Walking the Wall: Day 8, Corbridge to Robin Hood Inn

I walked Hadrian's Wall with my husband and four friends during June 2025. This is an account of our eighth day on the trail. 

When we left Corbridge and walked north to rejoin the Hadrian's Wall path, we didn't expect to see much different than we'd seen on the way down the previous day. After all, we were walking the same path! But we surprise ourselves. 

Our first surprise was Walker's Pottery, just north of town. The Old Pottery was a small family business, in operation from 1840 until 1910. 

It produced firebricks, earthenware, tiles, pipes and agricultural wares using clay from a pit near the site.

The pottery is on private property, but the owners were gracious enough to allow the public access from 9am until 4pm through a pedestrian gate and footpath.

A lot of the original buildings still stand here. two horizontal kilns, one down draught kiln are beyond the area open to the public, but the two bottle shaped kilns were accessible. There are only 44 of these structures left in the country. 

Standing inside one was an awesome experience. Our voices bounced around in an eerie way, and watching the concentric rings of brick climb to the open circle at the top was calming and inspiring. 

After that, we passed Aydon Castle, a fortified manor house that's part of the English Heritage holdings.

The website had said that the castle was open, and that we could buy tickets online or when we arrived. However, we found the place locked up, and no one around to let us in. We peeked through a crack in the door, then were on our way. 

The English Heritage Website seems to indicate that Aydon Castle is closed until they develop a new reservation system.

We then passed Halton Castle again. We'd passed it on the way south, but not stopped. This time, we walked through the cemetery and little chapel. Halton Castle is an example of a pele tower, a small fortified keep or tower house. Its first mention in the record is from 1382. The pele tower has four stories and a basement with a stone vault. There was another pele tower back in Corbridge. It was the home of the local priest, but is now a pub. 

The chapel was a separate building. It is small, and probably could seat 20 people, but it clearly remains in use. 

We finished the day at The Robin Hood Inn, in the town of Wallhouses. This Inn is one of the places we

had to go to get our Hadrian's Wall Passports stamped. It is an old fashioned pub and dates from 1752. We were not able to get rooms in the building itself, but they've erected little cabins out back, each of which has two twin beds and a small bathroom. They also allow tents on their lawn. I don't know if we were early in the season, or if the rains kept the tents at bay, but there were none the night we were there. 

I'd gotten a northern lights alert on my phone and was hopeful to see something spectacular. Alas, the whole night was cloudy, dark, and gray.

Walking the Wall: Day 7, Chollerford to Corbridge

 

On the 7th day of our walk we decided to deviate from the wall. We didn't regret it. Our plan was to deviate from the wall trail to see Corbridge. We’d planned to take a 7-mile diversion south, through Acomb and Hexham, but members of our group wanted to walk as much of the wall trail as possible, so we went all the way to Portgate before going south

We began the day with breakfast at The George Hotel instead. Their breakfast was served buffet style, and it had a lot to offer. Highly recommend! The George also packed lunches for us.

We began the day by searching for the penis carved into the base of the Roman bridge at Chesters. I used to teach middle school, and I’ve seen my share of penises carved into desks and drawn into text books. It turns out the Romans were middle schoolers at heart. To them, a penis was (as I assume for many middle school boys) a sign of virility and power. My guess is they carved it into the bridge to keep the bridge upright and strong.

 

After a little over an hour of walking, we arrived at

St. Oswald’s church, site of the battle of Heavenfield. In 633 or 634, a Northumbrian army under Oswald of Bernicia, who later became St Oswald, fought a Welsh army under Cadwallon ap Cadfan of Gwynedd.  Oswald won after seeing a cross and calling upon it for help.  Heavenfield is the end of the St Oswald’s Way, another long-distance path in Northumberland that goes south from the Holy Island of Lindisfarne to Hadrian’s Wall.

The inside of the church was lovely, and it had an old Roman altar that (I think) was used as a baptismal font at one point, and later as the base for a cross. It's interesting to see how old things have been adopted for new purposes over the millenia.

