Day 1: Wallsend to Heddon-on-the-Wall (28km)
In the morning, discovered that Pennine Express had sent me two emails. The first said that my 11:50 train was cancelled and the other asked "how did we do" on my previous trip with them, which had also been cancelled. The one train still running was at 10:54, and I stepped aboard at about 10:53:35, having made things exciting by getting confused about everything it was possible to get confused about: where the station was (where the map says it is), whether my ticket would be valid (it was), why the machines weren't letting me collect my ticket (I already had it), and how the ticket-scanning pass-gate worked (in the way you'd expect).
The trail starts from Segedunum, a Roman fort in the mildly depressed and tedious-to-reach Newcastle suburb of Wallsend. I was in a carpeted suburban B&B containing a full-sized horse sculpture and a lot of shiny Roman bric-a-brac run by a man who was friendly and generous with his views on what was wrong with the country. Getting to the beginning of the walk added 1.5km. I didn't love adding anything to the distance, but also worried that Pennine Express might find a way to cancel the bus.
The path follows quiet asphalt trails along the Tyne, past informational plaques about the tar and lead works formerly located along here, warning plaques about tar and lead contamination, and people cheerfully fishing from the bank, and then plunges you into a busy tourist market in central Newcastle, where you suddenly have to weave through a crowd of people carrying iced lattes and resist the offers of "real Welsh gypsies" to help you understand your future. A couple of junkyards with wrecked cars rising over their walls, the skeleton of a river boat half buried in mud, gulls, cyclists, and an ill-advised detour to the M&S in the train station -- it's so temptingly close to the path, but the rise is steep and the route winding and the station entrance in the wrong place altogether.
You don't see countryside until near the end of the day, and then you're shunted onto a strange path through a golf course and make a sharp push uphill towards Heddon-on-the-Wall, which is finally reached through a gauntlet of closed gates and barking dogs. Directed by a local who'd come out to reassure me that her furiously-barking dog just wanted to play, I found the farm, a nice stone one, and let myself in through the gate. After calling a number posted on a wall, a woman appeared and said "sorry for the mess, I was just moving some cows".
On this day, I set a personal best for the half-marathon, depending on what levels of ibuprofen and caffeine are allowable, of just under six hours. I think I can get that down to 5h30m by reducing lunch to two courses. It was gruelling, but you do get a pleasant sense of accomplishment from a long day of walking, even though the world would be much the same if you'd stayed home and hit your feet with a hammer.
Day 2: Heddon-on-the-Wall to Chollerford (26km)
Stores and pubs along Hadrian's wall are to you what wells and oases are to the Bedouin. The first business of day 2 was therefore to detour to a gas station Spar and do a very carefully-considered shop. I could have been more scientific about nutrition, but I think I got the amount of junk food I could reasonably carry about right.
Today's path runs along farmers' walls through green tunnels of bent-over trees, and is soggy after rain the night before. After a heavy one, you'd want waterproof boots, or, ideally, a fan boat. There are swarms of tiny flies; not the kind that bites, but the kind that needs to annoy someone before it can lay its eggs. A pair of walkers in front is making smart decisions, and I follow their lead by taking the road for a while rather than squelching through the muddiest fields. This is the Military Road, which the English built in the 1740s to move forces around to deal with Jacobites. For this, they turned to the handiest source of stone, and so the wall isn't much in evidence; you're walking on more of it than you can see.
As the trail works its way into pastures -- it's a public footpath on farmers' land, and you're constantly opening and closing gates and climbing over stiles -- you start sharing it with animals. Up ahead, there was a pair of gates to cross the neck of a field, and a white horse charged over to the gate when it saw me coming. I took a picture of it so it would be the last one on my phone should anything happen. It was friendly enough as I eased into the field, but tried to charge through the other gate as I opened it, forcing me to spring through and latch it hastily. Then it stood around trying to look like it never wanted to come through the gate, anyway. A woman was coming along in the other direction, and I pointed back to the horses and warned her to look out for the nonchalant one. That's how it gets you. You think it's not even paying attention, and then bam, it's through the gate and on the run, and then you see its face on the news because it's wanted on six continents -- nothing in Europe, oddly, but it has a bigamy charge at the South Pole Station.
