Friday, May 31, 2013

Day 8: Walwick to Halton Redhouse and Corbridge Roman Town (9 miles, 4.5 hours)




Warm and sunny today, and I decided to forego the sunscreen, so my south-facing arm and cheek and ear are lobster-like this evening. For the moment, they burn more than my blisters, which is a welcome distraction. Perhaps I should use the capsacin cream I brought for sore muscles to make the sensation symmetrical.



 


Here (above right) the Wall peeks a shoulder out from under the modern road, and gorse masses in the Vallum alongside





Daisy here very much hoped someone would throw her stick again (and again)

Sheep that are to be

Sheep that was



















I am dubious of the travel agent's itinerary mileage. Although the going was easier today than the last two days, it didn't feel like we were walking any faster today than the first few days, but we arrived at our B&B by 2PM and didn't feel like we had walked 9 miles. No one answered our ring, but the day was gorgeous and the B&B a magnificent stone farmhouse with stone outbuildings around a courtyard in back and a formal garden with sweeping views in front, so we were content to wait on benches in the shade (I) or sun (Pop).

 





It was still early when we were let in, so I proposed getting a taxi into Corbridge to look at the Roman Town Museum and mail a postcard to my UIC advisor, whose in-laws descend from Corbridge stock.

The museum was a pleasant surprise. Smaller than Vindolanda or Housesteads, less glitzy and polished than the Roman Army Museum, but well thought out in a quiet, slightly old fashioned way, with a nice audio tour that led one through the excavation and explained what one was looking at. Most of the buildings are just foundation outlines, and their uses not known with certainty, but there are two impressive granaries with raised, vented floors, partially intact, and several nice street drains.

Granary floor slabs with ventilation channels below
ventilation channels, wall w/buttresses, drainage gutter


Granary walls with buttresses
Granary portico pillar



 The portico pillar's base rests at the level of the street when the granaries were first started; the top stones behind the pillar are the street level 300 years later. That is a rate of accumulation slightly faster than is happening in my yard at home, where I have found garden edging stones 6 inches below the current ground level (the house was built c. 1950, so about an inch of accumulation every 10 years, if that edging was laid when the house was new).


"The only mullioned Roman vent in Britain"
Street drains (here and below)



 



Our taxi driver said he has a second home in central Florida, which I thought a bit unusual, even for a US taxi driver, so I asked him how he came to have that. Apparently he and his wife went to the US on holiday many years ago; his wife had seen a real estate advertisement in a magazine--if you came to tour the property, the real estate company would put you up and pay your expenses for a few days, and the wife thought that would be a good way to extend their holiday for cheap.  But she loved the place; they bought it and have gone once or twice a year for almost 50 years now. One neighbor hails from Michigan, the other from Chicago.

It being payday (the last workday of the month), our snowbird thought the pubs and restaurants in town would be swamped and we wouldn't be able to find dinner. Since he said the food at the pub near the B&B was good, we had him drop us there after our museum visit. But the pub was empty and no dinner to be had. It is "Rat Pack Night" and we could have stayed for food and entertainment later in the evening, at 25 pounds each. But Pop is not a late owl nor fond of loud music in crowded bars, so I didn't even ask what Rat Pack is (Googling suggests it is probably swing revival, which I would have enjoyed--and probably regretted in the morning with twelve miles of walking ahead). The bar maids were willing to pull us a pint, however, and had a small selection of junk food, so we sat outside in the sun and had beer and crisps (potato chips) and oatmeal bars and KitKats for dinner, then walked the mile back through sheep pastures to the B&B.


