In September 2022, I travelled around Britain for a week and a half using an All Line Rover train ticket. This is the tenth of eleven special posts giving a day-by-day narration of my trip. I also wrote an introduction to the trip, discussing my plans and goals, before I left; and will follow up my day-by-day narration with standard posts about the nineteen individual map areas I visited on the trip which are new to the blog. [1]
This post covers what I did on Sunday 25th September 2022.
Interactive map
Here’s an interactive map of my All Line Rover trip! By default, all 11 days of my trip are shown: press the icon in the top left to see the route for individual days of the trip only.
Key to colours: Purple = train, dark blue = metro/underground, pink = tram, green = bus, orange = walking, medium blue = ferry
Day 9: Haltwhistle & Hexham
Originally, I’d planned for this Sunday to be the final day of my trip, after which I’d have Monday and Tuesday off at home to recover from my busy travelling, before going back to work on the Wednesday. In the end, though, I decided to travel back on the Monday instead, and have one of my rest days on this Sunday, making it a more restful holiday day where I’d stay in one place. Waking up on Sunday morning in the studio flat I’d rented in Haltwhistle, I therefore for the first time in over a week, knew I’d be staying there the next night too!
Haltwhistle is very close to Hadrian’s Wall, so my plan for the day was to go out for a walk along the Wall in the morning, and have a relaxed afternoon.
It’s only a couple of miles’ walk from Haltwhistle up to the wall, and very pleasant walking it was too, gently gaining elevation through hilly farmland.
I had a brief nose into an abandoned farmhouse, which was very atmospheric, and passed through a field of Belted Galloway cattle, a breed of cow that my friends and I always find pleasing, also known as the “oreo cow”. There was a brown one, which I’ve never seen before.
I soon reached the Wall itself, and a nice dramatic bit of it it was too, with the Wall heading up craggy hills, along clifftops and down into little gaps between them.
There are, of course, many much more complete Roman structures out there – nothing in Britain can complete with the Continent’s intact temples, aqueducts and so on – but there’s always something impressive about the sheer scale of the Wall; and of course it’s just very pretty, heading up and down across the valleys and hills.
I walked along the wall for a couple of miles, and stopped for lunch in a shady wooded area on the banks of Crag Lough. After that, I headed back down to the nearby road, to catch the helpful AD122 Hadrian’s Wall Country bus, which connects various sites of tourist interest along the central, prettiest section of the Wall with the towns of Haltwhistle and Hexham.
Instead of heading immediately back to Haltwhistle, which would’ve involved waiting longer for a bus in that direction, I got the bus to Hexham instead. A supposed regular reader might remember that Vesper and I tried to visit Hexham Abbey back in January, but it was closed, so I thought I’d have another go. Happily, it was indeed open this time!
The Abbey is a really lovely building, and I had a good wander around the church and the associated exhibition.
The thing that really drew me to the Abbey, though, is its 7th-century Anglo-Saxon crypt, surviving from the original church founded on the site by Wilfrid, and twin to the one at Ripon I’d visited a vew months earlier.
The crypt was likely not a burial site, but a place where relics were placed, for visitors to walk through the crypt and see. It’s constructed, very obviously, of reused stone from Roman buildings. Very cool.
After that, I headed down to Hexham’s train station, got the train back over to Haltwhistle, and had a relaxed afternoon lazing around in my accommodation, before my final, long day travelling home the next morning.
Footnotes
[1] The individual map area posts will duplicate the contents of the special trip posts, but unlike the latter they won’t form a continuous narrative, since they’ll skip things I did in map areas I’ve already posted about. They will, though, newly contain narration of anything I did on previous visits there – since some of these are areas which are new to the blog, but which I visited before starting my blog in 2017.
Visiting all the maps! 