I had expected the Wall to be dramatic like the postcard sections of the Roman ruins further east. Naively I had imagined you could walk for mile after mile of the old Imperial border patrolling it like a first century centurion. I had wanted to look out from the Wall at the uplands to the north. I wanted to understand the nature of this border. What makes there different from over here? I was a little disappointed.
Here, in the western section that I walked there was not much of the Roman border left. Only the names in this area give you a real sense of its past - Walton, Castlesteads and a farm called Old Wall. The stones of Hadrian’s Wall itself have long since been nicked.
My Hadrian’s Wall was fantasy based on watching Ben Hur and coupling it to what is left of the Roman monuments at Vindolanda and at Housesteads. In these central sections of the Wall the original stones can still be seen and the ruins mark the fields and hills with a line that stretches across the whole landscape. In places it still feels like the end of the world. The sheer rock wall that drops down into Crag Lough gives the feeling that here is the end of civilisation. In the mists of the morning, when you walk amongst the ruins of the milecastles you can feel the spirits of the cold Syrians and Spaniards whose job it was to patrol this limit of the Empire. They must have looked north though the mist and rain with their civilised Mediterranean eyes and seen nothing but desolation.
I recently had a chance to play farm on these hillsides. Bellowing at the sheep dogs and wandering through the tussocky bog-fields on the far side of the wall. Despite my love of the fells I reckon I would find life as an upland farmer bloody frustrating. In the short time that Pauline and I were in charge of the farm we saw a van crash through a wall threatening to let our livestock out onto the main road, and then the lambs started to die in the intense heat that can visit these hills. This is marginal land, which is more likely to break your heart than the bank. The skill up here in farming is to simply stay sane and afloat. Things have not really changed since the Romans left. Desolation is still threatening this land.
This was the most northerly point that I was going to walk this Summer. I turned West after crossing the River Irthing, heading down the line of the roman border towards Carlisle.
I had company. Eleven year old Ari, my wife’s second cousin’s only son. Given how long I had been away from human conversation, I think Ari found me slightly strange. I know I was having trouble getting my head around him.
We map-read together - moving across country in an erratic fashion weaving like a sinner on a Saturday night. Ari did not think we were allowed to step off the roads and I was keen to find a wall that was not there.
As we strolled we talked in a format that is time honoured between adult and child. I’d ask a question which Ari would not answer if he could avoid it. I’d ask another question and force a one word answer out of him gaining the wonderful insight that he did not like cucumber. I found Ari unnerving because he was such a mixture, small boy and man all rolled up into one. He could talk to me about his feelings towards his father’s new family in his other home in Iceland and then plonk himself down on the road to pop the bubbles that formed in the overheated tarmac. With persistence, with my slow but deliberate questions, I batted like Geoff Boycott building up an innings of runs. I followed up a tiny victory by another swing of the bat, using my questions like ranging shots to try and find out what the hell we had in common. I knew I struck gold when I mentioned the computer I’d bought in the Spring.
After a ten minute monologue from Ari about my computer’s virtues we moved from his impressive knowledge of fact to childhood fantasy. Between us we devised our fantasy PC with enormous sounding specifications (which will probably be standard in about three years time). After that we devised a new computer game, a Viking warrior battle in the twenty-third century. It reminded me of my own fantasies when I wrote endless stories as a child about the ancient Roman wars. We even got down to talking about the type of music that we needed for the game.
I realised that, despite the technology, we were on the same wave-length. Whereas I wanted to scribble, Ari wants to code. Having bridged the gap of a generation we started to talk about a game to explain Hadrian’s Wall to local kids. A sort of history (yawn) come shoot’em-up to appeal to our range of tastes.
We did eventually find one bit of masonry left over from the Wall, which I stared at a little forlornly. It did not feel like a moment to celebrate. In the picture which Ari took of me I look dazed as I’m leaning on the wall. I had walked seven hundred miles to see this small pile of bricks. It was a shame Ari was not older as he would have probably have taken the piss out of me then. I needed someone to point out to me how funny the situation was.
The last few miles to Carlisle were across lowland farms. They reminded me of southern England, with Friesian cows quietly chewing the cud blissfully unaware of a light aircraft making a botched landing at the nearby Carlisle Airport. The Wall was nowhere to be seen here and I plodded on knowing that my walk with the centurions was always going to be a dream. The last milecastle I came to was number 64, trapped between the M6 and a permanent caravan park. From this point Scotland was a mere seven miles, a few minutes driving for the cars speeding by.
This place summed up for me the way in which the border has changed. The great structure of the past ran east to west creating a barrier to keep England, that which was Roman Britain - safe and apart from what was to become Scotland. Now the equally impressive M6 runs north- south inviting an army of trucks to cross the border. The sheer volume of traffic on the motorway made standing beside the carriageway oppressive.
It struck me here near the border that I had chosen to walk England, denying myself even a fleeting glimpse of Scotland and Wales. Accidentally I had also denied myself most of Northumberland.
I could have walked around Britain. I could have - if I thought that my marriage and my feet would have stood up to doubling the distance. I am glad I did not though. By saying I’d walk England it made me think about borders. It also made me think about what a strange surreal geography England has.
We quote Shakespeare when we talk about our land.
"This precious stone set in the silver sea."
"This sceptred isle"
England? Surely not?
It is somewhat fashionable to point out that Shakespeare was lousy at geography. In one play he has a ship thrown up by a storm onto the rocky cliffs of Bohemia. It’s one hell of storm that can chuck a forty ton ship several hundred miles inland. But let’s face it, his history was not much better. He has Romans using clocks to tell the time despite their invention several centuries later. Truthfully a lot of this is trivia; by Bohemia Shakespeare means somewhere far away, somewhere on the edge of make-believe which is, frankly, why one should not give a toss about details. Shakespeare didn’t. He asks us, his audience, to imagine the place and out of respect for genius we oblige him.
The same suspension of disbelief however can not easily be applied to the very country he was living in. Most of those sitting in the Globe would know he was talking cobblers in this famous speech in Richard II. England isn’t an island. A pedant would cry out that Mister Shakespeare needs to corrected. ’This blessed plot’ never was and presumably never will be alone in its setting in ‘the silvered sea’.
It rather ruins the poetry of sentence though to talk of ‘this fortress built by nature’ open brackets excepting the nice wide open border with Wales and another to the north that we English share with our buddies the Scots close brackets. It is pedantic to insist on this statement because the Bard is not dealing with physical reality but in the metaphysical way that the English feel about themselves. Like a mirror Shakespeare is reflecting something of how the people of his time felt about themselves - something which I was coming understand still holds true today.
We, the English are like a son or daughter of a large family who make believes that s/he is an only child. We are a nation within a nation, denying that the others exist. Perhaps that is why the English have so much difficulty accepting their part in the wider family of Europe.
I am spoilt for choice when it comes to writing down what my nationality is. My passport is red - I am a European, though it is tough to figure out what that actually means beyond the billions of pounds we all contribute to the Common Agricultural Policy. I am British then. I carry a Scots name, my maternal grandfather was Welsh and I find my heart is moved by the Celtic world.
However by accent, by upbringing, by where I am at rest, England is where I call home. For the first time in my life it really dawned on me that I was English.
As I walked off into Carlisle still following the line of the Wall I wondered why stating my nationality like this felt like an embarrassing confession. After all, didn’t I love England?
© Gavin Stewart 1996-2004
