To Hadrian’s Wall

This is…a fairly crazy trip. I really cannot reconstruct how I came up with this itinerary except to say that, well, since we’re on this island, we might as well got to Scotland, and Hadrian’s Wall is on the way to Scotland, and people in this crew are interested in Romans and archaeology in general, so why not…

I am not sure if it was the best decision, but it is what it is, so where we are. Or were. Because we’re in Edinburgh now.

Anyway.

Time to leave York!

The route? York to Newcastle to Hexham, with fingers crossed that the rail strike that had been called for the previous and the next day wouldn’t affect our travel. It didn’t.

Newcastle train station

Everything went smoothly, we arrived at Hexham before noon and walked the very short distance from the station to our hotel, quite appropriately called:

It was a little shabby, but what mattered was in place: the beds and sheets in the Family Room (three twin beds) were super clean and the employees were incredibly nice, so we were good.

It was too early to check in, but we parked our bags at the hotel and found the Hadrian’s Bus and off we went!

But first – the original “plan:”

I had built in the afternoon of the 22nd and most of the day on the 23rd for Hadrian’s Wall stuff, after which we would make our way further north, to Seahouses. For puffins. But more on that in the next post.

I had a couple of destinations in mind, but beyond that had absolutely no idea how much time we would need or want to spend in the area. Of course, spending a lot of time, and doing so hiking along the path of the wall was something that would ideally be in the cards, but given that this trip was this trip and not that trip – well, as it turns out – it wasn’t in the cards after all. There are a few major sites to see and lots of smaller ones. One could hike a chunk of the Wall, or on another trip, the whole thing. What would we want to do? There was no way of predicting until we got there and saw how long it would take to get from one spot to another.

So here we go. First off – the Hadrian’s Wall Bus is a bus, obviously, dedicated to the route along the Wall, obviously. It runs seasonally, you buy a day pass, and hop on and off. It was certainly helpful, but would have been even more convenient if it had run more frequently – say every half hour instead of every hour. Perhaps during the really busy season (which I assume is July and August) it does.

First stop: The Roman Army Museum and, with a very short walk, Walltown Crags, one of the spots where one can see a stretch of Hadrian’s Wall.

It is just what it says, the exhibit beginning with a decent, albeit a bit cheesy 3-D film, and then continuing with a clear and interesting exploration of Roman army life on the frontier.

The women’s restroom was….interesting.

As I said, a short walk from the museum was a stretch of the Wall.

Of course, we had to time everything so we wouldn’t miss the next bus – or else we’d have to wait another hour after that.

Next, the spot I’d really been looking forward to – the Vindolanda Fort and Museum. It didn’t disappoint!

The site is a working excavation, continually turning up new finds, many of which are featured in the museum. The most well-known find at the site is the Vindolanda Writing Tablets:

The Vindolanda writing tablets, written in ink on post-card sized sheets of wood, have been excavated at the fort of Vindolanda, immediately south of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. Dating to the the late first and early second centuries AD, the formative period of Roman Britain’s northern frontier, they were written by and for soldiers, merchants, women and slaves. Through their contents, life in one community on the edge of the Roman world can be reconstructed in detail.

I believe most of the tablets are in the British Museum, but they have a few on display in Vindolanda. The writing is faint, and they are delicate objects, but the display is helpful – the tablets are gently lit in a cycle, with a card and audio offering the text in both Latin and English.

Of course there is a lot more at the museum, since hundreds of people lived here and left signs and evidence of their lives – including shoes. Because of the composition of the soil at the level these were left – no oxygen – they did not decompose. Fascinating. I’m particularly taken with the designs of the textured soles.

There some folks working on the excavation.

We had to wait a bit for the bus for a few minutes after the site was closed, all alone in the parking lot, sheep gazing placidly at us from the other side of a fence. I got a touch concerned and wondered how we would get back to town if the bus didn’t show, but of course it did, so it was back to Hexham to actually go into our room (they’s gone ahead and put our bags in after check-in time), then walk up to the town for dinner in a pub, pop into the should-be-Catholic Hexham Abbey (closed to visitors, but the door was open and it looked to me like there was a wedding rehearsal happening), a stroll through Aldi, some time with a few rabbits on an athletic field..and back.

Now….tomorrow’s a strike day. We need to go somewhere. Huh.