Roman ruins, check. It only took us three trips to Hadrian's Wall Country, but we finally found some of the wall actually still standing. Below is probably one of my all-time favorite pictures. We're a little goofy :)
We hiked along the wall for awhile and made friends with some sheep. That's actually a pretty common occurrence for me in the UK/Ireland.
Past the train tracks, we eventually came to this:
Poltross Burn, Milecastle 48. When the Romans built the wall, they equipped it with "castles" to fortify the wall against the "barbarians" from the North. Of course, since we were there, we took turns invading and defending the wall. I can't remember the final score, but if history is any example, the Celts won eventually. Poltross Burn is one of the best preserved milecastles left. It was built by the the Sixth Legion and was occupied until the fourth century by Roman auxiliary forces- locals recruited into serving with the army in return for Roman citizenship once they retired. While there isn't a whole lot of it left, there's enough to get a general sense of the floor plan, and considering this thing is over 1500 years old, that's pretty remarkable. You can even tell where the staircases once were, since there are still a few steps leading up to nowhere.
After we'd had our fill of Roman masonry, we decided it was dinner time. I don't remember if I mentioned this in the Illuminating Hadrian's Wall post or not, but when we were here for that, we caught the train in Haltwhistle. On our way back to the train station, we passed a Chinese takeaway place that looked pretty tasty. We had an hour or so before our train was going to come, so we could have stopped, but we were overly optimistic and thought we might be able to catch an earlier train home, so instead we rushed down to the station. Of course there was no earlier train, but by the time we found that out, we didn't have time to go back for Chinese food. We decided to remedy that on this visit. We weren't too far from Haltwhistle, and it was getting to be dinner time, so we decided we might as well make for a place we knew had food. And it was far and away the best Chinese I had in England. So if you're in Hadrian's Wall country, I definitely recommend hitting up Haltwhistle and the Chinese place right on the main street.
So that's it for the epic road trip of awesomeness. After dinner, we made our very slow way home via all kinds of twisty narrow roads, but eventually we did make it home. It was a truly unforgettable experience, and huge thanks to Rachel, Max, and Ellen for the excellent company, and Ellen did a great job driving a stick shift on the wrong side of the road!
