Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 3, part 2

From Housesteads the Wall climbs and dips along the ridges towards the west: over Cuddy’s Crags, Hotbank Crags, Highshield Crags and Steel Rigg. I’ve walked this section on a bright, windy day, when the moors feel vast and open, and broken cloud-shadows glide swiftly over the folds of the land.

From an earlier trip, when the weather was less shitty

Today, though, cloud was everywhere, and everywhere was damp. Not that it mattered, with so much of interest to see. At milecastle 37 you find the arch of the northern gate with its springs still in place, as well preserved as any on the Wall.



A little farther the path takes a sudden dip into Sycamore Gap, where you see what is now popularly known as the Robin Hood Tree. This spot, as Hollywood has taught us, was once part of Nottinghamshire.


Scramble up the path on the other side of the gap, and there is a fine view of milecastle 39, whose north gate leads directly to a sheer drop from the crag. This makes the gate useless from a practical point of view, but it does demonstrate the strict by-the-book mindset of the Roman engineers, who insisted on placing their milecastles at precisely regular distances. There’s an even better example of this peculiar sort of military madness farther west.


And coming to Steel Rigg, here is a fine view of one of the turrets originally built between the milecastles. The turrets were systematically demolished by the Romans later in the second century, presumably because they were no longer considered necessary for the functioning of the Wall.


I left the path at Steel Rigg and finished my third day at Once Brewed youth hostel. I wanted to stay here mainly for nostalgic reasons, as I stayed here with Dunk thirteen years ago (almost to the day) during our Land’s End to John O’Groat’s bike ride.


I arrived two hours before the hostel opened, so I sat and drank more tea and hot chocolate in the neighbouring visitor centre. In my bunk room were two oldish men, also long-distance walkers. One of them was doing the Pennine Way, but had just decided to quit after two weeks of continual rain. Unluckily for him, the weather decided to improve the next day...

Silverstone 2011

This coming Sunday I'm running the Silverstone Half Marathon along with Gemma and Edmund. My run is in aid of Cancer Research UK, and is in memory of Dunk, who passed away in January.

I've set up a charity fundraising page here. Any donations to the cause, no matter how much (I know times are hard) will be greatly valued.

Dunk

I’d known Dunk long enough that I only have the haziest memories of first meeting him at some point in school. I do remember the first time we did anything together, when his dad drove us to a big swimming pool in Birmingham. It had one of those tall olympic diving platforms. I’m confident I didn’t jump off it, but I believe Dunk did. And even if he didn’t for some reason, he would have wanted to. Dunk enjoyed throwing himself off high places.

Obviously the coolest kids in the school

Of our small group of friends at school, Dunk was the one who went out and really did things. He was the first to get a driving license, and the first to get a part-time job (working at a hardware store), which meant he could buy a car – a white Austin Maestro if I remember right – and a leather jacket, and I don’t know which he was most proud of. He was the first to get properly, truly blind drunk, too, when on his eighteenth birthday we took him down to my local and had to carry him back. He was the first of us to get married, and in Nini he had a wife no less remarkable than himself.

Any earnings he didn’t spend on his car in those school days went into his other great passion: flying aeroplanes, or else jumping out of them. It was Dunk who drove his mother frantic by disappearing one weekend to take his first parachute jump – without telling her beforehand. The first I knew about it was when she turned up on our doorstep in a panic, beside herself with worry that her youngest son was about to fling himself into thousands of feet of nothingness. And when he couldn’t be in the air himself, he sent up rockets; I once helped him fire one up, a rocket he had built shaped like an X-Wing fighter, in the hopelessly unsuitable location of a Redditch neighbourhood, and we watched fretfully as it sailed back down on its parachute towards the middle of a busy road.

Dunk and Mak, last day of GCSEs, summer of 1996

At high school Dunk and the rest of us had most of our classes together, and outside school we hung out together. Mostly this meant choosing one bedroom to fill with computers and cables and spending the day in some kind of creative nerd heaven. We messed around with video recorders and microphones and once we tried to film our own space epic, cobbling together a spacecraft cockpit in Marek’s loft from cardboard, paint and parts we scavenged from an old MG.

Ant, Dunk, Sharpy, summer of 1997

In the summer of ’96 Dunk, Ant, Sharpy and I spent a few days exploring the Welsh Borders on bicycles. Dunk’s dad, I remember, brought our bikes in his van to the Wyre Forest, and that’s where we set out from, cycling from one youth hostel to another. The next summer we did the same, this time to the Black Mountains.

Dunk (with leather jacket), Ant, Sel, in sixth form

In the spring of ’98, during our final high school exams, I was poring over some photos from those trips and was siezed by a sudden urge to get out on the road again. But this time it would be serious: we’d cycle 1100 miles, the full length of Britain, from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Straight away I picked up the phone and asked Dunk if he fancied it, and he didn’t need to think twice. “Let’s do it,” he said.

From Land's End...

These are the best memories; summer, freedom, youth. For the rest of my life when I think of Dunk, this is where my thoughts will turn.

... to John O'Groats

After that trip, we said the next challenge would be to hike the Pennine Way the following year, our first summer break from university. But Dunk, with typical panache, took up rugby at uni and almost immediately broke his leg, which put paid to any hiking.

We never got round to resurrecting those plans. I saw less of Dunk over the years of university and post-university, except when I came home for the holidays, and one time, in 2004 I think, when I went with Ant and Mak to visit him in Newbury, and he took us up to the top of Watership Down. I was disappointed to see no rabbits. Eventually he married Nini and moved to Thailand, where he lived until recently.

Just last Monday Dunk and I finalised the dates for a new adventure in April, when we were going to go to Egypt (an adventure for me, at least; Dunk was a native). It would have been the first time I’d spent proper time with him for years: a chance to rekindle that old spirit that had once sent us cycling across the country on a whim.

Dunk had been fighting cancer for a while. He was never the sort to accept defeat or to stop making plans. The last time I saw him, at a New Year’s Day morris dancing extravaganza at Cookley, he had looked tired, but the latest news from the doctor had been positive. Ant had been playing guitar in the rain, so Dunk had stood beside him the whole time with an umbrella.

Dunk was the best type of friend: noble and generous, kind and true. Most of all, he was courageous: he threw himself into life with as much zest as he threw himself from planes. Those who knew him could only watch in admiration as he struggled with such trials and personal grief over the last couple of years, not least the sudden loss of his father, yet never stopped smiling.

When Ant called me on Wednesday morning to say that Dunk, after being rushed suddenly and unexpectedly to hospital, had passed away, I put on my boots and went for a long walk.

Ant, Dunk, me, summer of 1997

It was a beautiful day; clear and crisp, with a blue sky and a sun that was distant, but not so distant that I couldn’t feel its warmth. I took a path I didn’t know and kept going. The hardest part was when I eventually had to stop and turn home.