Hadrian's :Here Comes the Sun

It was 4;15am.  Despite a terrible night with no sleep, my spirits were lifted once I found my way back to the path by the Tyne. I saw a blue flash of a humming bird, darting to and fro though the reeds and then three otters swimming and playing together.

I made my way across a partly constructed golf course and wondered if I'd have had a better nights sleep if I'd slept on a green surrounded by bunkers. Probably not.

I trudged up a steep gradient to Wylam, which offers the residents superb views of the landscape and, for those up early enough to see it, the slither of light of breaking dawn.

I spent the next hour walking toward the sun with a totally unobstructed view. I was able to look directly at it, a golden crescent slowly forming into a semi circle. I delighted in the way it slowly bathed my face and chest; I felt I was warming and energising  my whole body and ...
'Wait a minute!' I spoke allowed, ' The sun rises in the East doesn't it?' And I was supposed be walking WEST. I'd spent the last hour walking, half asleep, in totally the wrong direction.

I cursed loudly, which would have been a delightful wake up call for the few houses near by (apologies).  I turned on my heels and headed back west.  

Hadrians: A Squeak in the Night

   Beneath the H-shaped rugby posts of some sports field on the bank of the Tyne, I finally rested.   It was 10 pm and dark. I was exhausted and was soon wrapped in the chrysalis of my sleeping and bivvy bags. My eyes were closed and I was wearing everything I had brought with me to keep out the cold. I breathed deeply looking up at the white posts above my head that swayed slowly in the breeze. I was certain to drop off to sleep at any moment. I was tired and my feet ached. I lay there. Eyes closed. Waiting for sleeps cloak to envelop my and carry me to dreamland. Any moment....any moment.
Then there came a squeaking sound. Not like a mouse per say, but like the sound a rubber duck makes in the bath.You know, like a child's toy?

'Hmm, what was that' I thought? From where I lay the sound came from above my head and to the right. There it was again, the same flat squeak sound, a little closer but still a good 100 metres or so away. It was no more than two seconds later when I heard the sound again, this time it came right next to my right ear!

At this sound, my whole body left the ground at once in some feat of levitation never before achieved, I screamed, 'WHAT THE FUCK!'. I fumbled around for my torch and on finding it shone it all around me, breathing heavily.   There was nothing but a sea of grass. My heart pounded. What was that thing? And how the hell did it  manage to cover that much ground in no time at all? And why get that close to me, doesn't it know I am a big, scary human and must be avoided.

Well, that was that for the rest of the night. It was out there and I knew it! For all the world it probably looked like a Furbie: small, cute, with big 'I-wub-you' eyes.

But it was out there.

I heard it several more times during the night, it taunted me, mocked me, tormented me, but didn't come that close again. It was the longest night of my life and I got exactly NO sleep! None!

At 4:15am, just before bay break, I staggered to me feet, packed up my things and headed up to Wylam to renew kinship with The Wall.

Hadrians: The Boathousemen, women and other animals

Desperately trying to walk the heart out of Newcastle I ploughed onwards, along the river Tyne, heading out of town.

I was going to sleep out tonight, in just a bivvy bag - no tent! The only thing was, I didn't want to do it in the city. The thought of sharing a sleep-patch with gaunt, 'sleepy' chaps calling themselves Horse, Toady and Scabby did not fill me with delight. Wind in the Willows it would not be.

So, instead, I was intent in covering enough distance to get me out of town and into the countryside, where I could camp in peace and not in pieces.  Unfortunately, I had not counted on one thing, the suburbs. Smaller towns, sporting a fine brand of hoodies, burnt out cars and kebab shops surround Newcastle. If I was to get clear of this lot I was to put my foot down, well feet really. I marched on for hours.

 It was 9:30pm when, exhausted and harangued by a ferocious thirst I came upon The Boathouse pub.

Adorned with a long, white flag pole with what can only be described as forlorn tassels where a flag once flew, the 'Beware of the Children' sign should have been enough to stop me going in. But it wasn't.

It was the evening of a Bank Holiday, which would explain why the small gathering of mainly 50 and 60 something's were all bladdered (define: smashed, squishy, trollied). However, the days long alcohol frenzy could not explain the fact that everyone in the pub, and I mean everyone,  had a shaved head, even the women and pit bulls.

I half expected a resident barber with clippers in hand to be sat next to the door. Thankfully, there wasn't, but it must have been my offensive coiffeured hair that meant that the whole pub stopped what they were doing to see me step gingerly toward the bar.

The bar man, to be fair, was in his 20's and not drunk, but you can be assured that his head was as cropped and shiny as the rest if the cult. I asked for a Guiness and this seemed to be received as an acceptable choice  to the locals who immediately went back to their conversations, which, from what I could make out, all followed a similar pattern no matter which group I listened in to. It was like this: one person would, using simple accompanying hand gestures repeatedly slur the word 'feckin', over and over again, before the other cuts them short with the line. ' Ahh, yowl talking shite m'n!'

I was fascinated by this for a while, but not so much that I didn't down my drink and leave pronto.

I needed to find somewhere suitable to sleep, and fast.

Hadrian Who?