All the other horses were perfectly indifferent, while the sheep are interested in you mostly as a spectacle. If you got too close, they'd bound clumsily away. Otherwise, they'd stare a bit, and then lower their heads to the lush grass again, their strange eyes rolling back in the ecstasy of the gourmand. I'm not in touch with the rhythms of the countryside, but it turned out that May is lambing season. The lambs were very vocal, exchanging regular baas with their mothers. Are you there / yes I'm here / are you there / yes I'm here / are you there / no, I've joined the navy and shipped out on a guided missile frigate.
The one tricky entry in the short Cumbrian bestiary is the cow. They can be unfriendly, and there's something inglorious about getting savaged by one. Your dying words would be "tell my family... it was a bear". None of them kicked me, but I made no lasting friends among them, either. Some were vaguely hostile, especially when the path led into their midst and they'd spread themselves across the width of the dry ground, leaving you no alternative but to walk through the herd. I know very little about putting cows at their ease. I tried talking to them, but one pawed the earth. I have heard that they like jazz, in case that helps anyone. Cow starts charging, you crank Kind of Blue, it stops and cocks its head, and soon you're riding it comfortably to the next town while enjoying a glass of fresh milk. I can't guarantee that this would work, but it does feel pretty ironclad.
The trail hugs the edges of most fields, but cuts diagonally across a couple of rising ones, providing views of some glorious countryside. Then there's a surprising tree plantation -- a field of young trees and another of stumps and mud -- and then, because the topography doesn't allow for a steep climb at the end of the day, you finish up with a grim walk along the side side of a busy road and then cross the Tyne, find the hotel, and curse the long walk from reception to your bed.
This day was 26km, and if it had been, say, 5km shorter, that would have been just fine. I was surprised when I shook out my shoes at the end of the day, because I was sure I'd lost a couple of toes. This route tests the limits -- not quite of human endurance, but of what your casual middle-aged walker wants to deal with.
Day 3: Chollerford to Steel Rigg (21km)
On a rainy day three, the route climbs up into misty moors and rocky pastures and past silent stone farmhouses circled by cawing crows. You could set three Gothic novels per kilometer of path along here. The wall appears and disappears, replaced by straggling farmers' walls made of suspiciously similar stone. The wall isn't really gone, it's just been reorganized. This is better than the Military Road, whose builders are responsible for at least two problems with the earlier part of the route: the lack of an actual wall and the presence of a busy road alongside.
You pass through a Roman fort, of which little is left, though there is a Mithraeum, surrounded by a wire fence but sporting tufts of fleece where sheep have sneaked through a gap to have a scratch against the ancient stones. The sheep snooze all over the vanished fort; real Ozymandias stuff. The great attraction for the walker is a man in the parking lot selling coffee and muffins. You hand him £1.50 and he conjures a little muffin from his van's dark interior and says "lovely".
The countryside is so stunning that it's hard to place your feet carefully, which you need to do because no one has been picking up after the sheep. It's hilly and dramatic, the sky broods mysteriously over the isolated stone farmhouses, and the wall snakes unbroken into the distance. There must have been less demand for stone in this remote country, and a 19th century antiquarian managed to buy up sections to save them. Late in the day comes the Sycamore Gap, where a famous tree stood until it was mysteriously cut down a few years ago, prompting a well-covered outburst of public emotion. When I tell you that the sycamore was a former Tree of the Year, you'll understand how serious the matter is. The stump is fenced off now, and various sources hold out hope that it will re-grow, but caution that it will take time, in case you were thinking of coming back later in the day.
The arrangement tonight was to call the hotel for a ride down from the trail. The innkeeper apologized for coming in a Kia and talked about plumbing and how much money there is in sheep farming (none). Hope is being placed in tourism, instead, and he points out an enormous new youth hostel and attached visitor's centre. Whether there's money in youth hostels is unclear; the average age of wall-walkers seems to be around 55. Maybe the place swarms with youth during the summer; or maybe, as the innkeeper in Wallsend would lament, kids just aren't interested in walls anymore.
