Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 2, part 1

I was woken by the dawn light, a yellowish-green glow through the fabric of my tent. It had rained heavily overnight, but the morning brought clear skies. I shared the campsite, a small field behind a farmhouse, with a couple of other hikers and a pair of cyclists. One of the hikers I would see every day except my last: he was in his 40s, wiry and fit-looking, with a distinctive khaki neck-flap hat and a GPS mounted on his shoulder like a miniature space cannon. Like a Japanese version of Predator, except he wasn’t Japanese. Or an alien.


It stayed bright into the afternoon. The walk was pleasant, following the line of the military road which was built in the eighteenth century along the course of the Wall. This section was actually built on top of the Wall, using the Wall and its associated forts as the main building material – an act of egregious vandalism that shocked antiquarians at the time and led to bitter complaints in Parliament.


For now, though, the sight of the massive ditch defences were enough to excite me, both the ditch to the immediate north of the Wall line, and the much larger ‘vallum’ ditch to the south. Archaeologists debate the precise purpose of this southern vallum ditch, which follows the course of the Wall closely, varying in distance from 50 to several hundred yards, depending on terrain. It clearly serves to demarcate some kind of military zone, but one wonders how it worked in practice.


I passed a few day trippers, but this part of the route was pleasantly quiet. The sense of isolation didn’t help when I crossed a stile to be confronted by a faceless scarecrow.


A little later I crossed another stile to find a small purple dragon staring up at me. A few yards farther on some kind of hippo was perched on a fence, and it was followed by an array of Scooby Doos.


By this point I was hardly even surprised when I saw a SNES shell embedded in a garden wall. At first I thought it was a novelty letterbox, but no, it was filled with cement.


Hurrying on, I passed by the Robin Hood Inn – because if you decided to establish a pub right next to the most important Roman monument in Britain, in fact built out of stone from said Roman monument, and decided to give it a relevant historical theme, you would name it after that most famous Roman of all, Robin Hood.


Around lunchtime I saw this crude but friendly bucket lid inviting me to stop at St Oswald’s tea shop. This place was actually already a planned stop, mostly because of the name. St Oswald was a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon king who converted to Christianity and won a famous victory on this very spot, and to celebrate he founded a tea shop.


It was a beautiful spot. I threw down my backpack and hammered my fist on one of the tables on the patio, and demanded a cream tea, which duly arrived. Eating the scones was a challenge as the tea shop was crawling with pests in the form of an assortment of cats and kittens, who stalked my food with admirable persistance. The kittens were quite easy to flick away, but the mother cat, clearly a grizzled veteran at such things, had the clever strategy of hopping onto my leg and trying to reach my tray while digging her claws into my trousers to prevent removal.


Next to the tea shop was the battle site of Heavenfield itself. A lonely church stands in the middle of the field, surrounded by a circular wall. Inside the church was a little exhibition about St Oswald.


My favourite part was a children’s colouring book, the novelty of which was that it was not only meant to be coloured in by children, but had also been drawn by a child (to be precise, Caitlin, aged 3).


I teach Anglo-Saxon history, but I don’t remember the part in the life of St Oswald where he rode around on a psychedelic llama.


Or where he rowed a boat carrying a queen whose body comprised nothing but a massive head.


Or the part where three soldiers knelt in front of him while he clutched his crotch in a worrying fashion.

I left the church and moved on. My punishment for making fun of a three-year-old was a growing darkness in the sky; brooding storm clouds loomed ever closer from the west, as you can see in this photo, and soon I would pay the price for my wickedness...