Hadrians Wall

We had always wanted to walk along Hadrians wall - actually I had really wanted to cycle from one end to the other but having only a day and seeing the slightly hilly terrain we decided driving and stopping at strategic spots was probably a better use of our time. The stone wall was built by Hadrian in the first century and it draws a line across the island from Carlisle to Newcastle - at the place where the Scots stopped the Romans from going any further north - perhaps the cold and the snow deterred the Romans a bit as well!! Amazingly there is so much of it left and we stopped in lots of places walked up to the top of a hill and surveyed the wall winding its way up and down and along cliff tops. Quite an engineering feat!! Our first stop was Lanercost Priory founded about 1166 by Henry II - it was built out of part of the wall which Henry obviously had no need for - and it was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1536. The king gifted it to one of his followers who made some of it into a private home and a few hundred years later it became a Parish Church.

Along the way there are a number of Roman Forts (16 to be exact) strategically placed to protect the Roman Empire. There is Birdoswald Roman Fort which stands proudly on a hill over looking a river. The fort was occupied for about 300 years from the first century and so we spent a while wandering around it looking at what have been the bunk rooms, the kitchens, latrines, mess room etc. After our visit to a few more forts we realised that the Romans actually were very clean and quite sophisticated in their domestic lives (underground heating, spa baths, latrines with running water to flush it all away) and we wondered what had happened that England didn't continue with this level of hygiene in centuries to come eg sewage was simply thrown out into the cobbled stones below and no one washed for weeks on end. Then there was Housesteads built around 124 AD soon after the wall had been built and Chesters Roman Fort which was built to guard the Roman bridge which carried Hadrian's Wall over the River North Tyne.