Wednesday, September 30, 2009

A hiker's attraction in northern England: Hadrian's Wall

Hadrian's Wall was once a frontier of the Roman empire in the northwestern part of Europe, far away from Rome. During that time, Roman soldiers patrolled along the stonework. Now, hikers and history buffs walk stretches of the 84-mile-long National Trail, following the path along the remaining structures of Hadrian's Wall, which winds through a scenic countryside of northern England, south of Scotland. In a recent Smithsonian article with photographies by Sisse Brimberg and Cotton Coulson [1], Andrew Curry writes about his east-to-west hike from Wallsend, a town outside Newcastle at the North Sea coast, across the hills-and-crags-covered English landscape to Bowness-on-Solway, the western wall's end on the Irish Sea side.
If you plan for a Hadrian's Wall hike, plan for a multiple-days hike, since there are so many interesting things to see and to do along the second-century Roman fortification in Britain. And, as always in England, plan for a rainy day or two.

Reference
[1] Andrew Curry: Trekking Hadrian's Wall Smithsonian October 2009, Volume 40, Number 7, pp. 40-47.

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