The inn is in Bardon Mill, a little village with defunct mills, a salt glazing kiln that they say the last of its kind in the UK -- we're so close to wiping out salt glazing altogether, why can't we close the deal? -- and a little shop that sells toasties and junk food. I turn up to the shop more or less intending to clean it out. "All right, put everything in the sack. I'm going to pay for it, the sack is just more convenient."
Day 4: Steel Rigg to Walton (28km)
At breakfast, a TV news program is airing an update on the case against two men charged with cutting down the Sycamore Gap tree. It shows them hunching away from a courthouse with their faces covered. Media coverage has been heavy and the investigation intense. The tree was expertly cut down during a late-night thunderstorm which, as in a mystery novel, prevented the nearest neighbours from hearing the chainsaw. The tree autopsy revealed that the cause of death was being cut down. DNA tests showed that it was unequivocally a tree. Celebrated amateur detectives ruled out its being left-handed, a Freemason, or having traveled recently in the Far East. Motive is unclear, but may be connected to hooliganism by Tree-of-the-Year contest "ultras".
The land is flattening out and the isolated grey farmhouses giving way to red-brick villages. There are lichenous village churches on mounds with yards of weathered tombstones that have been gradually falling over for two hundred years, village greens, and a shelf of books in a bus shelter serving as a local library. One village has a row of plaques awarded for victory in a Village of the Year contest (hamlet division). It had a great run until 2014, and then they ran out of room on the wall, the award ceased to be awarded, or the village couldn't compete with one that's dominated the league since being bought by a Gulf billionaire.
You crunch up to an old quarry on a gravel path and find it's been turned into a public park -- the quarry is now a shining little lake, though the signs tell you not to swim in it -- and that there's a class of children there, who seem as much at a loss as I am to understand why they'd taken a field trip to a quarry. However, there are picnic tables and a little visitor centre with food and coffee, making the quarry an important attraction for wall-walkers. You wish for more quarries. Next is one of a few museums along the path. I'd promised the publican I'd look at it, and its cafe was extremely interesting. I skipped the rest. At this point, I wouldn't have gone out of my way for the lost city of gold.
The trail runs through more sheep pastures and up to and around Thirlwall Castle, a crumbling mound-top 14th century fortified home that Wikipedia says "fell into decay" after 1748 and has been decaying aggressively ever since. It's a modest place by castle standards, good mostly for sheltering from raiders and whatever else was going on outside -- and, really, most of the 14th century would have been worth sitting out -- but it's your only chance to poke around one, and, if you like, "imagine the scenes" that the plaques nearby invite you to imagine. Down country lanes, more emerald pastures where sheep spray-painted with numbers graze industriously, hills, sections of wall, and the foundations of its regularly-spaced watchtowers and mini-forts.
The hotel for the night is a grand Victorian house with black and white photos along the stairs, plaques describing service in the wars, cooking smells, and a parlour where Edwardian detectives would gather the suspects to gradually unmask the killer. The parlour is decorated with horse pictures, my room with rabbit knickknacks -- a rabbit coat hook, a rabbit lamp, a framed drawing of a rabbit in a coat smoking a long pipe. On the opposite wall is one of a dog wearing clothes, but even here there are ghostly rabbits in the background, possibly former victims preparing to drag the dog down to hell. There is also a bumblebee bedspread, the incongruity of which feels like the key to some mystery. Where is the rabbit bedspread? Could it be in the village pond, wrapped around the murder weapon?
Outside, chickens strut and rescued horses stand around shaking their heads. A mantel clock ticks loudly, and downstairs a grandfather clock booms the hours. Under the glass of the table is the wifi password, which follows the general rule that, the smaller and more remote the hotel, the more paranoiacally long and complex is the wifi key. Only thus can the family scone recipe be safeguarded from cybercriminals. Centred on a small plate by the bed is a single apple. I would have been expected to toss it in the air a couple of times, shine it on my waistcoat, and crunch into it while peering out at the horses, but I just didn't feel up to it.
