Day 5 - Housesteads

Distance Walked: 9.3km, Time Taken: 2h 30m, # Times Went Astray: 0, # Beers: None but 1 small glass red wine

Today I did the bus-train shuffle again but this time I went to Housesteads Roman Fort which is actually part of Hadrian's Wall.  Vindolanda, yesterday, was about 2km south of the wall.  I've decided I've "done" Hadrian's Wall now.  I had planned to walk the whole route from Newcastle to Bowness-on-Solway but the wall is actually out in the countryside a good 1 or 2km from anywhere.  To get to a B&B for each night would involve either long walks or lifts to villages, which I don't like.  Also, most of the wall is either in poor repair or just doesn't exist any more.  I walked the best bits yesterday, so I think I'll just tick this off as done.

 

 

 

Today is a Saturday and the Hadrian's Wall tourist bus was busy.  Yesterday, there were only a handful of us.  Today it was standing room only.  At one point, on a steep, narrow uphill road, we had to stop to give way to a car coming down.  The engine really struggled to get us moving again.  I was wondering if we were going to have to get out and push.  If we did, how on earth would we get back on?

The bus ride was a fun experience.  At each stop there were so many tourists who didn't know which bus they wanted or which ticket they wanted or where they wanted to get off or some combination of all 3, each stop took a long time.  The driver tried to make up for it by going flat out on the narrow country roads between each stop.  You wouldn't have wanted to be prone to car sickness.

I got to Housesteads Roman Fort around 10:30am and first went for a hike along the Wall to the east until I got to a beacon and then back west on the northern (barbarian) side of the wall.  You can see how imposing a barrier it must have been with that line of wall across the hill tops.  And the wall in Hadrian's time was much higher.  Many of the stones have been souvenired to build other walls or structures over the years.

The wall itself follows the rise and fall of the hill tops, so lots of steps.  Fortunately, the average Roman wasn't much taller than me so it wasn't too bad.  Practice for the hills in the Lake District next week.  I also discovered today why the Coast-to-Coast walk goes from the west to the east.   The prevailing winds here are south-westerlies.  Today's weather wasn't nearly as pleasant as yesterday's.  It was cloudy and drizzled on and off.  Never enough to make you need to break out the waterproofs at least.  However, it was windy and the wind picked up in the afternoon.

I got back to Housesteads fort around 1pm and had a quick scamper around the site itself.  I didn't explore it as much as I had planned as I was just too cold.  Instead, I took refuge in the museum and then the cafe where I had a Dull cream tea (scone was stale).   

I caught the 2nd last bus of the day back to Haltwhistle railway station. I was the only person waiting at the Housesteads stop and the bus was only half full.  I don't know if everyone else were hardier souls who were planning to make a full day of it and catch the last bus back, or else pikers who had already called it quits.

The bus-train schedules don't match up well, but when I got to the railway station, the train that was supposed to have been through 5 minutes earlier was just arriving so I hopped on.  I had a ticket for the next train but it wasn't for another 45 minutes and I didn't want to wait.  I took the chance there wouldn't be a ticket inspector this close to the end of the journey.  There hadn't been one yesterday.  Of course, there was today but he chose to be kind and just scold me rather than fine me (it is a 100 pound fine!).

Carlisle on a Saturday night is loud.  Just down the road from my hotel are two pubs, across the road from each other.  They are holding duelling karaoke competitions, indoors.  You can hear them both from down the block.  At the restaurant where I had dinner tonight there was a party of women on a girls night out.  They were very cheerful.  So much so, I had to shout my order to the waiter.

I went to a Sardinian-Italian restaurant tonight called SannaS.  I finally got to eat good food.  To begin with I had a traditional Sardinian dish called pane fattau.  It was described as a traditional thin bread topped with a paste made from tomatoes, parmesan cheese and garlic.  I was imagining crispy bread with a thin smear of a tasty paste, but got mostly paste/sauce with some pieces of once-crispy bread in it.  Harmless and apparently the traditional way to serve it.  For main I had a pasta called malloreddus campidanese which is a traditional shaped pasta with a sauce made from spicy sausage, tomato, garlic and cream.  This definitely rated You Can Eat It.  The right amount of sauce on properly cooked pasta.  The only drawback was the serving size.  It was huge, twice as large as it needed to be.  I wasn't able to test their tiramisu, but from the look of it (someone at a nearby table ordered it) I don't think they got the cream-to-biscuit ratio right, so perhaps it was for the best.