 Because we continued from this point along the Wall trail, we missed Hexham, which has an Abbey that is worth a visit. The abbey has a good café that comes highly recommended.

 

Instead, we walked through Stanley Plantation, which is a pine forest that has been logged quite a bit and wasn’t particularly pretty. Just beyond that, however, we came to Port Gate, which one had a large Roman gate that let travelers along Rome’s Dere Street pass through Hadrian’s Wall. At the junction, there is now a lovely establishment named the Errington Coffee House which made us wish we didn’t have packed lunches.

We walked a short bit, then turned south at Halton Chester’s Roman Fort (Onum), which is unexcavated, so all we saw were mounds that have now become telltale for us.

 

We then passed through Halton, a little village with a lovely castle and chapel.

 

Corbridge Roman Town is another English Heritage Site. Dating from 86AD when a fort was begun, it grew into a large town known to the Romans as Corstopitum. This was the most northern town in all the Roman Empire. The ruins are well explained with signboards, and the museum has the Corbridge Hoard, a collection of Roman artefacts excavated in 1964. This is the first place we saw a dodecahedron, a mysterious metal doodad whose purpose is still a mystery.

 

In Corbridge we stayed at the Golden Lion. We ate dinner and breakfast there as well, and can heartily recommend it.  hello@goldenlioncorbridge.com 01434 239348 https://www.goldenlioncorbridge.com/

We walked about 13 1/4 miles on this day, so it was one of our longest, but we'd become stronger over the past few days and it didn't seem so bad. 

The Lost Book

 Perspective, my middle grade historical fiction set on Isle Royale during the Great Depression almost never got published. That's because I lost the manuscript.

This story's origins came in a family trip to Isle Royale during the summer of 2000. In case you've never been there, Isle Royale is a National Park on a remote island in Lake Superior. It sits near Michigan’s border with Canada, and can be accessed by boat from Duluth Minnesota and several Michigan ports, and by water plane. The island is car-free, with only a few lodgings. It is a wilderness of forests, lakes and waterways, where moose and wolves roam and loons sing their lonely song.Dive sites in the lake include several shipwrecks, and most people explore the island by backpacking and/or canoeing, portaging their canoes across narrow fingers of land to reach lakes and inlets.

I was transfixed by the beauty of the island when I went there. In the ten days we hikes, canoed and portaged the eastern end of the island, we saw only a handful of other people. It was probably the most isolated I have ever been. But beauty by itself does not make a story. You can write a poem about beauty, but a novel needs a plot. It needs characters who yearn for something, and it needs the story of how those character achieved—or didn't—the desires of their heart. 

I didn't find the story until my last day on Isle Royale.  We were taking the ferry back to Duluth when it

stopped near a rustic cabin that sat on the waterfront. As a sailor passed along mail and a box of groceries to a woman onshore, I learned that what I was seeing was becoming less and less common. Some, but not all of the people who owned land on the island were granted life leases by the government when the island became a national park in 1940.  Those leases allowed the people who gained them to continue living on the island for their lifetime. It had been 60 years since those leases were granted, and most of the grantees were growing old. Many of the remaining grantees were just children when the park was created. It made me wonder what it would have been like to be one of those who lived on the island. How did they feel when they learned that their homes were soon to be taken over by a government that had a plan that might benefit the general populace, but would destroy their own life and livelihood? 

I came home from that trip fired and inspired by that question, and within a year I had a completed manuscript. My main character was Genevieve Williams, a twelve-year-old girl who is put on a boat and sent to the island by relatives who do not want the burden of caring for her after her mother dies. She will now live on this isolated island with her father, a man she has never met and about whom her mother never talked. What Genevieve wants is to graduate from school so that she can go to art school. Once she's on the island, however, her artistic eye falls in love with its rustic beauty. She learns the story of the relationship between her mother and father and her whole understanding of the world changes, as does her priorities. 

