Hiking Hadrian’s Wall, Virtually

I’m a purist trekker when it comes to walking long-distance designated trails, insisting that they be step-by-step odysseys completed in one go with no skipping of sections deemed to be of lesser interest. Take my treks in England. I’ve dipped my boots in the Irish Sea at St. Bees Head and 200-plus miles later walked into the surf again in the North Sea at Robins’ Hood Bay. Coast to Coast Walk completed.

I’ve walked every step of the South Downs Way in Southern England and followed the Thames’ 185 miles of twists and turns from its source in a Gloucestershire meadow to where the river empties into the sea beyond London.

And then there was Hadrian’s Wall Path National Trail that stretches its way east to west across northern England between the Irish and North Seas.

In the summer of 2005, I pulled into Steel Rigg car park to walk a chunk of the wall that lies within the boundaries of Northumberland National Park.

Park ranger Page Lazzari was waiting to meet me. Together we’d walk the section “backwards,” west to east – contrary to the direction guides to the path are written – so as to have the wind at our backs. With but one afternoon at my disposal, Lazzari had suggested this portion of the trail as the best place to imagine what the Roman wall was like in AD 122.

Steep rises and falls in the terrain gave our legs a workout as we followed the wall of tightly fitted gray stones. Steep steps eased the way to top-of-the-world views, with Scotland but three miles distant. At one high point, we looked straight down into lovely Crag Lough where a pair of swans drifted over the still water.  It was there that I vowed to return someday and walk the whole thing. Earlier this year, I did just that. Virtually.

The Conqueror Challenges website made it possible. Dozens of challenges were offered. Among them, it was possible to swim the English Channel, walk the Inca Trail, climb Mt. Fuji, explore Angkor Wat and the Giza Pyramids. Other tours explored Singapore, followed the entire length of Route 66, or – here I stopped dead in my tracks – walk Hadrian’s Wall Path National Trail. All I needed to do was pay $30, download the app to my phone and tuck my Fitbit step-tracker in my pocket.

The Conqueror is the brainchild of Adam El-Agez of New Zealand. Determined to make changes in his sedentary lifestyle he bought a treadmill and started walking, an activity that after a couple of weeks became tedious. While cleaning out the glovebox in his car one day, he came across an old map. The thought struck: “If I added up all my treadmill sessions, I could walk the length of New Zealand!”

He began to pencil in his progress on the map. “A clunky way of keeping track,” he says, “but one that technology could surely take care of.”

The first Conqueror’s challenge was launched on January 10, 2016. To date, more than 850,000 participants representing 150 countries have virtually explored different parts of the world while walking, running, swimming, cycling, rowing, on the treadmill, or “Cartwheels, if that’s your thing,” El- Ages says.

Five miles a day has long been my regular Fitbit goal. At that pace, it would be possible to walk the wall’s 84 miles, in 17 days. Tying up my walking shoes, on the first day I set forth, virtually, from the town of Wallsend on the edge of the North Sea by walking the paths of a golf course near my home before the early-morning golfers arrived.

Each day’s progress was recorded on my cellphone on a map showing me as a teardrop, initialed YH. My teardrop carried the American flag.  Other teardrops had different national flags or opted for a “Citizen of the World” ID.

Via a tap on my phone, an interactive map placed me where I was on the path at any given moment. A click on street view showed my immediate surroundings. At the end of walking on day one, I found myself at what appeared to be a back alley set of steps lined with garbage bins.

For three days my path followed B6318, a secondary road with sweeping satellite views of bucolic countryside and picturesque villages but without a glimpse of anything resembling the wall.  That was expected, as Page Lazzari had warned.

While natural deterioration can be credited for some of the wall’s tumbling away, large sections were carted away as a ready supply of building material after the Romans’ departure. As Lazzari explained as we walked along, “Why bother starting from scratch at the quarry when plentiful handcrafted stones were right under your nose?” That was especially so in the lowlands where carting off was easily accomplished, entire buildings from farmhouses to churches were constructed of “recycled” wall.

In 1753, with total disregard for history, a military road – now known as B6318 – replaced a long section of what little remained of the wall’s existence.  “An act of official vandalism,” Lazzari called it. One that did, however, arouse the start of a conservation movement, a movement that took a mere 350 years before the wall, now a designated World Heritage Site, became a protected long-distance footpath.

From time to time, a digital postcard arrived in an email – from me to me.  The first one let me know how delighted I was with a stop for tea, one complete with scones, clotted cream, and strawberry preserves.

I hoped that there were such stops for tea in 1801 when poet and historian William Hutton, 78 years old and hailing from Birmingham, walked the wall’s length, turned around and walked back again. And then sat down to write a lively account of his trek. Other historians immediately groused that while his account was lively, he got a lot of stuff wrong.

“A lot of trekkers still get it wrong,” Lazzari had commented to me. Contrary to what’s often supposed, the primary purpose of the wall – 12 feet high and 10 feet at its base – was not to keep people out. Instead, it was a tool for controlling the market and the economy. Fortified gates, “mile castles,” were placed at every mile, allowing the passage of people and regulation of trade north and south. When “barbaric” clans from the north acted up, Rome’s legions, representing “the superior civilization from the south,” marched through the gates to give them a good smacking.

While the Conquerors Challenge followed the path as a purist walker would, entertaining no deviations from the wall’s route, emailed essays arrived describing sites relevant to the path. Among them was Vindolanda, a Roman fort one mile south of the wall that my ranger companion had encouraged me to visit.

Vindolanda was one of a dozen forts roughly placed at seven-mile intervals to protect the wall. Since 1970, archaeological excavation has been ongoing with no end in sight revealing officers’ residences, temples, a bathhouse and latrine facilities with flushing water, along with the civilian settlement that grew up around the fortress to provide services.

Materials of all kinds emerged, much documenting everyday life – shoes, pots and glassware, a lady’s wig, a cat caught in a floor heating system – were displayed in a museum along with a host of other unearthed objects.

During my virtual walk – as I read the from-me-to-me postcards that arrived in my mailbox – I recalled seeing the Romans’ equivalent to such correspondence. On view in the Vindolanda museum were replicas written on the stationery of the day, thin sheets of wood found preserved in the aerobic soil. (The British Museum, where the originals are housed, considers them among its top treasures.)

Expecting ancient correspondence of the “Hail Caesar” sort, I was charmed by their ordinary content: Thank you letters “Through your kindness we are able to celebrate the holidays more splendidly”; explanations “I would have fetched the ox hides but the roads are bad”; along with complaints about the local population, the Brittunculi, the wretched Britons.

I’d hoped to see satellite terrain or street views of the intact portion of the wall I’d walked with Page Lazzari. Instead, most likely due to its remote and unpopulated location on the trail, I sadly was greeted with “satellite view not available.”

So it was that I ended my virtual Hadrian’s Wall walk with views of only a few scattered stones here and there along the way, but with a renewed appreciation of what I had seen and experienced years ago.

On day 17 of the Challenge, the map on my cellphone showed that my YH initialed tear-drop shape had reached Bowness-on-Solway, the end of the National Trail.  A cheery message of congratulations on my accomplishment arrived. A medal would soon be coming in the non-virtual mail.

It came, weighing in at a hefty one-third pound, its packaging emblazoned with the motto, “Virtually Anything is Possible.”

 

Yvonne Michie Horn lives in Northern California’s Sonoma County. In addition to numerous SATW honors, she is the recipient of two Lowell Thomas awards for foreign travel writing.