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Hiking Hadrian’s Wall

On The Road – Athenaze and Ariobarzanes – Hiking Hadrian’s Wall—Part III of III

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Athenaze and Ariobarzanes

This post continues our travelogue of two through-hikes we made along Hadrian’s Wall. If you haven’t done so already (and if you have the time), we recommend that you read Parts 1 and 2 for some background and context—but even if you don’t, we hope that you’ll enjoy the following pictures!

In this post, we want to give a shout out to the wonderful people we met during our two trips. These include (1) the docents and interpreters at sites like Lanercost, who helped us to understand what we were seeing when we dealt with material outside of our own areas of specialization; (2) the publicans and restaurateurs who introduced us to delicious local goodies like Cumberland sausage, black pudding, haggis, and sticky toffee pudding; (3) the kind owners of the B&Bs where we stayed, one of whom definitely went out of his way to pick us up when one of us was too blistered to walk any further that day; (4) the other ramblers with whom we shared experiences along the way, whether on the trail or over food and beer at the end of a long day. “Valete” to all those who still inhabit this world, and “sit tibi terra levis” to all those who have passed on.

On The Road - Athenaze and Ariobarzanes - Hiking Hadrian’s Wall—Part II of III 9
The Mithraeum at Bricolita Roman Fort (mile 51)
This ruined Mithraeum (a sanctuary to the god Mithras) sits just outside Bricolita, another Roman fort on the Wall a few miles east of Housesteads. Mithras was the Roman interpretation of the Persian god Mitra, who became very popular with soldiers in the Roman army from the late first century CE onward. Mithras was a god whose worship entailed “mysteries”; the idea was that those chosen to be initiated into the mysteries gained some kind of special knowledge or privileged position that would yield benefits in the world to come (Isis was worshipped in the Roman world in the same way, and early Christianity contained comparable “mystery” elements). The altars you see here are replicas; the originals have been relocated to a local museum.

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On The Road – Athenaze and Ariobarzanes – Hiking Hadrian’s Wall—Part II of III

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This post is in: , ,

Athenaze and Ariobarzanes

This post continues our travelogue of two through-hikes we made along Hadrian’s Wall. If you haven’t done so already (and if you have the time), we recommend that you read Part 1 for some background and context—but even if you don’t, we hope that you’ll enjoy the following pictures!

Before we get into today’s pictures, we want to acknowledge the amazing people at two organizations. First, the folks at English Heritage, who have done a lot of work since the 1980s to preserve, interpret, and display important sites along and around Hadrian’s Wall. In particular, they painstakingly disassembled many of the in-situ remains of the Wall that still survive and reconstructed them, stone-by-stone, using modern bonding agents. Thanks to their efforts, those remains will hopefully survive intact for centuries yet to come. Second, the people at Natural England, the organization that maintains England’s network of long-distance National Trails, including Hadrian’s Wall Path. Without their hard work, neither of these trips would have been possible.

On The Road - Athenaze and Ariobarzanes - Hiking Hadrian’s Wall—Part II of III 8
The countryside between Thirwall Castle and Walltown Quarry (mile 35.5)
We really like this picture, for two reasons. First, it shows just how striking the British countryside can be in fine weather. We took this picture on our first trip in 2010, in late August; it shows the view to the west from a point near Walltown Quarry. Second, this picture offers us an opportunity to talk a little bit about the trail itself. Like a lot of English footpaths, Hadrian’s Wall Path consists mostly of a public right-of-way that cuts across privately-owned land (although there are also sections that cross Northumberland National Park). In practice, this means that hikers constantly need to cross field walls and fences that separate one piece of property from another. Stiles like this one exist to help hikers clamber over field walls without knocking anything over; we went up and down hundreds of these during each of our treks. The white acorn blaze you can see on the stile is the emblem used by Natural England to mark the seventeen different National Trails that fall under its jurisdiction.

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On The Road – Athenaze and Ariobarzanes – Hiking Hadrian’s Wall—Part I of III

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Athenaze and Ariobarzanes

By the middle of the 2nd century CE, the Romans had constructed a complex series of frontier installations in northern Britain. Hadrian’s Wall (“the Wall”) is the most well-known element of these installations. Featuring a stone curtain wall punctuated by milecastles, turrets, and forts, as well as ditches to the north and south, it stretched 80 Roman miles from what is now Newcastle-upon-Tyne to the Solway Firth.

Although it might be tempting for Americans in particular to draw a direct comparison between the Wall and the various walls proposed for the southern border of the United States, the Wall was *not* a “border wall”, simply because Romans in Hadrian’s era did not see Roman power as something that had fixed and immutable limits. Rather, the Wall—like comparable installations in e.g. Germany—had a rather different function. It helped Romans control the flow of people between two different kinds of social and economic zones: those “inside” the wall, which were dominated by settled agriculture and settled populations that could be easily taxed and controlled, and those “outside”, which had higher concentrations of mobile pastoralists and fewer big, permanent settlements. The Wall was therefore one element in a much wider frontier zone, which—to the Roman mind—separated peoples who had already been incorporated into the Roman imperial order from those who had yet to be properly “civilized”.

Today, Hadrian’s Wall Path—an 84-mile-long hiking trail maintained by Natural England—allows ramblers to explore the old line of the Wall. Adhering as closely as it can to where the Wall once stood, it leads hikers through open country, charming villages, and archaeological parks dedicated to the UK’s long past (Roman and otherwise). Visitors can plan true through-hikes, stopping at a different B&B every night, or they can walk bits of the trail on day trips. We’ve completed two separate through-hikes: in August and September of 2010, we followed the path from Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west over a period of nine days; eight years later, in May and June of 2018, we spent eight days hiking in the opposite direction. The pictures that follow are drawn from both of those trips, but are organized to display the west-to-east route (we think this is the best way to walk the trail, since it builds to a dramatic climax with the walk into vibrant Newcastle).

On The Road - Athenaze and Ariobarzanes - Hiking Hadrian’s Wall—Part I of III 9
The Pavilion at Castra Maia (mile 0)

From the west, the path proper begins at Bowness-on-Solway, a quiet little town on the Solway Firth. English Heritage maintains this nice little pavilion, where hikers just starting out on their journey can gaze out over the tidal flats, and those finishing up can flop down and rest while they wait for the bus to Carlisle. Locals spend time here too. When we ended our first hike here in 2010, an old man in a powered wheelchair drove into the pavilion while we were taking a well-deserved break, stopped to look north toward Scotland, and muttered “Savages!” Memories of the violent raiding conducted by the English and Scots against one another across the medieval and early modern frontier apparently live on.

 

The Latin on the sign mounted on the building’s pediment translates the English above it; Segedunum was (probably) the Roman name for the fort at the wall’s eastern terminus at what is now Wallsend. On the threshold, a mosaic greets visitors with the legend “Ave Maia” (Greetings Maia), a reference to the probable name of the Roman fort that once stood here at the western terminus, Castra Maia (“the Greater Encampment”).

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