Draw Down the Stars: Homeward Bound

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Nearly 2000 years ago, Northumberland was full of Roman soldiers, but these days there are so few of them that the AA have put up road signs saying ‘Roman Soldiers Wanted’ near the Chesters Roman Fort. This was the first sign we saw that gave a hint that we were nearing Hadrian’s Wall, having taken another lazy breakfast and started the wall-detoured road home around dinnertime. By this time, the sat-nav had already taken us randomly off course twice, and we were making do with finding the wall by use of a small map on the back of an English Heritage leaflet, one of those that doesn’t put all of the roads on and covers up important junctions with big car park symbols. Given that Hadrian’s wall spans the entire width of the country, it should have been virtually impossible to miss, but it seems that every farmer in the north of England has taken a bit of the wall and used it to pen their sheep in, so to say ‘there it is’, might not be far off the mark, but there seem to be hundreds of fields with big lines of rock in them, none of them looking particularly like the kind of thing that would keep Scottish barbarians out.

We briefly stopped off at Chesters, but decided to keep driving, knowing that there are other forts and museums along the route. As we were now on the main road along the wall we reasoned that even the sat-nav couldn’t get it wrong from here and trusted it to guide us to the nearest bit of wall. A quick check on the leaflet map ten minutes later confirmed what, deep down, we already knew: Outside of a town, a sat-nav will get you lost even on the most easy-to-find destinations. From here on we decided to completely ignore the sat-nav and rely entirely on the leaflet, hoping that when we hit the junction covered in parking symbols and English Heritage logos there would be some road signs guiding us on. There were, and before long we were inside Vindolanda, which sounds like a Roman curry, but is actually a fort, village, museum and ongoing archaeological dig, giving us pretty good value for money on our entry fee.

Vindolanda is incredibly well preserved in many ways, starting as you walk through the ruins of a small village outside of the fort, then into the fort itself, complete with shops, public baths and toilets, a pub and a replica of both the wooden and stone towers that would have stood along Hadrian’s Wall. Beyond this is the museum where most of the artefacts uncovered by the digs are housed. There was a huge collection of bones, armour, shoes and superglue. The superglue probably wasn’t Roman, but gives a surprising view on how the curators put their broken findings together, although thinking about it, how else would you stick together a jug that was in a hundred different pieces?

We spent a good few hours at Vindolanda, but eventually decided we could do with getting a move on if we were going to see anything of this wall. The map was cluttered with random symbols around Vindolanda, so we followed our noses for a while and eventually found a sign, which took us straight to an official Hadrian’s Wall car park, from where we could see a quarry. Nice enough, but where we expected wall, there was a pool of water and a hill with a cliff face from the quarrying. On top of the hill was, we could just about see, a bit of broken wall that stops dead at the quarry. 2000 years of progress takes its toll on everything, and we were standing on the wrong side of a huge act of 19th century vandalism. Luckily, a quick walk around the lake and, after a few false starts, we were finally on Hadrian’s Wall. We took the mandatory tourist pictures and climbed along it for a while, then decided, in the shadow of the late afternoon sun, that it was time for home. The beauty of the Northumbrian countryside soon gave way to the M6, and then, barring a service station break at the halfway stage, it was quickly back the normality of real life. The night after we got home was another beautifully sunny day and perfectly clear night. I looked up and I could see Saturn, and maybe thirty stars dotted about the sky, but the orange haze of the Wolverhampton streetlights was once more blocking the thousands more that I didn’t even know existed a week before.

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