Day 6 of the Hadrian's wall walk

Today was Day 6 of our Coast to Coast walk.

The walk started off at the Wylam Train Station, one of the oldest train stations in the world.

Just prior to taking this picture we saw someone poke his head out to look at the traffic. We think he might have been controlling the gates and traffic lights.

Then, we had to make our way to Heddon-on-the-wall, a town where you can actually see the wall! We had looked on the internet for directions. It looked pretty straight forward, and since our printer doesn't work I ended up hand drawing a little map. We made our way through the small town of Wylam with no trouble, finding this trail very easily.

You can probably guess where this is going, but we got lost! We ended up turning to the right too soon.

We found the town eventually, but as there was very little actual information online about where to find the wall, and two different maps showed two different locations (both of which we tried and found nothing there), we decided to take a break and eat our packed lunch at this nice memorial park.

Then it was off to find the wall! We had seen a sign right before entering the park for the Hadrian's wall trail, so we followed that.

After getting very confused by an "informative" sign about Heddon-on-the-wall, and seeing a sign to Heddon-on-the-wall which was pointing in the opposite direction, we just chanced to look to our right into a hedge-lined entrance and saw a very official looking sign about Hadrian's Wall!


The wall was originally intended to be 3 meters wide throughout, but a good deal of it wasn't actually built that wide. This is the largest surviving "broad" part of the wall.

Here is Jessamy standing in a kiln!

Since our trip so far had been a long walk uphill (two hours?), and the next section of the walk would be further into the country and would require a long walk back to public transportation we decided to walk around the town instead. We ended up at a dilapidated but interesting garden area called "Heddon Common", so we had yet another food break there.

Then it was off to the bus stop, and back home!