The skies had cleared, save for tufts of clouds scudding overhead and stacking in the distance over the rooftops of Gilsland as I left The Hollies-on-the-Wall B&B for the next leg of my hike, which would end at Lanercost, six miles ahead.

I had slipped a compression sleeve over the ankle I sprained in Newcastle 10 days before and tightened the laces on my boots. The swelling subsided overnight thanks to the ice bag provided by my hosts. Hopefully, I could complete the day’s walk, which, as memory served, flattened as it crossed pastures bordering the roadway. Minding the forecast, I had also pulled on my anorak for the first time since starting out. Good thing. A blustery wind kicked up from the west as I was leaving Milecastle 48 at Poltross Burn, a few blocks from the Hollies. Forty-eight is the largest milecastle along the wall with a unique quality: A stairway, four steps high, climbing to infinity, abuts the interior north wall. Archaeologists posit that the steps once led to an allure, or walkway, along the wall, an estimated 15 feet high. 

Here was another feature that I had missed photographing in detail on my 2019 hike, so I dinked around recording it from limited angles, none of which made my heart sing after I returned home. Unless you knew what you were supposed to see, the masonry was hard to identify as a stairway, which is likely why I missed it the first time around. All the while the creek (or burn) from which the milecastle draws its name, was in full noisy bloom from the storm overnight. 

I was less enchanted with the path leading from the milecastle to the rail crossing, through which passenger and freight trains whiz by about every 15 minutes. No one had weed whacked the grass that spilled from the fringes, and the accumulated droplets soaked my boots and socks by the time I reached the tracks. Fortunately, this day I wore shorts. 

Once you cross the tracks, pass through a couple of farms, and skirt a school yard you reach one of the last or first (depending on your direction) significant stretches of wall. The remains are six feet high or more in some portions with a narrow walkway, or pinch point, between the wall and farm fencing. You march along this massive chunk of ancient stonework (dwarfing the modern-era drystone walls) until you come to a rise above the River Irthing, which flows west toward the Irish Sea. From here the wall continues downhill, ending in the ruin of the massive Willowford bridge abutment, jutting into a meadow about 50 yards from the river, which is more like a creek near these headwaters.

As at Chesters, the crossing began life as a footbridge, spanning the river and running uphill, then was rebuilt around 160 CE to accommodate wheeled traffic on the Military Way. Mammoth opus quadratum blocks, cut and dressed to fit, served as the undercarriage for the work, arranged with gaps to provide sluice ports when the river flooded. But over the centuries the Irthing has shifted to the west, leaving the remnant of the east work high and dry while the other is little more than scatter under the river mud. The way you cross the stream these days is by the foot bridge installed via helicopter to commemorate the millennium, followed by a slog up a hairpin gravel road to reach the top of the hill where the original bridge had spanned. 

The first ruin in view on the plateau is Harrow’s Scar, or Mile Castle 49. A “scar,” by the way, is a cut or passageway, which is fitting in this case as the long-gone wall course and abutment are directly east. I checked my watch and winced that it had taken me an hour to navigate the distance from Poltross Burn. I blamed the pebble that strayed under foot as I was crossing the first pasture west of the railroad tracks. I next addressed what English Heritage bills as the “…longest continual stretch of Hadrian’s Wall,” aligning a straight-away of the rejoined B6318. Just beyond the Victorian mansion that serves as offices for the Birdoswald Roman Fort, the already leaden sky was turning black. I picked up the pace, moving with a hitch that those of my generation might identify with “Grandpappy Amos” of the 1950s television comedy “The Real McCoys,” starring Walter Brennan.

Nearing the fort, I met Paul from Manchester heading in the opposite direction. Unmindful of the coming squall, he was hatless, in t-shirt, jeans and cross trainers. But he did have his poncho and rain pants bungeed to his daypack. I placed him in his early fifties, on holiday. Pegging me for an American right off, we discussed familiar trails, and he was especially enthusiastic when he learned I am a native Californian. He had hiked Death Valley, Yosemite, Kings Canyon/Sequoia and Lake Tahoe. He then commented on the teenage boys who were on a semi-organized trek and strung out for miles along the trail. I had met a group at Walltown the day before. The bunch he saw had stopped at a café in Carlisle and when they finished eating, they went off in the wrong direction.