In need of milking?
Milking in progress



Heading home for the evening










Thursday, May 30, 2013

Day 7: Steel Rigg to Walwick (11 miles, 8.5 hours)

[Note: photos, and probably revisions, to come]

Grey and windy again,and verging on fog, but not as cold. Back up the lee of the crags, this time on the intended path. Even though we've skipped over the highest 1-2 miles of the Path itself, we're still on track to walk all the way across England, and there were plenty more crags to come. Today's was probably the most spectacular of the Wall walk scenery--extended stretches of exposed Wall, steep crags, distant views, Sycamore Gap (the eponymous tree plays a bit part in Kevin Costner's Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. The tree and its setting are a lot more attractive than the movie). As we began our first crag climb after returning to the Path proper, we heard a sound like a flock of migrating geese. But no--it was a flock of middle schoolers cresting the bend. We found sturdy rocks to perch on just off the path to let them by. Teacher in front, marching briskly; 4 chaperoning Mums at the rear, barking at stragglers like sheepdogs. The kids' conversation was amusingly familiar--all giggles and bravado and excited moaning about the climb. Twig-legged girls in skinny jeans snapping photos with their pink cell phones, rough-housing boys with untied boot laces dragging under their own and their neighbors' feet, inches from the precipice edge. It never ceases to amaze me that any of us survive to adulthood.

I thought yesterday's wind was whipping--this morning's was strong enough at times to threaten balance on the rocky downhill slopes and at crag crests. As with yesterday, there were a few fitful spittings of light rain, but it seemed to start in earnest just before Sycamore Gap--a steep drop down and back up with a large sycamore tree right at the crest of the gap--the only tree that high up anywhere in sight--and a rather handsome tree at that. Pop had been pretty worried about being up on the crags in rain, as the rocks apparently get quite slippery. I had started the day in rain gear, but Pop hadn't, so we stopped to wrestle gear in the wind and rain, and I put away my camera, not remembering how water resistant it is supposed to be. Mercifully the rain only lasted 15-20 minutes and the rocks didn't get wet enough to be truly slippery. But the wind continued, and I wanted so to let my hair loose to whip around, but knew I wouldn't be able to corral it again if I did.

The most beautiful stretch came just after Sycamore Gap, where the line of the Wall traces the edge of Highshield Crags above Crag Lough. No actual need for a human-built Wall here--the crag face is beyond formidable--sheer and high. Jackdaws played in the wind below our feet--whizzing from one end of the lough to the other, high in the air--sometimes gliding with wings outstretched, sometimes hurtling like torpedoes with wings pulled back tight, occasionally hitting a pocket of turbulence and somersaulting violently, though without losing much altitude. Perhaps I anthropomorphize, but it looked like playing--flying just for the sheer joy of movement.

Once again, the endless steep up and down of the crags was pretty hard on Pop. We came to an unmarked fork in the path--he wanted to try the lower path, and I the higher, though we weren't sure which was the official one. As we puzzled, a wiry hiker with a spiky orange crew cut, giant backpack, and walking poles tromped up. She consulted her GPS but didn't have any better idea than we, but she was much more decisive and plowed on ahead along the lower path.  Pop and I decided to try taking separate routes again. I took the high road and he took the low road, and he was at Housesteads afore me. But I got to plow up and down a few crags at speed and really get my blood pounding. Housesteads is an impressive fort, and its extent is clearly not fully exposed, as the surrounding grassy hillside is crowded with linear lumps. But, as Pop said, it felt very much like a case of "if you've seen one, you've seen them all." (I know that really isn't the case--the archaeology and history can be fascinating puzzles if you delve far enough in to begin to understand the details, but Roman history has never really grabbed me).

After Housesteads, the crags were much less craggy and steep, but the ups and downs were just as high--so very long and seemingly endless. And we lost the Path for the first time--missed a turn in a place it should have been fairly clear. Mercifully we realized that fairly quickly when we reached a corner where our choices going forward were between a locked and rusted gate or a steep cow-churned drop into a stream called Knag Burn (Knag Burn Mire would have been more accurate).

The wish to let my hair out kept nagging, so I eventually did so. I'm sure I looked Medusa in sunglasses, or perhaps better, given the location, one of Macbeth's hags, but it felt glorious, whipping around as we walked,. Probably best that I waited until we were past the steepest of the crags, as it would have made negotiating the rocks more difficult.

The up and down gradually subsided and settled into rather bleak marshland running beside the highway. For a stretch, the Wall appeared to be buried under the highway, as all that was visible was the Vallum (a defensive ditch dug parallel to the Wall on its north side). The marsh was full of bird song, but I couldn't see any birds, even with my binoculars. Toward the end of our walking today, the Wall re-emerged from the ground here and there. It's actually kind of eerie how it is sometimes a solid, even massive presence, sometimes a shrouded creeping line, sometimes only  hinted at by its shadowing ditches, and sometimes vanishes altogether. Often I find myself wondering--is that a bit of the Wall, or just a modern wall? But I think not an easy question to answer perhaps, since many of the modern field walls contain stones repurposed from the Roman Wall.

