Hadrian's Wall Path

Hadrian's Wall Path is a coast-to-coast walk that happens to follow the most famous ruin in Britain. Our line measures 138 kilometres from the Tyne to the Solway, and the Wall itself — the stone one, standing — is visible for perhaps a fifth of that. The rest of the time you are walking the line of it: the ditch, the bank called the Vallum, a field boundary that is suspiciously straight, a road built on top of it in the eighteenth century. Knowing what to look for is most of the pleasure, and the trail is generous with explanation.

It begins at Segedunum, the fort at Wallsend that guarded the eastern end, which has a museum, a viewing tower, and a reconstructed length of Wall so that you know what you are looking for before you set off. Then the Tyne. The first day is a riverside walk through the middle of a city, and it is better than that sounds: the river path runs under the cranes and past the sites of the shipyards, past the Ouseburn, and into the Quayside with its seven bridges in a row, the Tyne Bridge above you and the Millennium Bridge tilting for boats. Newcastle's centre, and its main-line station, are a few minutes up the hill.

West of the city the path stays with the river, under the Scotswood and Blaydon bridges, past the site of Kings Meadow island, to Newburn, where a battle in 1640 let a Scottish army into England and helped bring on the Civil War. Here the Tyne is a country river again, with a country park along it, and the trail leaves it for good.

The climb up to Heddon-on-the-Wall is the first of the walk and, at a hundred metres, one of the biggest; the ground the Wall was built on was chosen for its height. At the top, on the edge of the village, is the first stretch of real Wall: a length of the stone curtain, three metres wide, standing in a field beside the road. It is not much, and after a day of river it is everything. Heddon has beds, and the Military Road begins here.

For twenty-five kilometres west of Heddon the Wall is under a road. After the rising of 1745, when the army had found the country between Newcastle and Carlisle impossible to move across, a military road was built along the line of the frontier, and they built it on the Wall because the Wall was already there and already straight. The B6318 runs on top of Hadrian's masonry for most of this chapter, and the trail runs beside it in the field, on the grass between the road and the ditch, with the Vallum's great earthwork off to the left and the whole of the North Tyne country opening ahead.

It is the least dramatic day of the walk and the one where you learn to read the ground. Rudchester is a fort, Vindobala, with nothing above the turf but a shape in the field. Halton Chesters, at the Portgate where Dere Street came through the Wall on its way to Scotland, is another. The milecastles are numbered — every Roman mile, a small fort, with two turrets between — and the trail passes 22, 23, 24 and 25 as low platforms in the grass, each one signed. On Down Hill the road climbs to just over two hundred metres, and the Cheviots come into view to the north, and the Wall country begins to feel like a frontier rather than a farm.

At Heavenfield a wooden cross beside the road marks the battle of 634, when Oswald of Northumbria beat the Welsh king Cadwallon and, according to Bede, raised a cross before the fight; the church in the field behind is one of the quietest places on the trail. Then the ground falls to the North Tyne. The trail comes down past Planetrees, a length of Wall where the builders changed their minds about its width halfway along, and past Brunton Turret, one of the best-preserved on the whole line, to the river at Chollerford.

Chollerford has a bridge, beds, and, half a kilometre downstream, Chesters — Cilurnum — the cavalry fort on the riverbank with its bath house, which is the first of the great forts and the place to spend an hour before or after the day.

West of the North Tyne the Wall starts to climb, and so does the walk. The road and the trail leave the river together up Walwick Bank, past Black Carts, where a long stretch of Wall and a turret stand in the pasture, to Limestone Corner. This is the Wall's most northerly point, about 250 metres up, and the place where the Roman ditch-diggers gave up: the rock is dolerite, not limestone, and the half-cut blocks are still lying in the unfinished ditch nineteen centuries later, which tells you as much about the Wall as any museum. The view north from here is empty in a way nothing east of it has been.

Then the trail leaves the road for the first time in a day and a half. At Carrawburgh — Brocolitia — the fort is a grassy platform, but beside it, in a hollow by the road, is a small temple to Mithras, with replicas of its altars standing where the originals were found, and near it the site of Coventina's Well, a spring into which the Romans threw thousands of coins. From Carrawburgh the path strikes out across the open moor along the Wall's line, past milecastles 32, 33 and 34, with the ground rising all the time and the country turning from field to fell.

At Sewingshields the geology takes over. The Whin Sill is a sheet of hard volcanic rock that runs across northern England, and where it surfaces here it forms a line of crags facing north, sheer on that side and sloping on the south, and Hadrian's engineers put the Wall along the very lip of it. From Sewingshields Crags the trail rides this line for the next twenty kilometres, up and down every notch in it, with loughs — Broomlee, Greenlee, Crag Lough — in the hollows below to the north. The Wall here is standing, metres high in places, and the walking is the best on the trail and the hardest.

Housesteads — Vercovicium — is the fort at the end of the chapter: the most complete Roman fort in Britain, on a slope above the crags, with its four gates, its granaries, its headquarters and its famous latrines all laid out for you, and the Knag Burn gateway through the Wall beside it. The trail passes along its north wall. There is nowhere to sleep at the fort itself; the beds are down the hill and along the road, and the planner will send you to them.

