Hadrian's Wall Country, Part 1: The Approach from Newcastle upon Tyne

I'm finally (finally!) starting in on what I'm going to call the Epic Roadtrip of Awesomeness, July 2010. Five days, 4 grad students, 1 rental car, 3 tanks of petrol, some # of miles I didn't think to check before we returned the car, 1 big ole road atlas that became my near-constant companion, 3 memory cards full of pictures, and sadly no fried Twinkies or Mars Bars. There was haggis though!

Our first stop on the Epic Roadtrip of Awesomeness was a short hike along Hadrian's Wall Path, an 84-mile long National Trail that runs along- what else?- Hadrian's Wall. If you're interested in a brief overview of the wall, check out my Illuminating Hadrian's Wall entry (you can get to it from the Hadrian's Wall label off to the right sidebar.) We drove up from York and then detoured over from Newcastle towards Hadrian's Wall Country, found a place to pull over, and went for a hike.

There's not really a whole lot of wall standing in this section of the trail, but you can follow the marked path along where the wall once ran. The less ancient stone fencing running through here is likely built from the stones of the wall. We lucked out and had gorgeous weather; it was supposed to just rain rain rain all week, but aside from a few fairly quick showers, all while we were driving, and a miserably wet and muddy field when we got to Culloden, the whole trip was surprisingly dry.

Even though there wasn't a fun wall to climb around on, we still got a welcome chance to stretch our legs and enjoy some scenery. We would have had to drive further out of our way to hit a section of wall still standing, so we decided to just enjoy what we had. The trail is easy to walk and well marked, although you may have to get up close and personal with some sheep.

There's more photos up on flickr if you feel the need for some more idyllic English countryside. But we were particularly excited about this:



Trees! Most of Yorkshire is either moorland or gently rolling hills covered in crop fields. The presence of trees all closely packed together was kind of exciting and necessitated some frolicking :) Anyway, we hiked westward from almost the eastern-most end of the trail; there will be shots featuring actual wall from the western end of the wall coming from Carlisle to wrap up the Epic Roadtrip of Awesomeness series of posts, so I guess look for that in about 10 entries or so! Till next time~!