The operation is run by a mother and daughter, with some little children also running about, unless they're the ghosts of Victorian children taken by scarlet fever, and the martial arts gis and trampolining make that feel less likely. They're lovely people, really, the food is good, the house is comfortable, and the anachronistic oddness of the place is pretty glorious.
Day 5: Walton to Carlisle (19km)
It was raining when the hotelier dropped me off at the trail in Walton. I exchanged nice-day-ha-has with an elderly couple draping themselves in rain gear and hobbled off across flat and uninteresting sheep pastures where mosquitoes rise from the wet grass as you swish along. The farms are larger here, the wall is gone again, and the sheep have little new to offer the non-specialist. It's a short and easy stage, which is for the best. Getting towards Carlisle, I ate a strange lunch of leftover snacks in a freshly-mown field in the shadow of an electricity pylon and got up so painfully that the crows started to take an interest.
Closer to Carlisle is an honour-system snack shack, where you pick up what you want and leave money in the "honesty box". There are several of these along the trail. This is the least heartwarming of them, as it's festooned with video surveillance signs: steal a bag of chips and your image goes straight to the Interpol snack-bandit database. The nicest of the shacks is back in the countryside. It offers encouraging messages, fresh-baked flapjacks (oat bars), eggs, blister kits, and gear-repair tools dangling on strings.
Back among the farms, a horse named Paddy nods hello from his stall, but then there's the most sinister herd of cows I've come across yet. As I circle around, a few detach themselves and stare. Every time I look back, they're closer, but in the end they're satisfied with having chased me off. The beautiful brick barn beyond their field has a huge sheet-metal annex with an enormous hole torn in the side, possibly crashed through by some uncontainable monster cow bred by mad agricultural scientists, or, and this is much more common, perfectly rational scientists chasing funding from a mad granting agency. There are also rows of glamping pods here and there.
The trail links up with paths leading through Carlisle's Rickerby Park, where you're close enough to the city that you need to stop saying "hi" to strangers. It's easy to mis-time this, like walking around with an umbrella after the rain has stopped. This might be how I fell into conversation with a gloomy man in the parking lot who had been told a certain restaurant was in the area, and still wanted my help even after my words, accent, and air of haplessness should have shown I wouldn't be much use. We enjoy a few minutes with Google Maps together, but even then the most I can do is to point him to a probable tea house. As I walk away, I hear him asking the next passerby. He may have been a spirit doomed to walk the earth until he finds the restaurant he left unfound in life. Alternatively, he may have been corporeal but really bad at finding things. There's no way to be sure.
There's a cenotaph in the park, surrounded by benches and so a good place for a long rest before tackling the fifteen minute walk to the hotel. It's a WWI memorial with a little plaque bolted on to expand coverage to WWII and, rather cleverly indemnifying the city against any further monument-building, "subsequent conflicts". There was a great boom in monuments in the years after 1918, followed by a bust that never ended. Limping further on, you come to a wedge of park full of camper vans and small motor homes, and I still don't know whether their occupants are homeless, protesting, lost, or on vacation.
My room in Carlisle is in a stretch of row houses cheaply renovated into a business hotel back in the early 2000s, or whenever people thought half-partitioned showers and touch-activated mirror lights were cool. It's on the wrong side of the river for the castle, cathedral, and downtown area, but is across the street from a fertility clinic for dogs.
Day 6: Carlisle to Bowness-on-Solway (26km)
You leave Carlisle on pleasant-enough riverside paths and come out into country roads connecting beautiful little villages. The five institutions of the English village are the medieval church, the green, the Parish hall, the notice board, and the defibrillator. The notice boards publicize minutes of the last council meeting and hold announcements about yoga, lawn bowling, movie screenings, plant sales to raise funds for gardening societies, and, in one modern Gomorrah, a bingo night. The defibrillators are colourful and prominent landmarks, if a bit dubious as a public health measure. "Meet me at the defibrillator," people say, probably.
