I think we were the only guests at Halton Red House Farm last night. We breakfasted alone in the dining room with damask table cloth, Chippendale chairs, and massive sideboard. Our hostess seemed concerned I might perish if I didn't have at least a boiled egg. I thought beans on toast, croissant with marmalade, grapefruit, pineapple, berries blue, straw, and rasp, dried apricots, prunes, yogurt, and two pots of coffee made a pretty adequate breakfast.
Grey and cool again, less windy, more damp. Apparently good mollusk weather. Threatening to drizzle in the morning with patchy sun in the afternoon. Pop spent most of the morning far ahead of me or waiting patiently at some gate or stile. His longer legs and less distracted attention give him the advantage on level ground; my younger heart and lungs fair better on the ups and downs. If I calculated correctly, I'm averaging one photo for every 4-5 minutes of walking, which must have some effect on my speed, and I think perhaps is taxing his patience a bit. "You took a picture of those two days ago." "No I didn't--I'm taking a picture of the rain drops on the grass blades." "Oh, I thought you were taking a picture of the snail." "What snail? Where was it?" "By your feet. Sorry, I shouldn't have said anything."
We passed more walkers today. One woman, walking alone, asked "How far to civilization?" "Hmm, what do you mean?" (Thinking it was either quite a long way or right here, depending on one's definition) "I mean a toilet." "Oh--no luck there--you'll have to squat behind a bush--that's what we do." But then it occurred to me that it had been quite a long time since we had seen a bush beside the path, and I hoped she knew what nettles look like, since the pathside weeds were pretty dense with them.
The Wall stayed hidden most of the day. I think perhaps buried under the pavement of the roads we walked on or beside. From time to time the Vallum appeared beside the path. Long stretches of pasture under uncertain skies. By noon more frequent and larger clusters of houses on the distant hills; by 1:30 the steady hum of highway traffic, the occasional drone of small planes or roar of jets, the odd faded pizza box wedged in a hedge or empty soda can rolling clattering down a lane. But still huge open fields between.
Our Halton Red House hostess hadn't offered a packed lunch, and our first opportunity for sustenance beyond the small collection of cookies I had accumulated in my backpack was around 2:30 at the round-about in Heddon-on-the-Wall. The Three Tun pub didn’t look terribly alive, but the door was open. We weren’t so much hungry as tired of walking; Pop was indifferent, but I decided I really did want to stop, and I was glad we did. The sandwiches were decent, the ginger beer outstanding, the décor cozy, and the people watching good. I asked the young man at the bar if the tuna mayonnaise was made with white or dark tuna. He had no idea and ducked into the kitchen to ask. The kitchen lady came out, clearly having been informed that there were Americans in the bar asking odd questions about the tuna. She didn’t know whether it was white or dark, she didn’t think they made a distinction here. All she knew as it was tinned tuna and the tin said it was dolphin-safe. Remembering my past experience with British tinned salmon, I decided to opt for the bacon, lettuce, and tomato baguette. The other customers at that hour consisted of a tiny, tea-drinking woman in hiking gear with a shock of magenta hair and a backpack full half her size and two older men leaning against the bar drinking beer or ale and veering between intelligible dialect and something I wasn’t entirely certain was still English. After we left the pub we wended our way through some woods and bits of suburbs, exchanged pleasantries with a man remortaring his garden wall and a woman who stopped us and asked us where our accents came from “They’re American, aren’t they?” (Chicago and New York being our replies) She said she was from Virginia, but in an accent about as unVirginian as one could manage, so I said, “But you weren’t born there!” Oh, no—she was from here and back visiting family. We ran into to her and her family at the entrance to a little park with a block long stretch of Wall—the biggest and last bit all day. Soon thereafter, I decided we must have taken a wrong turn. The map was confusing; a local couple packing their car and a young woman out walking didn’t know where the Wall path was or what the route number of the street was or which road it was on the map, but thought we ought to go back to the Three Tuns and go some other way from there. We headed back to the bit of Wall park and looked about for acorn signs (acorn symbols mark the path—when it is marked). We exchanged confusions with a pair of British women not in hiking gear, with a New Zealand couple in a rented camper, and with a foursome of hikers with slightly broken English and Germanic but not quite German accents. Also a seemingly knowledgeable native whose instructions were too complicated to really sink in and a pair of construction workers whose instructions were simple but not accurate. So we wound about through a pretty suburban village/development, not even knowing if we were lost or actually on the path. Perhaps half an hour of that before we found a path sign again. In the end, I think we had only strayed from the official path once, back at the bit of Wall park, but I’m still not certain. And then we overshot our night’s lodging by at least a quarter mile because our instructions said the place is right on the Wall Path, which it isn’t quite. But in the end we did arrive, and we did get dinner.
For reasons not entirely clear to me, the Wall Path diverges from the line of the Wall at the little park in Heddon-on-the-Wall and drops down to follow the River Tyne. We won’t cross paths with the Wall again until the very end of our journey at Segedunum Fort tomorrow afternoon. Looking at the map, it appears there are no more visible remains of the Wall and only minimal remains of associated structures between Heddon-on-the Wall and Segedunum, but lots of busy roads and dense suburbs, so maybe walking along the Tyne is more sensible.
No comments:
Post a Comment