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.