One church has local fame as the place Henry I lay in state after dying on his way to fight the Scots. There's a memorial off the trail, but detours off the trail are unthinkable at this stage. I do talk to someone later who went to have a look, but, after walking a mile, was chased away from it by a cow. "I tried to wave it off, but it was 'aving none of it." I also run into a couple I'd walked with briefly two days before, and we exchange stories about the white horse that tries to rush through gates. Wherever that horse is now, I wish it well.
The cow story was neatly timed, because the path along the Solway gives you the choice of a high-speed road and a grassy, tree-lined embankment, but the embankment is a narrow one grazed here and there by cows. I climb down it to avoid tangling with them, and then an older woman coming the other way brushes them casually out of her path. How did she acquire this quiet authority with cows? What do I have to do to earn their respect? The herd decides, in that mysterious collective way it has, to cross the road, and I have to rush across a cattle grid to avoid being cut off, but then can turn and enjoy getting stink-eyed by each animal in turn. From then on, there are only sheep, which run from anything that moves and some things that don't. It's in the company of sheep that I feel most confident.
Bowness-on-Solway is at the mouth of the Eden, strung along some of the most impressive mud flats you will ever see. Once a fishing and smuggling town, it's now a place of pilgrimage for wall nerds and estuary enthusiasts. The whole area around and north of the wall was an unsettled no-man's-land until the 1707 union, so the oldest buildings date from just after the last time it was destroyed, and there are great fortified farmhouses in the outlying area. The town is dotted with plaques describing the raids and the drownings and suckings into mud flats that plagued men escaping across the Solway with their new cows.
The trail ends at a tiny shelter with an approving image of Hadrian, a bench, and a congratulatory message in English and Latin. Here, you can mill around with other people celebrating their completion of the walk, like attending a dusty and strikingly unsuccessful cocktail party. I take pictures of another group for them and one of those end-of-trail selfies where the sun is glaring and your mouth is hanging open stupidly. In later years, I will look at it and fondly remember what a terrible photographer I was.
The B&B is a new white building joined to a decayed stone house and a brick chicken coop. Removing the bandages from my toes is a grisly business, like unwrapping a row of mummies. In the morning, muddy chickens huddle against the building, the rooster making himself irresistible to the hens by crowing derangedly every few seconds. There's a crowd of us waiting to catch the bus back to Carlisle, and we talk about the trail and contemplate the wads of feathers in the street, evidence of a titanic overnight rooster clash, unfortunately survived by the combatants, who continue to crow triumphantly.
The bus is jammed with walkers, and when we stop at tiny places here and there for elderly villagers, each more ancient than the last, the walkers at the front rise one at a time to surrender their seats. There are two buses a day to Carlisle, and if you miss those, you have to work your passage on a coastal barge, for example, by managing its social media accounts. Raising the profile of barging, networking with other barges, inventing barge-related hashtags, it wouldn't be so bad. "If you walked on gravel today, thank a bargeman #largebarge #nokeel #bargelife." In Carlisle, I decide there's no time to see the sights, and wait instead in the train station, where I spot a trainspotter and tick "flat cap-wearing tripod-user" off my list. Then it's just a question of politely kicking an ear-gauged teen and his goth girlfriend out of my seat on the train and I'm in Glasgow.
In George Square, a stately public space beautified by statues of notable Scotsmen, Celtic fans with a boombox compete with a preacher and someone timidly picking out 'Wonderwall' on an acoustic guitar, all three oblivious to the many people trying to will them out of existence. The proper place for them is not the square but the street, where people only have to tolerate Jesus, soccer fandom, and Oasis for a few seconds before passing out of earshot. Celtic have just won the league, and increasing numbers of increasingly shirtless fans are drifting down Argyle street. A very drunk teen in lime green holding a bag of groceries has seized the mic from a busker and is gamely trying to sing Jailhouse Rock despite only knowing about 30% of the lyrics. That's the spirit that won Celtic the title. Actually, the spirit that won Celtic the title was probably more of a lyric-knowing spirit.
In the very early morning, the bus to Edinburgh airport and the trip home.
