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| atop hadrian's wall the evening before our hike |
Well, today was at once one of the best yet and also just about the worst. After visiting Roman fort remains at Housesteads and Vindolanda (privately owned and maintained with the best, most complete museum collection of artifacts we have seen so far), we culminated our weeklong course on Roman Britain with quite the finale – a short hike along Hadrian’s Wall. I knew the wall is incredibly historically significant. I knew that it is nearly two thousand years old. I knew that it is the most visited attraction in Northern England. But I just did not expect hiking it to be so great.
The morning had been cold and we
all regretted our clothing choice of shorts, but by the time we began our trek,
the sun began to show a little, the wind gave up, and the temperature could not
have been more pleasant. The views of the rolling, patchwork hills of
countryside spotted with baa-ing, fluffy sheep were unparalled and, though I am
devastated I no longer have my pictures of them, no picture was able to capture
the depth of varying greens or the sense of peace the landscape inspired. The
hike we made was only about three miles but we climbed up and journeyed down
rather steep inclines mapped out by inlaid stone steps. We saw a country home
with laundry drying on the line and several members of my group, unable to
imagine how people could live in such a beautiful yet remote area, worried how
the residents would make it to the hospital in case of an emergency. “Surely a
helicopter could land in all this empty space!” We happened upon a few amateur
rock climbers braving a natural wall of stone facing a small body of water and
cheered in the third and final member of the group as he made it to the top.
The exercise was fantastic and the knowledge that we were walking the path
Romans walked in the first century AD carrying large stones and tools to create
the nearly eighty miles of wall was invigorating. We saw many backpackers and
met one young woman and her border collie who were hiking sixty miles of the
wall in four days. I want to do that someday, but I think Baby may need to stay
at a Bed & Breakfast instead.
I managed to safely and easily
hold onto my camera for the entirety of the walk, taking oodles of pictures...until the last one hundred feet of the walk. The finish line was in sight. The
bus ready to take us back to the B&B was right there. Some people had even
made it to the end. And I managed to swing my camera right off its lanyard into
the one and only swampy area of the hike. It magically flew far and deep – far
and deep enough to evade the hands of ten searchers. I muddied my
blister-covered feet, stung my arm on a nettles plant, and shed a few tears. At
least I lost only a week’s worth of pictures, rather than losing my camera two
months into the trip. And this served as a good reminder of the importance of
my own internal memory photographs and my words describing these memories. Now
my first week abroad and my hike on Hadrian’s Wall have become all the more
personal and vibrant, for I am the only one who can truly recall the images I
saw.
Plus, a FaceTime session with
home can cure all.
listening to: "The Stable Song" by Gregory Alan Isakov
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