Walking the Wall: Day Four, Gilsland to Bardon Mill

 

If anyone were to ask me where to start an abbreviated hike of Hadrian's Wall, I would recommend Gilsland. The little village of Gilsland is small enough to be quaint, yet large enough to have some very nice features for hikers, the most important of these being the Samson Inn. Founded in 1601, this inn is the heart of the village in more ways that one. Back in 2022, the former owners decided to put it on the market. When no one stepped forward to keep the inn running, the village, realizing how important the Samson is not only to hikers, but to the community, decided to buy it itself. They formed the Gilsland Community Benefit Society Ltd (GCBSL), and after much grant writing and fundraising, which included pie sales and raffles, they were able to purchase the establishment. In October of 2024, after a renovation and thorough cleaning, the first pint was poured in the reborn pub. We weren't able to stay there, because the Inn was not yet taking reservations when I was scheduling this walk, but we did eat all our meals here and I can say they are friendly and helpful and we thoroughly enjoyed meeting the locals and sensing their pride in having kept this inn going.

Another place in town that I had intended to patronize was House of Meg, a tea room that comes highly recommended. Unfortunately, they were already closed when we made it into Gilsland, and it was still closed the next morning when we left. 

Today was supposed to be an 11.5 mile day, but we decided to use the AD122 bus, which shortened things up considerably. I'll explain why as I tell you about the day. 

We left Gilsland on a cool and misty morning. Almost immediately, we were following the vallum, the huge ditch that runs along the southern side of Hadrian's Wall. The vallum is a unique feature, the only such ditch to run along any frontier in the Roman Empire. It was built a few years after the wall and is believed to mark the southern boundary of a military zone which is bounded on the north by the wall.

The word vallum actually means wall, and Hadrian's Wall itself is called Vallum Adriano in Latin. The Venerable Bede, an historian who lived in the eighth century provides the earliest surviving mention of the ditch. He refers to it as a vallum, or earthen rampart instead of as a fossa, and the term has set.

 

We soon came to Thirlwall Castle, a twelfth century home that was fortified in about 1330 by John Thirlwall. It stayed in the family despite the fact that Sir Percival Thirlwall was killed while acting as Richard III's standard-bearer at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. A survey in 1542 stated that Robert Thirlwall owned the castle and it was in good repair, but in 1748 it was sold to the Earl of Carlisle, who had no use for yet another castle and allowed the structure to fall into decay. It is now an English Heritage Site, and they are working to protect it from further dereliction.                                                                                                 

We found ourselves walking along the wall quite often. Sometimes we were in the vallum, and sometimes we walked beside it. We also found ourselves crossing over walls that divided one pasturage or field from another. There were ladder gates and "kissing" gates, and others whose names I do not know. 

 

When we could see Walltown Crags looming through the mist, we knew it was time to stop at the Roman Army Museum. This museum is tied with a Roman fort known as either Carvoran  or Magna and is run by the same people who administer Vindolanda. It is not an English Heritage site, but we found it was well worth the price of admission. I especially enjoyed their film, Edge of Empire, which showed computer-animations that began with an archaeological site, then built up the building that had once stood there. 

In fact, the museum was so great and the weather had disintegrated so badly that we decided to pick up the AD 122 and take it all the way to Vindolanda, despite the fact that in doing so we would miss a good section of wall here, including Turrets 44B and 45A and Walltown Quarry. We'd also miss another English Heritage site,  Great Chesters Fort (Aesica) , which has the most complete Roman cavalry fort in Britain and a tearoom that came highly recommended.

We ate our sack lunches on the AD122 bus https://www.gonortheast.co.uk/services/GNE/AD12 while rain spattered on the windshield. Although we felt a little disappointed in missing part of the wall hike, another walker who stayed in the same inn as us told us that he slipped and fell on the wet stones, and that the rain was vicious on the top of the crags. that made us feel a little better about our choice. 

The bus dropped us off at Vindolanda, a fort that was built along the Roman road several decades before Hadrian began his wall. It is an excellent museum and archeological site, and we were glad that we'd created extra time to visit it. Vindolanda deserves at least three hours, and even then it has so much information and things to see that it is worth a blog all by itself.  

When we were done with the museum, we hiked a little less than two miles to Bardon Mill, where we stayed at the Bowes Hotel, a lovely quaint Inn that treated us like family. 

So why would I recommend Gilsland as the start of a shortened Hadrian's Wall hike? It was there that we truly began seeing the wall and vallum regularly, and that the scenery became spectacular, but it is also the first place where the AD122 can be accessed. Because of that, it would be possible to use Gilsland as a base to hike all the best miles and see all the best museums along the wall. We could have stayed here for days, yet we continued on, and the walking became more and more beautiful and challenging.