When we arrived at the Keelman's Lodge in Newburn last night, the pub garden was packed with Saturday evening revelers and the bar as well. I was certain we'd get no sleep, as it looked like the sleeping rooms were just up the stairs on a landing above the bar, but it turned out there was a separate small building with four bedrooms, and we slept well enough.
We traded boots and pastures for sneakers and asphalt for our last day of walking. I had anticipated a quite urban walk through grungy streets and abandoned industrial buildings, but was pleasantly surprised at how well the Path avoided that. Abandoned (and a few active) industrial buildings did peek through the foliage from time to time, but the Path was, by in large, through passable urban woodland along the river front--hardly countryside, but pleasant enough nonetheless, though the inattentive cyclists were a bit frightening at times.
It was Sunday morning, and the church bells rang in the suburbs across the river--Newcastle's rapid growth as an industrial center in the 1800's shows in the orderly ranks of narrow row houses lining the hills on the south side of the Tyne. As we approached the central city, the woods opened out into promenade, and fishermen appeared along the edge, casting bits of worm and chopped fish on lines weighted with large lead sinkers to anchor them to the bed of the fast-moving river. I stopped to chat with one small group, apparently having a bit of a contest, and admired a tiny flounder they were measuring out--no more than four or five inches and a soft, muddy brown. I hadn't seen a flounder alive and up close before and marveled again at the bizarreness of design--to have your eye migrate from one side of your head to the other during development! I asked how the fishing was and how big was the biggest fish they had caught. One held out his hands about two or three feet apart and said one of the group had caught an eel that long earlier, and another chimed in to say that the record was a nine pound eel caught closer to the Tynemouth. Not something I would want to try to wrestle to land and bludgeon and then extract a hook from. Never mind eat.
Scattered along the promenade were historical plaques describing the invention and development of a hydraulic crane by a William Armstrong, later Baron Armstrong, and his subsequent development of an industrial empire based on manufacturing, civil engineering, and armaments. He had the Swing Bridge in Newcastle built (opened in 1876) so that larger ships could pass through to his shipyards at Elswick. Apparently the original hydraulic mechanism for rotating the bridge is still in place, though now driven by electric pumps (per Wikipedia).
Between the Swing Bridge and the elegant new pedestrian Millennium Bridge the promenade was jammed with Sunday market. Young people hanging out, families navigating strollers through the crowd, housewives buying bread, stalls selling everything from beautiful loaves of rustic bread and single-sourced meats to cheap leather coin purses, bratwursts, socks, Jamaican curries, cellphone covers, churros, slushies, used books and LP’s, doughnuts, tacos, knick-knacky crafts in wood and clay, pad thai, and flipflops. I stopped to talk to the farm stall minder and admire his meats—a small selection of artfully arranged lamb and pig parts. I asked how one uses trotters and whether pigs’ cheeks are tough and best cooked by braising, saying that American supermarkets don’t generally carry them. So he and his customer debated for me the best recipes for making a rich broth or soup from pig trotters, and how to lightly cure pig cheeks to use like bacon. When I said that most Americans prefer to stick to muscle meat, they marveled at the wastefulness of that, and the stall minder said there was a classic British cookbook—Mrs. Beeton’s—that gave instructions for cooking every bit of farm animals and of squirrels and other game. I recognized the name from a book on my shelves at home and asked if Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management was by the same lady. “That’s the book!” I had to confess I had never cracked its cover, but did offer that a couple classic American cookbooks do also address cooking such delicacies as squirrel and pigeon and possum. And then we discussed the mystery contents of sausage. By then, Pop was far ahead of me and through the crowd. We were supposed to call the travel agent when we reached the Millennium Bridge, so that they could gauge when to send a taxi to pick us up at Segedunum at Wallsend. Having made that call, we then had three hours to finish the walk, which made Pop a bit nervous. From there east, the Path was no longer crowded and became progressively dingier. We stopped briefly (for sodas and bathrooms) at a quayside cycling hub, where serious bikers were preparing for excursions or sitting about, minding tables full of high end bicycle parts or explaining aspects of bicycle repair to novices. Further on, a bicyclist stopped to ask us for directions—the Wall Path comes in hiking and biking versions that alternately converge and diverge, which can be confusing at times. He was heading west—just starting out—and wanted to chat—how was our walk? (excellent). Were American cities safe? (depends on whom you ask and where you go and what you do—not much different from anywhere else in the world). Did we know Winslow Homer? (Yes, of course [though not personally]). Did we know that there was a nice exhibit of paintings in nearby Cullercoats, where there had been an artists’ colony where Homer and others as deserving but less famous had lived? (No, we had no idea of that [would have been nice to visit, but we were pretty much beat and looking forward to showers and sleep]. Segedunum was a bit of a disappointment—dog-eared and without much helpful signage to explain the ruins—nothing higher or more decorative than foundation stones. There was, however, a very nice reconstruction of a Roman bath house and a tiny bit of the Wall that had been found in 1903 during a shipyard expansion and moved to the Segedunum site. The Wall apparently ended at the Tyne’s bank near Segedunum, but the river’s edge has been much altered over the last 2000 years. Across the Path from the fort, a low rectangular paving of Wall-sized stones dips down and under an abandoned building; it isn’t labeled as a remnant of the Wall, but I imagine it is. If so, or even if not, Wallsend is an ignoble end for a once proud Wall. As is the end for most of us.
Wall:
Thus have I, Wall, my part discharged so;
And, being done, thus Wall away doth go.
(MSND, V, 1)
Steve showed up with his taxi and our luggage at the
appointed time and drove us back to Gateshead. I nwhere we had gotten Pop’s medication,
hoping to find more Tegaderm for my blisters and another camera card. Mission
more or less successful, I wandered down Grey Street and then, hearing church
bells ringing changes, headed toward St Nicholas’ Cathedral. In the little
square beside the cathedral was this lovely sculpture of Queen Victoria in her
late middle-aged splendor—a pleasure to see a real woman memorialized as she
really was (at least as I have seen her in photographs)—not as some idealized
young beauty. The Cathedral doors were open, and as I went in, an older woman
approached me, programs in hand, and asked me if I was there for the service.
At first I said no, but then, seeing a mixed choir of adults and children,
thought to ask if it was going to be a choral evensong—yes, Tuesday would be
the Queen’s 60th Jubilee (anniversary of her coronation), and all
the dignitaries of Newcastle would process as part of a celebratory evensong. I
was less interested in dignitaries than in good choral music and cathedral
acoustics, and, knowing that Pop would also enjoy a choral evensong, even as
tired as he was, I stepped out into the street to call him and suggest he catch
a taxi over. The music was fine (even though the choir master had been berating
the choir’s Amens as “Rubbish!”
during practice), the ritual familiar, the sermon thoughtful, and the
procession a fitting mix of elegant tradition (the Cathedral Dean and clergy in
formal ecclesiastical regalia, the Beadle in black velvet tailcoat with lace
collar and cuffs and long, gold-knobbed staff) and unpretentious practicality (the mayor and council
members in come-as-you-are businesswear
of varying degrees of tailoredness or dumpiness, but all with elaborate
Renaissance-style insignia of office
around their necks). Excepting a few young touristing students, Pop and I were
the only members of the congregation in jeans and scruffy shirts, but no one
seemed to mind, and a young curate came up to welcome us and chat after the
service. He had never walked Hadrian’s Wall, but he had done the C2C—a 190 mile bicycle trail across England through the Lake District and Pennines--and we exchanged travel impressions.
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