My manuscript went through several rounds of revisions and critiquing. I sent it out to several publishers. And, somewhere during the next few years, I bought a new computer and transferred everything over from the old one to the new, using floppy discs. My life may not have been as rustic as Genevieve's who worked by kerosine lamp light and cooked on a wood-burning stove, but technology was not what it is now back in 2002. Slowly, rejections of the manuscript came in the mail. When the last had trickled in, I looked for the manuscript so that I could decide whether to send it out to other editors and agents, or rewrite it. I found I could do neither. Somehow, the manuscript had not transferred from one computer to another. It was gone, without a trace. 

Years passed. Every now and then I would think of Genevieve's story and feel a wave of sadness. The story was (I thought) gone forever. I became increasingly sure that it would have been my greatest success.

Then, a couple of years ago, a friend of mine was cleaning out her garage when she found a dusty old pile of papers. It was a copy of my Isle Royale story! I had given it to her to read through and comment, and somehow it had gotten misplaced. Lucky for me, my friend didn't throw the stack of papers away. She returned them to me. I could use that old manuscript and twenty years of acquired writing skills to create an even better story.

My husband, who is my hardest critique, says that this is my best story yet. I'm not so sure, but I am glad that it has finally, after a quarter of a century, seen the light of day. 

Walking the Wall: Day 6 Housesteads to Chollerford

After a second night in lovely and accommodating Bowes Motel, we sat down to a hearty breakfast in the hotel's dining room. The staff graciously gave us a ride to Housesteads so we could  continue the walk. That cut 1.8 miles off what was to be an 11.7 mile day. 

This was the nicest day, weather-wise. The sky was clear and we had no rain. 

Our first challenge was climbing Sewingshields Crags, another of those picturesque hills on which the wall snakes up to high cliffs. Look carefully, and near the top of the hill you can see a little white dot. That's my husband, who is training for a marathon this fall and decided to take advantage of the lovely weather and run the course this day.  The rest of us continued to walk and to marvel at the views—north into Scotland and south into England. They were breathtaking. 

By lunchtime, we had made it to Brocolitia Roman Fort, an English Heritage Site that remains unexcavated.  The man who runs the Corbridge Coffee Company’s Coffee van was a lot of fun to talk with. I bought a soda from him, the first sugary drink I had the whole time I was in England. In the hot sun, it tasted very, very satisfying. 

Nearby Brocolitia, is Temple to Mithras, a mysterious god whose rituals were all secretive and still largely unknown. The Temple was probably built by soldiers based at the nearby fort in about AD 200. The three altars were found here, all dedicated by commanding officers of the unit stationed here, the First Cohort of Batavians from the Rhineland. There was money, cigarettes, and other offerings on the altars, showing the paganism is not dead, even now.

 

Just before we got to the Mithric Temple, we crossed a boggy area. The man at the Corbridge Coffee Company’s Coffee van let me know that was Coventina’s Spring. There is nothing there but a little raised wooden walkway to get you through the muck, but it had been the site of a huge hoard of coins, offerings to the water goddess that inhabited the spring. In 1876, John Clayton, an amateur archaeologist to whom Hadrian's Wall owes much, opened up Coventina's Well and discovered 13,487 coins, many of which dated to a55AD. He then hauled Coventina's altar to his house in Chollerford, which is now the Chester’s Museum. 

Broccolita is on AD122 route, so one could take the bus from Vinolanda or Housesteads to Broccolita.

A little farther on, we got to Limestone corner, the northernmost point on the trail, and the farthest north that the Roman Empire reached. The rock here is not limestone as the name would imply, but the much harder whinstone, a kind of basalt. The stones show 

signs of being worked by Roman masons, who must have realized that they were too hard to hack through and abandoned the project of clearing the ditch of them.

My husband found us again soon after Limestone Corner. He'd run all the way to Chollerford, then walked back to us because I was carrying his pack, and his lunch! 

If you are not up to running or walking all the way to Chollerford, you're in luck. The Ad122 bus runs all the way there. 

