Somehow I thought this trail would not venture up a cliff like the one pictured above. But I was wrong. If you want to follow Hadrian’s Wall then you have to go to where the Romans built it. Looking at the cliffs ahead, I wondered why the Romans thought they needed a wall on top. The natural crags seemed defense enough. However, the Romans were thorough, and they built atop the Walltown Crags. That meant that anyone who came later had to go up on rocks assembled to make bumpy stairs (second photo below).
Then walk across crag to the next set of rocky stairs going downhill (for creaky knees, that’s worse).
According to “Hadrian’s Wall Path,” this is the “highest part of the Wall that hasn’t been restored or rebuilt by well-meaning 19th-century archaeologicals.”
A milecastle on the Walltown Crags. Note the gate at the front. There would be one in the back as well, meaning anyone passing into Roman territory had to pass through both gates and be trapped in between them for soldiers to see if they had a Green Card. Looking back on the Walltown Quarry.
All of this up and down, but mostly up, leads to Green Slack on Winshield Crag, the highest point on the trail.
Me approaching the highest point on Hadrian’s Wall. The two Johns at Green Slack.
In recent years, the train gave up its stop at Gisland. The permanent post office closed, and now there is one run “on a pop-up basis by volunteers in the Village Hall,” according to “Hadrian’s Wall Path.” Then a pub closed, and the owners of the Samson Inn said this is not quite right for us and offered it for sale. “A developer’s dream,” said one of the operators there now. The building could accommodate four cottages for sale or rent at a costly price.
But the community organized, raised funds, had some government help and kept the pub. Between 400 and 500 live in Gisland, and there are something like 450 shareholders in the pub. Not all investors are from the town. Some Hadrian Wall walkers have contributed, including some who will never do it again but want to save it for future trekkers.
Gisland is where Sir Walter Scott met his wife. More about him in a future post.
After three days of walking, here is the first piece of Hadrian’s Wall we have seen.
Back to Day 4:
We are walking headed east on the walk that follows Hadrian’s Wall, which means you walk 25 miles before you see anything resembling a Roman wall. And it is a sorry bit of piled rocks. Shame on the Romans for leaving such a site as the walkers’ first glimpse of what they had done. Or maybe the blame should fall on those who came afterwards and used the wall as their Home Depot.
But it gets better. Much better. Much of the wall you see looks like this, a scaled down version of what was once a 20 foot high wall complete with forts, milecastles (one every mile), turrets ( between the milecastles) and a signal tower. We would see plenty of those as we walked on.
Or climbed on. Here is one way to get over the modern walls that local farmers have built. Larger stones in the wall to serve as stepping stones, some with a gate added.
There are also several ladders over fences and walls.
It’s a risk to local farmers to have thousands of hikers crossing their fields with their livestock. Will all walkers behave? There are signs at each gate to leave the livestock alone and keep dogs on a lead.
We were lucky enough to arrive at Birdoswald when a guided tour was about to begin.
While pointing out what the Romans did at this fort, she also described what came afterward. The Romans first showed up in 55 BC when Julius Caesar came, to see and not conquer before he returned to Rome and met up with the senate, Brutus and sine die. Jump ahead 100 years to Emperor Claudius and 40,000 soldiers who conquered most of the British Isles and its assorted tribes before getting to the Caledonians in what is now Scotland. Why bother, said Emperor Trajan and his successor Hadrian. We’ve got the minerals and grain we came here for so let’s let the barbarians stay up north and out of our hair. Hadrian started his wall in AD 122 and over six to 10 years built 17 forts, 80 milecastles and 158 turrets, along with the wall that connected them.
Even though the Romans had thousands of men, I am amazed that all this could be built so quickly. The stones had to be quarried, cut into the right shape, hauled to the wall, stacked and mortared. Defensive ditches were dug on both sides of the wall.
But the wall was in use for 300 more years until the Romans withdrew their troops from Britannia to fight closer to Rome as the empire ceased away.
Some Roman drew this horse on a building stone.
Our guide leader pointed out that life did not end when the Romans left. Pictured above are the granaries at Birdoswald. The wooden pillars were not put up by the Romans but were installed in Medieval times. The village outside Birdoswald moved in to the covered fort when the Romans left. Many of the troops then were Dacian who didn’t know how or care about keeping up the stone fort (sorry Romanian and Transylvanian descendants). This became, our guide leader said, an “irritated land,” and many down south wanted it to stay irritated and not venture southward. Eventually, this “debatable” (her word) land sunk into 300 years dominated by reivers, raiding parties on both sides of the English and Scottish border. If you think of Steve McQueen in the movie “Reivers,” based on William Faulkner’s story (the only thing I have read by him), forget it. That lovable horse player, woman chaser was nothing like the Border Reivers, who rustled livestock, raped women, pillaged and kidnapped. This ended in 1603 with the Union of the Crowns, when childless Elizabeth I dies and the crown passes to the next available heir, her cousin James VI, King of Scotland. England and Scotland now shared the same monarch.
The farmhouse on the site was built in 1745, and the property eventually was purchased by Henry Norman, who said we ought to preserve this Roman history instead of carting it away to enclose your garden.
From Birdoswald, we walked on toward Gisland, where we spent the night.
