) in Old Welsh. At the entrance I notice the timetable for the ‘AD 122’ bus by which Miss T. will come later. Walkers’ intuition tells me our paths will cross sooner than I originally anticipated, and so I send her a radio telegram with instructions to get off at the ‘Milecastle Inn’ at Cawfields instead.
Already in the modern reception building this site transports you to the past: a Roman-style courtyard with fountains and statues tempts you to linger, but the knowledge of how much there is to see and contemplate forces me to resist. A small temple to an unknown god lies on the left as you approach the fort. A little further are the remains of the vicus, the best preserved in Britain and more in evidence than the internal buildings of the fort themselves. There are two bath houses: the later and more substantial lies in the midst of the civilian settlement; the earlier lies to the south, but was already demolished in Roman times. One of Vindolanda’s many delights is the road leading through the vicus up to the West Gate, which still has its original flagstones. Beautiful statuary is often replicated so perfectly, as at Brocolitia, that you can’t always tell whether you’re looking at the original or a copy; a dilapidated old road, on the other hand, gives you the irrefutable sensation of following ancient footsteps. Stand on those broken flagstones and the houses of Vindolanda’s civilian settlement and its perimeter wall grow almost palpably around you. An archaeological dig on the internal buildings of the fort is underway as I pass.
Much of the perimeter wall on the eastern side stands tall and thick, well over head height, and features the remains of semicircular civilian houses built against the wall. Further on the path descends to a garden in a dell ornamented with statues and a beautiful reconstruction of a temple. The museum is also here, brimming with artifacts from this important site. Apart from samples of the Vindolanda tablets and an excellent display about their restoration and interpretation, there is also a collection of sandals and other leatherware, miraculously preserved in the anaerobic peat.
Time is pressing by midday and on my way out I see the great man himself who deciphered the tablets, Robin Birley, taking his lunch in the garden, but I’m too much in awe to approach him with the usual ‘I’ve got all your records…’ speech and must be content with paying my respects at a distance.
Leaving the site on the eastern end and crossing the Stanegate I stumble across the second of the milestones, exactly one Roman mile on and much taller than the one I encountered earlier. From here the path climbs through pasture until I meet the modern Military Road again where it intersects the Vallum. The path climbs further to meet the course of the Wall along a pretty wooded escarpment high above Crag Lough. And the end of the lake the Wall reappears and falls steeply to ‘Sycamore Gap’, where the eponymous tree stands picturesquely at the foot of a gap in the structure. The path climbs again and at the top the well preserved Milecastle 39, ‘Castle Nick’ nestles comfortably in a dip, or ‘nick’ in the ridge. The roller coaster continues above Peel Crags, followed by another impossibly steep drop to which the Wall still tenaciously clings after nearly two millennia. At the bottom the Wall peters out again, but the Ditch is strongly in evidence as the long climb towards Windshields crags begins. The sun burns unimpeded on the wilds of Caledonia to the north as I climb past Milecastle 40. When I reach the trig point at over eleven hundred feet, the highest point of the Wall, I am as always awed by the thought of a twenty-foot-high, nine-foot-thick stone wall labouring up and over this wind-blasted peak — another fine spot for contemplation of this furthest reach of an ancient civilization. Or was it? For a short time there was another wall with paved roads and bath houses a hundred miles further north, and though Antoninus’s memorial isn’t as dramatic as Hadrian’s, I set a mental course for another fine walk along it in the future.
From here to the Irish Sea the road is ever downwards, though never easy. The roller-coaster continues and the Wall is in increasingly good condition. Several turrets are visible for the next two miles as it continues to snake over the gradually descending crests and troughs of the ridge, often at impossible gradients. Milecastle 42 is well preserved, with the massive masonry of its gates still visible. Sitting awkwardly on a steep slope, it is often cited as an example of inflexibly bureaucratic Roman thinking: milecastles were to be exactly one Roman mile apart, regardless of how inconvenient the situation or how close a better site.
From here I turn south, passing the outlines of a few temporary Roman camps that possibly accommodated soldiers while building the Wall, on my way to meet Miss T. at the Milecastle Inn. Perfectly synchronized, I see her getting off the bus a few hundred yards short. We meet at the crossroads and celebrate our reunion over cold cervisia at the inn, refreshing ourselves for the long hot march ahead.
We retrace my steps back to Milecastle 42, and after climbing a steep slope the Wall suddenly disappears over a cliff, the result of quarrying. The road continues around the quarry lake and through pastures uphill to Great Chesters. Here a farm straddles the north wall of the fort of Aesica. This site has been little excavated, but in the south-east corner stand the walls of a small shrine featuring an original altar stone, the only one still in situ along the frontier, though the only supplicants these days, apart from ourselves, are a couple of chickens. We stop for a snack in one of the offices by the Western wall of the fort before continuing through a wood and up Cockmount Hill. The Wall is mostly grass-covered rubble here, though Turret 44A stands tall and overgrown perched dramatically on the corner of a cliff. The Wall appears sporadically along these rugged heights, once again disappearing over an eroded cliff, but is nowhere grander than at Walltown Crags where the road winds between it and rocky outcrops, forming a natural walkway. Hutton notes that two Roman altar stones were used for washing dishes outside nearby Walltown Farm and that back in the sixteenth century Camden was afraid to approach this area for fear of bandits. We stop here for a late birthday supper Miss T. has prepared: a tantalizing Roman picnic of nuts and dates, anchovy paste (to approximate garum, the Roman fermented fish condiment), quails’ eggs with a spice dip.
Soon after we get going the Wall disappears again over another cliff and into another lake created by quarrying. At one point the whole of this stretch was in danger of destruction, but was saved just in the nick of time as awareness of the value of ancient monuments was growing. On the other side of the lake is the fort of Magnis (Carvoran in good Welsh), though now only a barely discernable raised platform in the fields behind the Roman Army Museum. Here on display are military artifacts and a fine film of the reconstructed Wall, but it is after seven and already closed when we pass. We continue downhill for half a mile beside the clearly defined Ditch towards the village of Greenhead and the melancholy Poe-esque ruins of Thirlwall Castle, built with instantly recognizable cubic masonry stolen from the Wall.
From here to Gilsland are two miles of pasture, paddocks and people’s back gardens, occasionally flirting with the Vallum and Ditch, but sadly the Wall, nowhere else more magnificent and dramatic on this stretch, has disappeared anticlimactically for today. Likewise, our inn in Gilsland, a mile short of Banna, is pleasant enough, but the fish the landlady is good enough to supply us with so late in the day is disappointingly bland after Miss T.’s lovingly reconstructed portable birthday cena.
