Monthly Archives: August 2025
Wall To Wall Wall
We packed up and said goodbye to Carlisle, relieved not to have to perform contortions to park the car any more. I dropped Ian off at Banks East, pausing to watch the mist rising slowly from the valley floor up to the hilltops. The plan was to meet at Steel Rigg in 6 hours’ time. […]
Ian’s Hadrian’s Wall Walk Day 3, Banks to Cawfields
Heading into the middle sections of the walk, the landscape continued to get more scenic with few on-road sections. The drawback was it also got a lot hillier and quite steep in parts, as the wall – and the walk – followed a significant line of crags that run through the area. I also crossed […]
Ian’s Hadrian’s Wall Walk Day 2, Carlisle to Banks
In between days 1 and 2 we had a break to sort out a few car related matters, but I did sneak in an extra 1.7km across Carlisle. So day 2 started in east Carlisle and it was definitely the nicer side of the city. Lots of dog and day walkers out on a sunny […]
Wall
It was perfect weather for walking, so we got up early and Ian was underway by 9am, departing from Trinity Leisure Centre in Carlisle. His goal for today was Banks, about 23 km away. We arranged the pickup time and location, and went our separate ways. Being Sunday, it was an easy drive out of […]
Ian’s Hadrian’s Wall Walk Day 1, Bowness-on-Solway to Carlisle
Hadrian’s Wall was built by the Romans across northern England nearly 2,000 years ago. The modern border between England and Scotland is close to the wall in the area west of Carlisle but far from the border on the other side of the country – the wall goes sort of straight across but the border […]
Stuck
Ian will blog separately about his Hadrian’s Wall trail hike. To start it off, we drove to the tiny village of Bowness-on-Solway, on the southern edge of the Solway Firth. The landscape here was quite different – extensive grasslands and mudflats. Signs warned of flooding the road, but there was no water lapping at the […]
The Debatable Lands
We left Newcastle mid morning, and headed west towards Carlisle. We had a couple of hours to fill before check in time, so we diverted into Scotland (as you do). This is border country, home to Ian’s reiver ancestors (although the Dodd reivers lived near Otterburn. The Armstrongs were the major clan in what was […]
Jet Lagged Orienteering
Today we collected our rental car – a suitably British MG in basic black. In the late afternoon we headed south on the A1, to Durham, or more precisely Gilesgate, just east of the cathedral city. It all went well until it came to the fine navigation. Who knew there were two Church Lanes in […]
The Best Laid Plans
Beep … beep … beep … beep …beep … Crash!! Bang!!! Wallop!!!!! It was 7am when we were rudely awakened by the sounds of a truck being backed up the laneway, followed shortly thereafter by the din of besa bricks being dumped unceremoniously into the skip which was now parked right outside our bedroom window. […]
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