Outfit used
2007 Deseo Plus towed by a 2007 Kia Cee'd 1.6 CRDi LS
Turn the clocks back 20 years and in the little suburb where I grew up, you'd see me wandering to school with my Transformers lunchbox in one hand, and a school project entitled 'The Romans' in the other. Most of my memories of school are hazy recollections of random clips around the ear and reprimands for laziness
but what I learned about the Romans made
a lasting impression. I recall hearing that the routes of Roman's roads are still in use and that they invented central heating, but what really caught my imagination was how they built
a 74-mile wall. Today, as a car and homeowner,
I see the merit of roads and heating, but as
a child, the only thing I owned was Lego.
I recognised Hadrian's passion for bricks and figured he was the sort of bloke I could share
a Ribena with. Twenty years on, I decided
a visit to the wall to inspect the old boy's handiwork was long overdue.
Bearing in mind my mission, the Hadrian's Wall Campsite, close to the town
of Haltwhistle, seemed a good choice. It's a small family-owned site and, with the Deseo being a basic van, the promise of a new washblock helped swing the final decision. Little vans are always quicker to set up, and in no time the kettle was pressed into service and I started studying my maps. It quickly became apparent that there are dozens of Roman sites to visit and I needed to identify the great from the good. Tea drunk, I decided my first stop should be the nearby visitor centre at the intriguingly named hamlet of Once Brewed.
The Northumberland National Park Visitor Centre is a great place to start a trip in the area. There's a wealth of leaflets, maps, posters and other information to help you plan your visit. I was told by the staff that the wall is owned by dozens of different people. The National Trust and English Heritage have some of it, while other bits are in the middle of pastures owned by local farmers. Hence the mass of information leaflets referring to different bits of the wall. Talking to the visitor centre chaps pointed me to a few key sites that would give me a good spread of what there was to see. They gave me a varied itinerary of rebuilt and reclaimed sites with polished presentation, and the area where the wall is crumbling back to nature. The Roman Army Museum at Carovan was to be my first stop, to learn a bit more about why the wall is there and about the people who built it.
If you relish the sort of museums that have rich interactive exhibits, laser light shows and internet terminals at every case, the Roman Army Museum may come as a bit of shock. Staffed by enthusiastic helpers, the museum is traditional but not stuffy. Bubbly Derek, behind the till, did a great job of issuing my ticket while pouring a coffee for
a couple of German visitors and simultaneously issuing orders to a rowdy school group who were about to run amok in his museum.
The first items you encounter are the traditional glazed cabinets packed with locally retrieved 'Roman-abilia'. Each has
a short description to explain what you are looking at. Several of the school group were looking pretty glazed over themselves at this point, but when the one-minute warning for an animated film was sounded, they all ran away screaming. I managed to squeeze myself into the back of the room to watch the Eagle Eye short film that plays at regular intervals. It's a view of Hadrian's Wall taken from the perspective of the iconic Roman eagle. The recently added theatre is conspicuously slick compared to the other exhibits but that's not to decry the rest of it. I polished the lot off in a little over an hour, and then polished off a cuppa and one of Derek's sarnies in the café before heading to the next site.
One thing I learned in the museum was that the wall's route was dictated by geographical considerations. The idea was for the wall to run across the top of the hills and peaks in the area, giving a great vantage point and making it harder for the barbarians from the north to attack. There were existing Roman structures in the area, and a road, known as Stanegate. Running roughly parallel to Stanegate today is the rather less evocatively named B6318, linking Carlisle with the outskirts of Newcastle upon Tyne. This road effectively follows the wall and is the route you need to take if you want to see the sites and sights along the way.
I was advised that to get up close to the wall I should head west, which seems to take you away from the wall's main stretch. The secret though is to turn left off the B6318, about a mile past Gilsland, following signs for Birdoswald Fort. On this minor road, you get to drive alongside a long stretch of the wall, and get a close-up look at Hadrian's work. The wall was obviously well built, what is also obvious from this road is that the wall is more than a very long row of blocks. Along its length are buildings and milecastles; these may look randomly placed, but that does our Roman ancestors a disservice. The wall is precisely configured, with these turrets placed every Roman mile, hence the name milecastles. Along this stretch are Leahill, Piper Sike, Pike Hill and Banks Hill turrets and each has a small information board to explain their role.
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