Newcastle upon Tyne

Today I travelled on the train from Newcastle to St. Bee's. Pleasant train trip. I met Sarah and David from London. They are hiking the first part of the C2C and will be staying at the Ullswater Inn where I will be staying on Day 4. They are carrying all of their stuff but not camping. Hopefully I will meet them out on the trail.

St. Bee's was quite rainy today. Not a heavy rain but constant. I wandered around for an hour and a half. They had a monastery here which is now a church. Very beautiful. The church was open and inside they had the history of the church and region. Interestingly they had dug up some of the graves a few years ago and discovered the preserved body of a 700 year old nobleman who had died while fighting in Lithuania in the 14 century. He was brought back and buried at the church and forgotten until renovations required digging up his grave. Miraculously his body was intact and they performed an autopsy on him. He had a fractured rib and lacerated lung and hemothorax which led them to believe he had died in combat. They even had pictures on the wall illustrating the autopsy. Pathology is everywhere.

I walked down to the Irish Sea where the trail begins and got a pebble to carry with me to the North Sea. I also dipped my feet into the Irish Sea which is a pre trip tradition. It was raining pretty hard so I walked back to the Fair ladies Barn where I am staying to chill out before dinner. I was pretty wet by the time I made it back to the hotel.En savoir plus

Hadrian's Wall was built to reflect the northern extremity of the Roman Empire and not the boundary between Scotland and England, as many people think. Construction of the wall started in AD122 and was completed in AD128 under the stewardship of Emperor Hadrian; it is 73 miles long and runs from Wallsend in Newcastle, Tyne and Wear to Bowness-on-Solway, Cumbria and acted as both a military fortification and to control trade and immigration across its boundary; 16 forts and various towns were on its route and there were turrets every Roman mile (milecastles). The Romans also constructed a Military Road immediately south of the wall for troop movements etc. Hadrian's Wall formed the North West frontier of the Roman Empire until AD410, when serious invasions started from the North by the Picts.

Much of the wall has been lost due its use for construction etc over the centuries; it is either simply not there or its route indicated by dry stone walling. Portions of it do remain, however, as do many Roman artefacts; this is thanks largely due to the efforts of John Clayton, a Victorian.

It is possible to walk the course of the route that Hadrian's Wall took via an 84 mile long footpath There is also a road, the B6318, that runs along some of, and in parts parallel to, the old Military Road (with the footpath criss-crossing it). We take the road option, turning off close to West Denton close to where Milecastle 8 was situated, and plan to visit some of the main sites en route . We will be based at Haltwhistle; there is no time to explore the town though.En savoir plus