Author’s note: I return to the Hadrian’s Wall path, c. 2023 and the second to the last leg of my return trek.

July 11, Gilsland and Lanercost

For whatever reason I neglected to work on my daily journal during my stay at the Hollies-on-the-Wall B&B in Gilsland and had to plumb my memory for the bits of the day’s hike that stood out. Pain and anxiety top the list. But next came dinner, which saved the day.

I left off my last dispatch pondering whether to walk or chance intermodal transportation from Walltown to Carlisle (near the end of the trail, 20 miles away) and back to Gilsland, as I would not arrive at the Hollies until after dark. I chose to go with former, for which I was sorry in less than a mile, as the trick of memory led me to misjudge time, distance, and the tread on the path in the early going. 

From a satellite or drone, the trail looks easy, cutting across sheep pastures with a few dips and climbs within and without the berms and ditches—all that remain of the Roman works on the passage. But the verdant grasses, enriched by rain and copious amounts of manure, hid rocks and ruts that played havoc on the sprained ankle that I had not allowed to heal. I had to mind every step, so much so that I considered crawling, which would have been much faster, but I was wearing cargo shorts and neglected to pack knee pads. 

My short-term goal was making the wooded hillock ahead, topped by the 14th-century ruin of Thirlwall Castle that Jerry and I bypassed four years before. Leaving the pasture behind, I entered a woodland and crossed a foot bridge over shady Tipalt Burn. The creek winds through Holmhead village, a scattering of houses clustered about the ruin above and aligning with the trail on the far side of the hill. As with much of what I had missed exploring in 2019, I read up on the castle before leaving home and was bound and determined to see it. 

The castle takes its name from the Thirlwall family, who in 1330 built the bastion with stone quarried from the Roman wall to repel marauding brigands (Reivers) from both sides of the border. But having money enough to own a castle was no guarantee of a happy future. Percival Thirlwall, King Richard III’s standard bearer at the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485), met a grim though glorious end, his legs severed while steadfastly clutching the king’s colors. The last of the family sold the place in 1748, and the structure deteriorated until the county government stepped in to preserve it in 1999. According to historians, the family took its surname from the place name Thirl—Wall, meaning “a gap in the wall.” This may explain why the nine nicks, or gaps, hikers traverse from Cawfields to Walltown have long been known locally as “The Nine Nicks of Thirlwall.”

Shuffling up from the creek, my trekking pole smacked the gravel tread, ringing like a pickax, until I reached the junction of a spur trail that cuts through a dense thicket to reach the castle ruin looming above. A wayside exhibit provides all the necessary information for casual wayfarers, including source organizations for further information or calls for donations to aid in stabilizing the ruin. I walked up the path and surveyed the pile. From a distance, it reminded me of Odiham Castle in Hampshire, though on closer inspection I noted that unlike Odiham—reduced over time to flints and powdery masonry—enough facing stones remain on Thirlwall to preserve the ruin. A few bear the inscriptions of  Roman legionaries.

My contemporaries may remember that Peggy Lee song, “Is That All There Is?” the jazz singer’s weary paean to anticlimax.

I hate to admit it, but the castle did not make my heart sing. All I wanted by then was a hot shower, a bed, and a glass of ale with bangers and mash at the Samson public house…still two and a half miles ahead. I made my way back to the trail, slipped past the rail crossing before the train swept by and skirted the swamp until I once again met the B6318 sweeping through open countryside to Gilsland. But that would not be my route. I crossed the highway and tiptoed with traffic along a weedy verge, on the lookout for where, without fair warning, the trail cuts up from the road on flagstone steps. Before this junction, there is a nine-yard fragment of curtain wall poking out of the embankment, protected from erosion and errant cars and trucks by a stone and mortar plinth. The setting is so nondescript that it had been easy to miss my first time through. It was only after I returned home and read Mike Bishop’s website page, “Per Lineum Valli, Wall Mile 46,” that I learned about this partially buried nine-foot chunk, including how construction workers stumbled upon it while excavating the roadbed in the 1950s.

According to my photo time stamp, I spent a minute standing at the plinth, staring dumbly at the fragment before moving a few feet on to the trailhead. It occurred to me then that this had been a replay of another moment at Wallsend, where a similar lump of reconstituted masonry occupies a weedy embankment on the River Tyne. Had I not already seen the milestone at Vindolanda and explored the Great Chesters Fort and Roman Army Museum, these remnants would be a poor excuse for a return journey half-way round the globe. Peggy Lee struck again.

 

As noted in my 2019 account, the landscape on the way to Gilsland is mostly farmland. The wall long gone, sheep and cattle graze among Roman earthworks—ditches and berms created from the spoil—still evident north and south of the wall course. The south network, or vallum as it has been known since the early Middle Ages, also provides convenient hazards for duffers on the links of the Haltwhistle Golf Club. It was not until I crossed two open fields and negotiated the first stile that I met the V-shaped north ditch (fossa), the sides by now sloped or steep, depending on the extent of plowing over the centuries. Having interpreted the redoubt at American Camp for 20 years, I was knowledgeable of earthwork design and application. When the park was diligent in mowing the structure each summer, the ditches, ramparts, and gun platforms were clear even to the most casual park visitor. However, I was less familiar with the legacy the park structure owed to ancient Rome.

The Romans considered ditches an essential element in fortification as they impeded the momentum of attackers, who first had to weave through an obstacle of sharpened stakes (cippi), then climb a “counterscarp,” i.e. the mound created by the excavation. If they made it into the ditch, they discovered that the narrow talus or tarso ruptor (“ankle breaker”) at the bottom impeded the sure footing essential to reassemble and scale the ditch’s “scarp” (inner wall) and ascend the agger (rampart), the final obstacle before reaching the base of the wall. 