We stayed at The George Hotel in Chollerford. It had once been a pub and Inn, but a large addition was added to the back that's made it almost more of a conference center. The George has a  lovely dining room with windows overlooking the River Tyne. The breakfast was buffet style, with lots of selection. It also has lovely grounds, with chairs and tables out on the lawn. 

 Instead of eating dinner there, we walked north to the next village and ate at The Crown, a fun pub with lots of interesting decor.

Chesters Fort was THE place to see in Chollerford. It is another place to stamp Hadrian's Wall passports, and is an English Heritage site. Chesters Fort (Cilurnum) was built in 123 AD just after the completion of the Wall. It guarded a bridge which carried the Military Roman road across the River North Tyne.  It housed some 500 cavalrymen and was occupied until the Romans left Britain in the 5th century. 

The land on which Chesters fort stands was bought in 1796 by a man named Nathaniel Clayton, who leveled the ruins to form a park between his mansion and the river. His son, John Clayton, was of a more curious and scientific mindset. When he succeeded to the property in 1832, he began excavating what his father had buried. He also began acquiring other properties that had remnants of the wall and Roman forts. His nephew, Nathaniel George Clayton,continued the work, opening the Chesters museum in 1896. The museum houses the extensive collection of antiquities discovered by John Clayton at Chesters and elsewhere along the Wall. 

Walking the Wall: Day 5 Steel Rigg to Housesteads

 

Even though we made no forward progress, the fifth day of our hike along Hadrian's Wall ended up being the high point of the whole trip, both literally and physically. 

The morning began with breakfast at The Bowes Hotel in Bardon Mill, where a full English breakfast was included in the price of the room. If you've never had an English breakfast, it is quite a lot of food. We could have eggs, bacon, sausages, fried tomatoes, mushrooms, beans, and toast. The English have gotten smart, and realize that not all Americans appreciate black pudding and beans on their breakfast plates, so we each got a list of ingredients which we got to check off. We also had fruit and breads and the staff was happy to make a bowl of oatmeal for us if we wanted. 

Our original plan was to walk the 1.8 miles north to Vindolanda, then pick up the AD122 bus, which would take us to Housesteads. The staff at the Bowes offered us a better option: a ride to wherever we wanted to go. We chose to be driven back west to Steel Rigg. This allowed us to walk some of the most dramatic and beautiful sections of the trail, the upland section along Whin Sill. Here, the wall follows the curving contours of the land, climbing up steep hills and sometimes clinging to the edge of cliffs. We were lucky that the rains of the day before had cleared and we had bright skies with billowy clouds, and enough of a breeze to keep us cool, but not enough to knock us off our feet! We were definitely "chuffing" quite a bit up these steep slopes, but it was worth it. The views were spectacular. I can only imagine how impressive the wall would have been when it stood 15 feet tall, with a walkway on the top, and was painted white. The wall was definitely a very visual statement of Roman power and engineering.

The most crowded part of the whole hike was Sycamore Gap,a dramatic dip in the ridgeline that held one of the most photographed trees in the country until a couple of mindless vandals cut it down a year ago.  Perhaps 20 people were clustered about the stump, and their outrage and sorrow was palpable. The tree became famous when it appeared in Kevin Costner's 1991 film, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

A few more scenic climbs, and we arrives at  Housesteads, a Roman fort that is now an English Heritage Site and another of the places where we could get our passports stamped. There is an excellent museum run by The National Trust and English Heritage. 

Housesteads is the best preserved of the thirteen permanent Roman army posts along the length of Hadrian's Wall. It has been called by many names over the years, including Vercovicium, Borcovicus, Borcovicium, and Velurtion. It is now called after the nearby 18th-century farmhouse of Housesteads. 

The fort was built in stone by Roman legionaries in the decade after AD 122, soon after the construction of the wall began. Until the end of the 4th century, it housed an 800-strong infantry regiment of auxiliary troops. From the late 2nd century onward, the garrison was manned by the 1st cohort of Tungria, originally recruited from Germanic tribes in the region around Tongres, in modern Belgium. 