This is the chapter people walk the trail for. From Housesteads the Wall runs west along the top of the crags — Housesteads Crags, Cuddy's, Hotbank, Highshield above Crag Lough — climbing to each summit and dropping into each gap, with the stone curtain beside you the whole way and the milecastles at their intervals in the dips. Milecastle 37 above Housesteads still has the arch of its north gate. The gap beyond Highshield is Sycamore Gap, where a single tree stood in the notch of the Wall and became the most photographed spot on the frontier; it was cut down in 2023, and the trail passes the stump and the place. Then Castle Nick, milecastle 39, tucked into its own gap, and the pull up Peel Crags to Steel Rigg, where a car park and a road down to Once Brewed give most day-walkers their start.

Beyond Steel Rigg is Winshields Crags, the high point of the entire Wall and of this walk: our terrain puts the trail at 343 metres by the trig point, and the view takes in Scotland to the north, the Pennines to the south and, to the west, the whole line of the crags you have still to walk, falling away in steps towards the Cumbrian plain. The descent is by Caw Gap and Cawfields, where a quarry has bitten a piece out of the Sill and left a lake, and milecastle 42 sits on a slope so steep it seems to be sliding into the gap.

The last of the crags are Walltown, the wildest, where the Wall is in long standing stretches and the Sill throws up its final line of cliffs; Aesica, the fort at Great Chesters, lies between, the least visited of the forts and the one with an altar still in place by the gate. Then the ground falls for good. The trail comes down past Thirlwall Castle, a fourteenth-century tower built out of stone quarried from the Wall — the fate of most of it — and crosses the Tipalt Burn and the railway to Gilsland, the village on the Northumberland–Cumbria border where the crags end and the second half of the walk begins.

Beds along the crags are on the road below rather than on the Wall, at Once Brewed and Twice Brewed, at Greenhead and Gilsland, and this is the stretch where they book up first; the planner treats it as the walk's bottleneck.

Cumbria begins at the Irthing, and the Wall changes with the county. East of the river it was built in stone from the first; west of it, in the 120s, it was turf, replaced in stone only later, and the geology of what you can see changes too, from grey whinstone to red sandstone. The first thing across the river is the best of it: Birdoswald — Banna — a fort on a bluff above the Irthing gorge with the longest continuous stretch of standing Wall on the whole line running east from its gate, past the site of the Roman bridge at Willowford, back towards Gilsland. Walk that stretch in the morning light before you turn west.

After Birdoswald the Wall goes underground. For thirty kilometres the trail follows its line across the farmland of north Cumbria — the ditch, the Vallum, a hedge that keeps too straight a course, milecastles 51 to 60 as low humps in the pasture and a signal tower at Pike Hill — and the walking turns gentle, along lanes and field edges, through Banks, Walton and Newtown, with the Lake District fells appearing in the south-west and the Solway plain widening ahead. Lanercost Priory, with its Augustinian church still in use, is a kilometre off the path below Banks and worth the diversion. This is a day of villages rather than monuments, and it is the stretch where walkers who expected the crags to continue are sometimes disappointed, and walkers who know what they are looking at are not.

The trail meets the Eden at Crosby and follows the river, through Linstock and the parkland at Rickerby, into Carlisle: under the M6, along the riverside walk, and into the city by the Sands Centre and the castle. Carlisle Castle has stood on the site of the Roman fort of Luguvalium for nine hundred years and its keep has done duty as a prison for, among others, Mary Queen of Scots; the cathedral is smaller than most and finer for it. Carlisle is the last town of any size, the last main-line station, and the last place to buy anything before the Solway.

The planner will usually put a night here. The final chapter is short, flat and exposed, and it is worth starting it early.

The last day is the flattest on any National Trail. From Carlisle the path follows the Eden out through Grinsdale, Kirkandrews and Beaumont, where the river begins to widen into the estuary, and then leaves it for the villages of the Solway shore: Burgh by Sands, Drumburgh, Glasson, Port Carlisle, Bowness. The Wall ran along here to its end, but you will see nothing of it; the stone went into the churches, which are fortified, and the farms. What you see instead is the Solway Firth, a great sheet of sand and water with Scotland a couple of miles across it, and the light, which is the thing people remember.

Burgh by Sands has the church where Edward I, who had come north to fight the Scots, lay in state after dying on the marsh in 1307; the monument to him stands out on the saltmarsh a kilometre from the village, reached by a path that floods. The marsh is the day's hazard. Between Burgh and Drumburgh the road and the trail run across it at sea level, and on the highest tides of the year the road goes under — there are depth gauges at each end, and the tide tables say when. Check them before you start, and if the tide is up, wait; it goes out as surely as it came in.

Drumburgh has a fortified house built from Wall stone, Glasson a scatter of houses, and Port Carlisle the remains of a canal basin and a harbour that were meant to make it a port for Carlisle before the railway came and the sea silted. Then the last two kilometres along the shore to Bowness-on-Solway, a village of one street on a low bluff, where the fort of Maia — the second-largest on the Wall, and the last — lies under the houses.

The trail ends at a small shelter on the shore below the village with a view across the firth to Scotland, and a sign that says how far you have come. There is no station: the way home is by bus or a lift, and the planner lists what the map knows. Give yourself the afternoon.