“And they all have phones with Google Maps, right? Go figure.”

To Paul’s mind, the presence of all these kids, unaccompanied, not to mention legions of senior and hobbled Americans such as myself, underscored that the Hadrian’s Wall path is not a formidable undertaking…like a lot of other places billed as demanding, such as Mount Kilimanjaro.

“I went there not long ago thinking I was gonna do this challenging climb, you know, and come home self-satisfied,” he said, shaking his head. “So, I get there and see 10-year-olds skipping up the trail with their moms and dads.”

We wished one other luck, and he was on his way. I turned into the fort reception area and displayed my nine-day English Heritage International pass. The woman at the counter, about my age, said, “You’re leaning hard on that stick. Are you injured?” I explained that I was, though not in detail, after which she described, in detail, her own ordeal on a coast-to-coast trail farther south, “…about 180 miles of walking.”

“My ankle was the size of a grapefruit, and I lost a toenail,” she said. 

I commiserated, then made my escape onto the grounds. A chill wind kicked up as I edged along the periphery, duplicating my survey of Great Chesters. Birdoswald is a significant waypoint in the hike, as it was here at Banna (“Promontory Fort”) that the turf wall from the west met the stone wall from the east during the first building phase. But unlike Great Chesters, this fort was anything but lonely and evocative. Cartoon Roman legionaries on placards direct the visitor here and there, and as with Chesters and Vindolanda, the exposed walls rise above manicured lawns. The outstanding feature of the fort is that a stabilized granary foundation, much like the one at Corbridge Roman Town, also served as a Saxon-era great hall. In fact, archaeologists think that a Saxon warlord may have used the entire fortification.

The fort is also well known for housing a garrison of Dacians. These initially were warriors who once lived in modern Romania, whom the Emperor Trajan (Hadrian’s cousin) had conquered, and dragooned into the auxiliary legions. They garrisoned the fort from 126 to 276 CE, married, and raised sons who also became legionaries, but continued to identify with the lost homeland. We know this thanks to Roman record-keeping and the image of a sickle-shaped weapon, called a falx, chiseled in stone above the door of the horreum, the stabilized granary ruin.

A Squall and the Kindness of Strangers

With the squall closing in, I decided it was time to leave and continued along the “longest continual stretch of wall” toward Lanercost, five and a half miles distant, where my B&B was waiting. And then it hit. My anorak was already in place, but raindrops splatting fast and furious were congealing on my safari shorts and running down my legs into my boots. I waded through the tall grass to an abandoned stile, pulled my rain pants out of my pack, unzipped the cuffs, and tried to slip them over my boots. This otherwise simple act seemed to take forever, and by the time I finished the storm struck in full force. I labored up the open hillside and flinched when I reached the crest. Armies of black clouds (I took to calling them “Orks”) masked the far horizon—precisely where I was going. I pondered, for a millisecond, then reversed course down the hill. I re-entered the visitor center through curtains of hail pounding the patio where clumps of fellow hikers sought shelter under the snack bar umbrellas. Approaching the desk once more, I blurted, “Can somebody call me a cab, please.”

The woman who had lost her toenail said, “It will be pricey.” 

I shrugged.

She made a few calls, nonetheless, to the same result I had experienced a few days before. Few cabs were available, and those that were willing to drive out from Carlisle (16 miles away), wanted too much money in her view. She hung up the phone and said, “Give me five minutes.” With that she left the desk and soon returned to report she had arranged with her colleague, Katrina, who had been at the desk earlier, to drive me to Lanercost. All I needed to do was pay for her petrol (£10 to be exact).

Not long after, Katrina reappeared from the office, a cheerful woman in her fifties with a ginger ponytail and led me out to her Toyota jeep. Now remember, the British drive on the left, meaning the driver sits on the right. That meant a three-foot climb leading with my right leg. The one with the bad ankle. After a couple of failed attempts, accompanied by sharp pain, I solved the problem by backing up and onto the seat, engaging the frame with my left foot, pushing up, then swinging both legs into the foot well. This sent Katrina into peels of laughter.

“Oh, I’m sorry to have a laugh at you, love, but I’m going to remember that.”

