Country: England
Distance travelled:
Weather: very overcast, windy & cold

This morning we awoke in our first free camping site to a cloudy and grey sky. I could see the sunrise attempting to put some colour into the clouds but to no avail. I got up around 7am and gave Mark the entire bed to spread out in. After a happy half an hour rearranging some of the cupboards, I shifted a few things around in the garage of the van and then walked over to the edge of the cliffs while I brushed my hair. What I had assumed was some kind of touristy notice turned out to be a solar panel with its own fence just a few meters from the cliffs’ edge. I have no idea why.

After a while the wind chill became a bit much so I went back inside and forced Mark to get out of bed. We ate a quick breakfast, packed up and hit the road. It was starting to get busy on the rather narrow road we had come in on, the dog walking brigade seemed to be meeting in our quiet little spot and we wanted to get back out onto a two way road actually wider than the van.

With the aim of visiting some part of Hadrian’s Wall, we set off in a generally northern direction. We didn’t get far as we were distracted by a shiny, bright and obviously new Asda supermarket where we grabbed some supplies. At this point, since our connection to the internet had been restored, we spent a little while deciding exactly what part of the famous wall we would actually visit. After some deliberation, I chose the Corbridge Roman Town as it supposedly had a street with buildings either side. Or ruins at least. It was a drive of about an hour and a half to Corbridge and unfortunately upon arrival we found that the site was only open on weekends this early in the year. The next closest location on the wall was Chester’s Roman Fort which wasn’t open at all until April so after some quick web searching we headed for Housesteads Roman fort on another part of Hardrian’s Wall. We were dismayed on arrival by discovering that the site was not National Trust but run instead by English Heritage and that we were going to be up for 6 pound entry each. Well it turned out that National Trust actually owned the site, but just have it administrated by English Heritage so in fact members of either organization get in free. Bonza!

So we grabbed a quick lunch in the van (ham and cheese rolls), rugged up, and braved the stiff, brisk wind and threatening skies. After a brief walk we were soon standing at the ruins of the south gate. Housesteads fort was occupied for around 300 years after being built as part of the Hadrian’s Wall project which walled off the barbaric lands to the North from the Roman Empire in the south (Britannia).

We roamed around the fort taking in the scenery and the incredible ingenuity of the roman construction (heated floor, running water…these guys were good) ending up finally overlooking the north wall of the fort which forms part of Hadrian’s Wall. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the damage any attacking army would suffer trying to storm the wall with a garrison of troops defending it.

For those that are interested in dunny’s, Housesteads boasts one of the most complete set of ruins of roman latrines. It was truly impressive construction, though I for one am glad that 1800 years have passed since people were using it 🙂

After spying some nice hills off to the east with the wall snaking along them, we set off for some photo opportunities. On our return we dropped into the small museum (included in the free of charge ticket). Here we watched the movie that was being shown and found it really helped picture the buildings and lifestyle of the time. There was also some artifacts from the site on display and some nice guesswork about what they were 🙂

With all that done we returned to the van. We have been concerned about the slight smell of gas in the kitchen area, but not in the garage unlike last time, and we could smell what seemed like smoke around the van. We took the opportunity for a look around for the source and tracked it down to coming out of the vent for the gas fridge. Turns out that an injector may be faulty (we called tech support) and will need replacing. This is a small job, but one that might cut short our trip to Scotland and we haven’t even got there yet!

With our gas fridge not working we need to run it from EHU so we tracked down a site near Holtwhistle where we will stay the night. We’ve just finished dinner and with the weather sounding like a raging storm in a movie we might just go watch one 🙂