All the while, missiles rained down from above.

I could readily identify with tarso ruptor as I picked my way through the ditches. Although I did not have to shinny up the slopes to dodge cattle as Jerry and I had done four years before, the rocks that had leached to the bottom over the years demanded strict attention. After a mile or two, and once past the ditches, I was ready to quit for the day. But this was a hike that never seemed to end as I passed through a farmyard and faced another field crossing. On top of it all, the sky turned sodden and fat rain drops smacked the bill of my cap. Ordinarily, this would have spurred me to pick up the pace. But it was no go. I limped through one more kissing gate and finally entered the familiar climes of Gilsland, passing behind apartment houses and finally The Samson public house nudging the B6318. Remembering the wrong turn we made in 2019, I headed under the rail overpass and two blocks on arrived at the ranch home façade of the Hollies-on-the-Wall. I walked around back, through the courtyard and finally to the hikers’ entrance at the back door, the rain by then hissing on the pavement and soaking my anorak.

Living in my head as I am wont to do, I flattered myself that on answering the bell Jackie would remember my sparkling personality from four years before when Jerry and I arrived more than two hours early and she granted access to the washer and dryer in our spacious room above the garage. Moreover, I had interviewed her—along with Tracey and and Samantha at Hallbarns and the Vallum Lodge with whom I had also stayed previously—by email during the pandemic to learn about how they had been coping on the wall path. (The entire family was down with Covid.) 

As with Tracey and Samantha, Jackie hadn’t an inkling of who I was, other than another exhausted wayfarer among a stream dating from when she opened for business that same summer of 2019. Moreover, in ensuing years, she had fine-tuned her operation and learned self-preservation, though she was no less gracious. I was an hour early, she pointed out, but as it was raining and my room was ready, I might as well come in and relax before dinner. She briskly escorted me past the kitchen—where her husband Stephen and son halted an animated conversation long enough to say hello—then down the hall to an elegantly appointed guest room, where my roller bag awaited at the foot of the bed. There would be no washer and dryer this time around, which meant I would have to rinse my quick-dry underwear in the bathroom sink. 

Jackie quickly recited the house rules—no muddy boots or hiking poles, quiet time, breakfast, check out—and then explained that The Samson had closed. As it had been the only eatery in the village, they had booked a table for me and their one other guest (blessed with the washer and dryer) at the Greenhead Hotel, Restaurant and Pub, 10 minutes from town. Stephen would drive us over; she would bring us back when we were ready. Would I mind sharing a ride and a table? I nodded, and then asked the question of the day: (No, it was not “Do you remember me?” I had been down that road, er, trail, before.) “Do you have an ice bag?” (She did.)

After a hot shower, then icing and elevating my ankle, I made my way into the kitchen to muster for dinner and it was then I met my companion for the evening, a willowy, raven-haired woman in her mid-thirties who extended her hand and introduced herself as Amie. We piled into the car with Stephen and chatted away as the headlamps swept over the wet pavement. We were back on the good old 6318 passing by where I had crossed the road earlier that day. I asked Amy in which direction she had come on the wall path, to which she responded that she was hiking the Pennine Way (a 234-mile hilly path from Edale, east of Manchester to Kirk Yetholm, just over the border in Scotland).

“Alone?” 

No, she replied, her dogs, Wolfie, a German Spitz, and Roxie, a Chihuahua, had sniffed and marked over the entire route at the end of their tethers. Spitzes come in all shapes and sizes, but Wolfie is about the same size as a Pomeranian, so, incredibly enough, she was tramping the hinterlands solo with a pair of lapdogs. While imagining their little legs trotting furiously to keep up with Amie, I conjured a vision of “Vera” and other British murder mysteries wherein her hike would be ripe for exposition by a twisted show runner or make a livid cover story in the Daily Mirror. But she was not concerned in the least. That rarely happens on national trails, because it would be too much work for people of that sort, she explained…to which Stephen and I guffawed. The worst she experienced, she said, were blisters and picking stickers out of Wolfie’s bountiful fur coat.

The Greenhead restaurant was cozy and well appointed with a fire in the hearth and a bar glistening with a wide selection of whiskies reflected in an ornate mirror along an interior wall. They assigned us a quiet corner table that blessedly allowed conversation without repeatedly having to shout, “I beg your pardon” and “come again” until we were hoarse. 

Our exchange of personal information soon revealed that I was having dinner with a successful London recording artist, actor, and dancer. Hers was a simple response, absent of pretense (very British) in response to “What do you do for a living?” Raised in Stevenage, a town of 90,000-plus on the outskirts of London, Amie’s career was jump started when she won a BBC voice competition as a teen and never looked back, appearing in musicals throughout the city, including the West End theater district. She was especially proud of playing Katherine Howard in “SIX,” a musical based on the Six Wives of Henry VIII. Two months after we had dinner together, I learned that she had won the part of Lucia in the West Palladium production of “Figaro: An Original Musical,” meaning she, Wolfie and Roxie finished the Pennine Way without mishap.

Back at the BNB, as I was too tired to journal, I pulled up a book on my Kindle and settled in to read. I woke up in the wee hours, chin on my chest, iPad resting on my stomach, and the rain pattering on the roof and gurgling in the downspouts. Other than that, the house was quiet. I was wide awake and used the time to re-pack my roller bag, queue up my rain gear and check my new trail guide and “Per Lineum Valli” to verify my route and possible hidden wonders. 

My ankle had calmed down—meaning I was limping rather than hitching—and if memory served, the trail ahead was less challenging. 

I would give it a go.