I was now eager to crack on with the walk once leaving the pub and feeling like I was now sponsored by Guiness. It was now nearly 2pm and I had to get going. Despite the heavy pack I was full of energy and had a skip in my step (to be fair, that could have been down to the Guiness). I was heading to Wallsend and Hadrian's Way. Two examples of local place names reminding us of the distant pass when there is nothing to see, and there's was absolutely nothing to see in the City!  The Wall (what was left of it) was long since buried under the buildings and roads. So, place names and street names was all I had to go on.
It was soon to become clear that in the City of Newcastle and, to a slightly lesser extent along its entire length, things had moved on and Hadrian's Wall has been buried (in most cases) and forgotten. To be fair it, all started just as soon as the Romans went back to Italy. The wall was quickly dismantled by the local populous. Not in an political showing of defiance, but simply to build other buildings.

Many of the very old buildings in the area have stones that were originally used in The Wall. Some stones have been used as part of several other buildings along the way, like the fortified vicarage in Corbridge, that I was to stumble upon later. I love the idea of a fortified vicarage!

Never-the-less, the once mighty, immovable wall has now been brushed aside by business parks, nightclubs, roads and football stadia.

Even out in the countryside, the path that follows the line of the Wall, which incidentally has been created with the help of an enormous amount of Lottery funding, continuously skirts around privately owned land. This was to prove enormously frustrating, not only because the Romans built the thing pretty, dead-straight, but when you can see the direction you need to be walking, and the pack feels heavy, and your blisters are tingling in your boots, the paths leads you along a much longer detour around various empty fields, adorned with the classic signs like 'no trespassing', 'private property' and 'oh my favourite, placed on grand iron gates, on a long gravelled drive, ' keep out bull'.   Nice:-(

Day 1, part 2: Finding Nemo

Time to Go! But not wishing to rush into anything too hastily, I spied a pub with a name that caught my attention;The Rock of Gibraltar. Being my mother(and fatherland) I just had to go in.
Bar one print of an early map, hand drawn in the 18th Century, there was nothing inside that connected it to Gibraltar.  This was rather disappointing.
When my fish and chips arrived the battered fish filled the entire plate spilling over either side. I pushed my knife into the batter to a hiss of steam and a crackle of batter. Once the steam had cleared I looked down and noticed there was something missing.
 Where's the bloody fish?
 I peeled away the inflated brown batter to find a small, paper-flat, sorry looking, piece of fish inside the brown casing.  I'd thought I had been given Jaws only to discover I'd found Nemo. I paid the bill with disdain, if you can imagine what that looks like? They would not forget this day in a hurry, no siree!

Hadrian's Wall Trek. Day 1, part 1

Here we go.
The plastic bladder that is my mobile water source for the next few days leaked on the way to the station, rendering much of my clothing soaking before I'd even caught the train. When full it's 3 litre capacity gives the bag a significant amount of extra weight. To be fair, as a source of water for when you're on-the-go it's ingenious in design, offering a long plastic pipe which you can attach to your rucksack and sup on when you need to. The fact it had leaked was not a design fault, but mine. I had clumsily put the rucksack into the back of the car leaving all the weight of the pack pressing against the water bag. Water had squeezed out, but , thankfully, it hadn't burst altogether.

My rucksack itself is ridiculously heavy. I would have weighed it before leaving but Jenny had told me that the family scales were not working properly. I questioned whether the scales were genuinely broken or she just didn't agree with its calculation of her weight.

I don't know exactly how it managed to get this heavy. I have packed the absolute bare minimum. I fact, it's dangerously little, if not dangerously antisocial. I have one pair of pants, two pairs of socks, one pair of trousers and two Tshirts. I have a toothbrush and paste, but no soap or washing materials. Instead I have the shower in a spray-can that is The Lynx Body Spray. I have a waterproof coat, a sleeping bag, a bivvy bag and that is pretty much it!

 I managed to forget my waterproof trousers but remembered, at the last minute, the bloody map!  To be honest, I would have rather have had the waterproof trousers than the map. As I am following a wall, in theory, there should be little chance of getting lost! I simply follow the wall. Only if the wall dissected into several deceiving options would I hit a snag. Or, as I was to discover in Newcastle, the wall disappears under several hundred tonnes of tarmac and brick. Here, I would need to use other forms of  deduction to follow the line of its path.

If nothing else I could rely on the Ancient Romans for building things straight. Just like their roads, if they wanted to build a wall from east to west you could rely on it being as straight as humanly possible. That's not to say they didn't make the most of the natural contours of the landscape they met on the way, but their philosophy for engineering, which complimented their for strategy for war, was keep it tidy and keep it straight.

It is not grim up north- official. No sooner had I arrived at Newcastle station and stopped at the kiosk for Neurofen and Plasters that i was introduced to the uber-social Tynesiders. The lady was determined to give me every detail of how I was going to get to the metro station and was adamant that I took onboard that if I took the wrong train from platform 2 I'd end up at the airport and not the coast. ' You got that luv, look for the one that says the The COAST!"
Then the ticket machine attendant, very attentive. Then there was the dad who took my photo at Tynemouth, the start of my walk. He took several wanting to get it right, despite the fact we were both aware that during this time his young daughter had wander off and out of sight. "Ah she'll be fine, now let's just try a couple more.  So, how many days are you hoping to do it in?" He asked me. "Four?"
"Five," I replied, surprised at this blasé 'four'.
"Oh 'ay, you'll be fine. The first 8 miles is terrible though. You've got to get through the city first, but after that it's beautiful"
On we go!

The Calm before the Off

Less than 24 hours before I set off for the 5 days solo trek along the length of Hadrian's Wall.
Nervous? Yes.    Excited? Yes.
 Looking forward to learning a little about the north of England and its people, learning  a little about Ancient Roman Britain, but learning a great deal about myself.