Hare Hill: All Is Not as It Seems

We chatted a bit as we motored up the 6318, and then I asked if she could stop at the Hare Hill ruin, the last remnant of the wall, heading west, and at 10-feet high, the highest fragment on the path. My hiking partner Jerry and I bypassed it in 2019 by taking a more direct route from the crossroads near the village of Banks. This involved hewing to a verge on a busy road that led to the Lanercost Priory and eventually to the same B&B where I was staying this night.

Relishing her mission away from the office, Katrina was happy to comply, but she confessed that she had never heard of it. This is because today the ruin is ensconced in a swale off a private road, and the closest public car park is at the priory, a 30-minute walk away. In fact, while searching in vain she stopped three east-bound hikers, who had just been there and gave us directions. The artist and archaeologist Jessie Mothersole in 1920 required similar vectoring, which she received from a serendipitous source: 

“Fortunately for me, this was the owner of the [Hare Hill] garden, with his two grandchildren, and he kindly sent one of them to ask if I was looking for the Roman Wall. Of course I said, ‘Yes,’ and then he shouted: ‘Wait till I have packed the children into the car, and I’ll take you to see it.’ So, I waited and then followed him along a side-road into the garden of Hare Hill, where suddenly, round a corner, we came full on a splendid piece of Wall.”

Which is exactly how Katrina and I found it, though the garden is long gone, replaced by lawn and an exhibit wayside posted by English Heritage, the owner and conservator of the inholding in what is still a private property. Katrina was equally thrilled. She helped me out of the jeep, and we strolled around the ruin. While the ragged south side is exposed to the elements, the north, with its orderly stone curtain wall, offers a finished appearance on the highest part of the ruin, which rises like a dorsal fin at the end of 50 feet of exposed wall foundation, poking two feet at most above the grass. 

The prospect of a visit to the site compelled me to re-read Dr. Mike Bishop’s “Per Lineam Valli” website and other works before leaving home, among them Mothersole, and going way back, the 18th and 19th century treatises by antiquarians such as John Horsely, William Hutton and J. Collingwood Bruce. In addition to those worthies, I read Mark Richards’ scholarly guidebook—Walking the Hadrian’s Wall Path (4th edition, 2025)—only the night before to learn what is authentically Roman as opposed to well-meaning restorations. As you would expect, other than confirmation that the stone-curtain north face is of “Victorian” origin, opinions differ markedly among modern writers as to the ruin’s authenticity.

Bishop stresses throughout his website, “…with Hadrian’s Wall, all is not as it seems,” and Hare Hill is a perfect example. As he points out, “…the keen-eyed will note that the [reconstructed] face is not even aligned on the much-more-modest (and more recently) exposed section immediately to its east,” which for him calls into question the pedigree of the entire ruin. After the artist William George Howard (1808-1889) became the 8th Earl of Carlisle he ordered the section stabilized and reassembled using either freshly dressed stone or stone harvested from wall scatter, much as his uncle, George Howard, the 7th Earl (1802-1864), had done in rehabilitating the priory, and possibly even Hare Hill, decades before. The decisive factor in dating the work, Bishop contends, is the century stone (inscribed primus pilus, first spear) excavated before 1894 from the ruin of a nearby watchtower and slipped into Hare Hill.

Richards stands with Bishop, whom he quotes throughout his text, by arguing that only the bottom two layers of the “dorsal fin” are authentic. In his view, the entire ruin was reassembled sometime after William Hutton’s visit in 1801. The European world was transitioning into the Romantic period (1798-1837), and what could be more romantic than creating a nostalgic ruin harkening to antiquity in a Georgian (or Victorian) garden. 

But I wondered: How can this be, when Hutton, the pioneer thru-hiker at age 78, offered an eyewitness account at the dawn of the 19th century. Even then he was impressed by the height of the ruin. Here is what he reported following his round trip along the path: “At Hare hill…the Wall is ten feet high, and five yards long; but the front stones are gone. I viewed this relick [sic] with admiration; I saw no part higher.” And he hiked all 84 miles—twice, and no doubt read fellow cleric Horsely, that intrepid 1729 hiker, before leaving home. Here’s how Horsely described it: 

“West of the brook called Banks-burn, at a house called Hare Hill, is the highest part of the wall there is anywhere to be met with; but the facing stones are removed. We measured 3 ½ yards from the ground, and no doubt a half a yard more is covered at the bottom by rubbish; so that probably stands here at its full original height.”