Before the trip began I was able to connect with Allen Woods, one of the interpreters who guides people through Housesteads. What a lucky find he was! Allen told us so much, in a way that we could understand, and with a great sense of humor. He helped us interpret not only the archaeological site, but the land on which it was built.  

 Allen was also kind enough to give us a ride back to Bardon Mill at the end of the day. 

Housesteads is about halfway along Hadrian's Wall. It is also one of the highest points in the wall and definitely set along the most dramatic stretch, with views that reach far into Scotland and far south. Having good weather for this beautiful walk helped, but having someone knowledgeable to share his understanding with us really opened our eyes and made the tour more memorable.  We walked a beautiful and rugged stretch of trail on this, our fifth day, and even if we ended up right where we began, it was the highpoint of the whole trip. 

The delightful surprise of Bardon Mill.

 

Bardon Mill was not part of my plans for walking the Hadrian’s Wall path. The town is too far off the trail and the AD122 bus doesn’t pass through it. Circumstances, however, forced me to book rooms there, and I am glad I did.

Bardon Mill is a little over a mile south of Vindolanda, which itself is two miles south of Hadrian’s Wall. While the museum and excavations at Vindolanda definitely make it worth the detour, I could find no good reason why I should deviate an additional distance to see Bardon Mill. When  you’re walking 10-12 miles a day, addingt hree extra miles is pretty daunting. Most hikers, and that 

includes me, want to find lodgings as close to the trail as possible.

For this section of the trail, that would have meant finding rooms in Once Brewed. However, we were a group of six, and Once Brewed is a very popular place. There were no rooms to be had, and once I began searching, it became apparent that there were no rooms to be had for miles around. I cast my net wider and wider, and finally found lodging for six in Bardon Mill. Some of the people in my group were skeptical about my choice, and I couldn’t blame them.

The trail south from Vindolanda made it clear that Bardon Mill is not overly popular with hikers. It was

not well marked, and we got lost a couple of times, but basically, the trail runs down a little valley through a lush forest. We saw no one else as we walked. At the bottom of the valley, we had to cross a very busy freeway, the A69, but once we had, we were enchanted by what we saw.

Errington Reay & Co is the only commercial pottery in the United Kingdom that is currently licensed to produce salt glaze pottery.  It was established in the village in 1878 and appears to still be going strong.It was right next door to our lodgings, so that when I looked out my window, I saw pottery. They made a large variety of wares, including these delightful chickens.

We stayed in the Bowes Inn, the pub that also seemed to be the center of social life in this village of 450 people. The staff was welcoming from the moment we walked in the door. We ate breakfast (included with the room) and dinner with them, and they packed lunches for us to eat on the trail.

While we were there, there was a pool tournament going on in the pub. Apparently, the Leek club has a show here every year, at which the produce from which is auctioned off to raise funds for local charities. Bardon Millers are evidently very proud of their leeks. There were numerous pictures of them on the walls of the pub. 

But their hospitality didn’t end there. Knowing that there was no bus to accommodate us, we were offered rides up to the wall. Because they are not a taxi service, our drivers could not charge us a fee, but hoped that we would provide them gas money, which we willingly did. We stayed two nights. The first morning we got rides back to Steel Rig, so that we could walk from there to Housesteads. This allowed us to walk some of the trail we missed by taking the bus from Walltown Quarry to Vindolanda, and we were glad we did because that section of the trail was spectacular. The second day we got rides to Housesteads so we could continue on our way east along the wall.

This was a bit of an inconvenience for the staff. Because they have no bus and there are no schools in the village itself, their own children need rides to schools in the neighbouring villages of Henshaw, Haltwhistle, and Haydon Bridge.  Offering rides to hikers is a second priority. I got the feeling that this town would love having the AD122 pass through, both so that their children could use it and to attract more tourists.

The staff at the Bowes Inn treated us like family, the food was good, and the rooms were cozy and quiet. By the time we left, we were all in agreement that staying in Bardon Mill was not the bad idea we had all feared.