We were supposed to get to Chollerford today, but we also needed to be done by 5:30, as the vaguaries of B&B availability have us staying at the same place two nights in a row, and our hostess needed to collect us and drive us back to home base before 6. So tomorrow morning she will drop us off where we left off tonight. We should be able to stay on track, as tomorrow was scheduled as a 7 mile walk; now we'll have to manage 9 instead. Last night's dinner at the Twice Brewed Inn was decent, but not remarkable; tonight's was far better--a shepherd's pie with very young and tender lamb and bits of carrot and onion in a rich brown gravy under an exquisitely  fluffy mound of mashed potatoes topped with cheddar cheese. Sides of braised carrots and red cabbage dotted with raisins. Another round of Guinness and sticky toffee pudding with warm custard for dessert. I didn't intentionally plan for this to be a foodie vacation, as I didn't think that would amuse Pop, but the eating is turning out to be much better than I expected.


Day 6: Gilsland to Steel Rigg (nominally) (9 miles, 8.5 hours, including stop at Roman Army Museum)

[Note: photo organizing, and perhaps text revisions, to come]

Cold and grey and windy again today. Mostly climbing up through sheep pastures, often quite steep, with a whipping wind in our faces. Didn't need many signposts today, as the line of the Wall has become much more evident--sometimes one or more of the ditches is visible, sometimes the Wall itself--sometimes disguised as a jumble of moss-covered stones, sometimes as a lumpy earthen dike, sometimes massive and squared and imposing, even in its time-shortened height (the eastern section was reportedly 16-20 feet high in Roman times). Today we should have reached the highest point of the Wall along the Winshield Crags (345 meters/1132 feet), but Pop had had it with climbing up and down the crags before we got to the top. It looked on the map like there was a more-or-less parallel path that might avoid the rocks and heights, so I suggested he go that way while I continue up along the crags and the Wall. After my first really steep climb I decided I was worried about him and headed south a bit to see if I could see how he was managing--I didn't see him, so I phoned him (5 bars even though no cell towers or houses in sight). He had run into a mire, had had to back track up the hillside. and then had run into a chest-high stone wall with barbed wire. He could see the road, about half a mile in the distance, and thought he'd walk down to it and along it to the crossroads I was to come down. I could see the road too, and our hiking instructions warned that it was a busy and high speed road, so I wasn't too comfortable with him walking all that distance alone with me up on the crags and unable to help if he had a problem, so I followed the stonewall down until I located him, and we squished the rest of the way down the lee of the crag through thick marsh grasses and cow-churned mud. Of course there was no stile over the stone and barbed wire to get out of the field and onto the road, but there was a gate (with a frozen latch) leading into the next field. So we climbed over the gate and along the next field until we found a gate onto the highway--no shoulder, just a lumpy verge and steep, marshy ditch dotted with nettle patches. The cars whizzed by, but none hit us, and we arrived at the next B&B intact. No fierce guinea pig here, but four hens guarding the doormat.

Quite close to our B&B there is a camping barn. As we walked past, an ice cream truck whizzed past and turned up the camping barn's driveway, playing music not much different from our neighborhood ice cream truck at home. Maybe 50 degrees; grey and windy and verging on foggy; the camp ground held one van and one adult with parka and hood wrestling with a billowing lime green tent. Not the best of ice cream weather nor the most promising of marketing opportunities. Perhaps the barn itself was full of ravenous young campers with change in their pockets, but none were immediately evident.











































































Dinner at the pub down the road--a very attractive and busy place with pretty good food and music to start a bit later in the evening. It was getting pretty crowded, so we shared a table with a family from south of London--the parents originally from Moscow plus their British-born teenage son. They had lived a number of years in Salt Lake City as well,and have hiked in many of the areas of Britain and Wales we are planning to visit, so we exchanged travel notes.