Little had changed at the time of Bruce’s 1851 excursion that resulted in his writing the first guidebook to the wall:

 “Soon after passing Banks-burn, we arrive at Hare-hill, where a portion of the Wall stands nine feet ten inches in height. This is the highest piece of the Wall that is anywhere to be met with; but, owing to the smallness of the fragment, and to its being entirely deprived of facing stones, it is less imposing than it would otherwise be.”

I am afraid I have joined my contemporaries—and I would love to have a conversation with any one of them—in overthinking Hare Hill, but I submit that one thing is clear to us all: It is hard to imagine the monument without this marvelous reconstruction, even with all its flaws. In its own way it fires the imagination and deepens our appreciation of the distant past.

Lanercost

I shared a little of this with Katrina, until her eyes glazed over. It was time to go. She dropped me at the Lanercost Priory, the Augustinian order church and monastery founded in 1169 by Robert de Vaux, an English magnate. The only part of the complex that still functions is the nave, which serves as a parish church, and where the 8th Earl of Carlisle rests under the floor—an example of high art that he would no doubt appreciate. The transept, presbytery and apse are open to the elements, the plaster long eroded, leaving skeletal pinkish stone, wherein is the sarcophagus of the 7th Earl who launched a project with government funds (and more stone from the wall) to save the building.

It was pouring by then and puddles were forming in the transept. It was my tough luck that the priory’s popular tearoom, where Jerry and I killed a couple of hours while waiting for our room, was closed. So, I took a chance and called Deborah, the owner of the B&B, and asked if I could arrive early. She had done her homework and, unlike Tracey, Samantha and Jackie, had plumbed her records and learned that not only had I stayed there before, but that I also booked with her in 2020 before Covid ended travel for everyone.

“Come on over and have a cup of tea,” she said. “Your room is ready.”

I squished past the tombstones on the north side of the priory, some dating back 300 years, others with epitaphs barely legible or long dissolved by time and the elements. It was a mile and then some along a rural road, past a primary school and cricket pitch, then a right over the bridge that crosses the River Irthing, running swift that day from the heavy rain. By now, my ankle sent a rocket of pain up my leg with every sodden footfall. Finally, at the end of the tree-lined road, looming in the mist, was the Lanercost Equestrian and Country B&B, a large white farmhouse with stables on 10 acres hugging the riverside. 

I walked through the courtyard, rang the bell, and sat heavily on the cast iron bench in preparation of removing my boots. Deborah, a stout woman about my age with a cascade of ginger hair and twinkly blue eyes answered the door. She was just as I remembered her.

“Come in, Michael, it’s so nice to see you again.”

I entered the pleasantly familiar hallway to find my roller bag and a couple of others set against one wall, plus a drying rack for my boots and rain gear. Speaking of the latter, Deborah amazingly recalled my angst four years before when, unbeknownst to me, my anorak and rain pants escaped the bungee cords on my pack a few miles up the trail. It had been a central topic of conversation during the dinner hour amongst the other hikers, two of whom recalled seeing them by a particularly tricky stile. It dawned on me then that the indelible impression I had left with her was as a nitwit, not my sparkling personality. No wonder she rescued me from the chill rain.

I begged off a cuppa and hauled my bag upstairs. She had given me a large room facing the back yard, where several sheep were grazing, despite a downpour. In the center of the room was a clawfoot bathtub, which I at once filled and slipped into, ready for the world to fade away. I regarded the puffy lavender ankle resting on the tub’s lip and knew then that, 25 miles short of trail’s end at Bowness-on-Solway, I would call a cab in the morning for Carlisle. There, I would take advantage of a free day and visit the Tullie House Museum and eponymous castle; attractions Jerry and I had bypassed while tramping through the city in 2019. 

And the day after that, I would hire a car and local guide to take me to the pavilion overlooking Solway Firth and call it good. I would not hike again this trip. 

But there would always be next year.