The History of Isle Royale

Isle Royale is an island in Lake Superior. If you look at a map of the lake and think it looks like a wolf looking left, Isle Royale would be the eye of the wolf.

The island's history spans thousands of years. During the last Ice Age,15,000 to 20,000 years ago, Isle Royale was covered with thick glacial ice. About 10,000 years ago, the ice receded from the Lake Superior basin and Isle Royale rose above the waters of the lake. Its rocks, which are layers of lava flows and conglomerates formed during the Mesoproterozoic era, were tilted up by the weight of the glaciers, then eroded into long fingers that were then surrounded by water. This gives the eastern side of the island the look of fiords.  

We may never know when the first human ventured across the waters to land on the shore of Isle

Royale, but it is certain that people had arrived by 2,5000 BCE or soon thereafter. Early visitors mined raw copper, searching for nuggets and veins of the bright metal, then beating it out of the bedrock with rounded, hand-held beach cobbles. Archaeologists have found large numbers of these hammerstones along Minong Ridge, which has many of these ancient mines. More than 1,000 pits attributed to the Indians have been located on the island, but none include habitation sites. 

The Ojibwa call Isle Royale as "Minong," meaning "the good place." This may be because of the abundance of berries, including thimbleberries and blueberries.They mined copper and fished in the surrounding waters.Isle Royale remains within the traditional homelands of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

European contact began with the French during the Seventeenth Century. Fur traders, including Brule in 1622, Nicolet in 1634, and the Jesuits Raymbault and Jogues in 1641 lead to increased interest in the island's resources, including copper and timber. However, the remoteness of the island and the challenging weather and sailing conditions limited the area's use.

In the 1840s, Michigan's first state geologist, Douglass Houghton, reported on the wealth of copper on the island. That began a copper boom that lasted into the late 1890s. Unfortunately for the island, a common way to locate copper deposits was to burn forests, exposing surface rock. After the mining boom ended in the late 1890s, incidence of fire decreased and Isle Royale was not devastated by fire again until the 1930s, when it suffered its most devastating fire.

Fires, along with strikes and storms, also drove out the lumber industry, which tried to make a go of it on the island between 1892 and 1935. 

The longest-lasting industry on Isle Royal was commercial fishing. While historical records are scanty,

it's likely that The Northwest Fur Company got fish for its stations at the head of the lake in Western Lake Superior from the north side of the island sometime in the late 1700s. By the 1880's, from twenty to sixty crews came from the mainland to fish every year. They arrived in June and left in November, selling their catches to steamers from Duluth that made regular trips to the island to pick up fish and deliver supplies. During the early period, most fishermen were Cornish, English, or French. By the turn of the century, Norwegians, Swedes began to arrive, attracted by how similar the environment was to their homeland. Few fishermen or their families stayed on the island year-round. The isolation of the island once the lake froze, and the bitter weather permitted on the hardiest to stay.

Along with mining, lumber, and fishing, tourism tried to make a commercial success of itself on Isle Royale. Beginning in 1855, it established itself as a health destination, where cool weather and clean air could cure the sick. In the 1860's and 1870's, excursion boats carried travelers to the island, to picnic at the site of the Siskowit Mine or near the Rock Harbor lighthouse. Resorts were established on both sides of the island, and people from Minnesota, Michigan and Illinois began buying property for summer homes.


Private ownership of the island was not to last, however. In the 1920s, conservation efforts gained momentum, with advocates pushing for the island's preservation as a wilderness area. While some of the landowners were strong in support of the movement to create a park, others were not. In 1931, Congress authorized the establishment of Isle Royale National Park and the National Park Service began

acquiring all the lands and buildings belonging to the fishermen and summer residents. Some of those owners were given life leases.


The park was officially established on April 3, 1940, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former English and History teacher who now writes contemporary and historical fiction for middle grade through adult readers. Perspective, her novel set on Isle Royal in the 1930s, will be published in October, 2025. You can preorder the ebook or paperback now.