Walking the Wall: Day 9, Robin Hood Inn to Wylam

 In June 2025 I walked the trail along Hadrian's Wall. We began in the west and hiked with the wind at our backs for ten days. Although the trail is 84 miles long, we hiked well over 100 because of deviations to see things off the trail. If you'd like to start at the beginning, click here: https://jenniferbohnhoff.blogspot.com/2025/06/walking-wall-getting-to-starting-place.html 

On the morning of day 9, we awakened to the pattering of rain on the roofs of our little cabins tucked behind the Robin Hood Inn. We were treated to a full breakfast in the Inn, which is loaded with lots of fun things to look at. There are antlers and full, taxidermied heads hanging on the walls, lots of old pictures, paintings and photos, plus some interesting furniture, including wooden booths carved with the likenesses of people. This groomsman, carrying a saddle, was one of the charming carvings. 

By now, we had left the wild and rolling hills of the middle part of the trail far behind us and were entering into flatter and much more populated country. The little towns began to meld together into suburbs, and although we didn't see many people along the trail, we heard constant traffic along the road which our trail paralleled. 

The day was misty, and we hiked over stiles and through meadows with tall grass that coated our pants, but it never rained hard and we were never soaked through and through. 

We chose to go to England in June because, at least statistically, it is the driest month of the year. I believe we only had one or two days on which we weren't rain on—and April and May had seen a drought in which it didn't rain at all for six full weeks! 

The moral of the story is, hope for the best but plan for the worst.

The Military Road, or what is now labeled as the B6318 on maps, runs so straight that even many locals think that it must have Roman origins. But it does not.  It was constructed by Hanoverian forces in 1746 to suppress the Jacobites, (led by Bonnie Prince Charlie), after their uprising the previous year. So while it is historic, it is nowhere near as old as the ruins we'd been focusing on during this trip. 

The Military Road took us into Heddon-on-Wall, a lovely, quaint town with numerous pubs. We stopped at the Three Tuns for lunch, and found the place filled with patrons wearing their finest. The women wore dresses, and the men were either dressed in military uniforms or in suits, and we, in our raincoats and with backpacks slung on our backs, felt very out of place. 

On the TV screens, a large parade was in progress, and we soon learned that it was the King's birthday, and that the parade we were seeing was taking place in front of Buckingham Palace. We were never able to ascertain whether the people in the pub were associated with nearby Albemarle Barracks and were celebrating the King's birthday, or whether there had been a wedding or other celebration. Whatever it was, the partygoers stayed at the bar while we ate at a table, and all was well. 

Heddon-on-Wall was the last place we could see the Wall itself until we got to the reconstructed pieces at the very end of the trail. As in the far west of the trail, the wall through this section has been largely "appropriated" over the years. Many of the stones are now parts of farmhouses, churches, and

field walls. Sometimes people didn't move the stones very far before they reused them. In Heddon-on-Wall there is a wheat drying kiln that was built right into a section of the wall sometime during the late middle ages. 

We had intended to stay the night in Heddon-on-Wall, at an establishment called Hadrian’s Barn. However, less than a week before I left for this journey, the proprietor sent me an email saying that she had to go into the hospital. She referred us to Ship Inn, in Wylam, so we ended up walking south an extra couple of miles. 

Those couple of miles ended up being quite an adventure. I'd mapped our entire journey on AllTrails, each day door to door. While we didn't use it much, relying more on the acorns that were nailed to posts along the way, the app came in handy whenever we managed to go off trail. However, I'd never added in the short bit between where I had thought we'd stop in Heddon-on-Wall and where we actually did stop. Without a trail marked out, and since Wylam was not along the Wall Trail (and therefore there were no acorns to follow), we wandered into a rather posh country club with a lovely golf course.

I'm sure the golfers were as surprised too see a group of pack-laden hikers strolling down the fairways as the well dressed people in the pub had been, but they, too, were nice about it. One even told us where there was a break in the hedge so we could slip out and get onto a trail that led to Wylam. 

The trail that took us into town is called the Wylam waggonway, built in 1748 to transport coal from
Wylam to a dock on the River Tyne. The coal waggons were originally pulled by horses on wooden rails. In 1829, a local man named George Stephenson showed off his locomotive, the Rocket, along this section of track. It managed to pull a load of three times its own weight at the dizzying speed of 12.5mph, and hauled 20kph and hauled a coach filled with passengers at 24mph, securing the locomotive's place in the Industrial Revolution.

That night we slept in The Ship Inn, an old public house under new management. We'd just gotten to our rooms when a great gully washer of a storm blew through, and glad we were to be under a good, solid roof. 

The next day was to be our last along the trail, and most of it was to follow along the River Tyne, through increasingly urban and industrial neighborhoods. At the end, we would be in Newcastle, which had several fine museums that we wanted to spend time in. It was clear we would face a decision tomorrow.