Is Hadrian's Wall Path hard? An honest guide

Hadrian's Wall Path has a reputation as a tough walk, and parts of it earn it. But most of its 86 miles are riverside, field and lane, and the hard walking comes in one place: the crags in the middle, where the Wall rides the top of the Whin Sill. Here is what the numbers say.

The numbers

Distance

86 mi

138 km, measured on our line

High point

343 m

Winshields Crags

Total climb

1,470 m

from LIDAR terrain; a floor, not a ceiling

The total climb is about 1,470 metres by our measurement from the Environment Agency's laser survey, less than half the Cotswold Way's, and the high point is Winshields Crags, 343 metres. The biggest single climb is about 190 metres, from Chollerford up to Limestone Corner. It counts only the rises our survey resolves, so ours is a floor.

What makes it hard anyway

The crags. Between Chollerford and Birdoswald the Wall follows the crest, and so does the path: up and down every few hundred metres, over short steep steps. Nearly all the trail's climbing is here. In the planner's seven-day split the hardest day is Carrawburgh to Walltown Crags, 21 kilometres with about 490 metres of climb, most of it in these drops and rises.

Water. OpenStreetMap has four taps within 400 metres of the whole path, and none for 40 miles in the middle. There is nothing on the crags; the villages are down on the road below. Fill up where you sleep.

The weather and the season. The National Trail recommends west to east, with the prevailing wind behind you, and asks walkers not to use the trail in winter, when the ground beside the Wall is fragile and turns to mud. On the last day the Solway marshes flood on the highest tides, whatever the month.

What makes it easier than you think

The rest of it. Either side of the crags the walking is easy: the Tyne through Newcastle, fields and lanes in Northumberland, and the Eden and the Solway in Cumbria.

Trains, at the ends and along the way. Wallsend has a Metro station 200 metres from the start, and Newcastle is on the East Coast main line. The Tyne valley line runs close to the Wall in the middle, with stations at Haltwhistle and Bardon Mill. The awkward end is the finish: Bowness-on-Solway has no station, and the bus to Carlisle runs twice on weekdays and once on Saturdays, in the morning only. Those are checked, with the dates on the guide.

So who is it for?

If you can walk twelve miles a day, you can walk Hadrian's Wall Path in seven days, and only two of them are hard. At fourteen or fifteen a day it is six. The planner shows what any number of days looks like, and for each night it says where the count of beds came from and when it was read. A bed on a list is not a bed booked.

Build your walkHadrian's Wall Path in 7 days86 mi · about 12 miles a dayOpen the planner →