Carlisle; Sunday, 24 May, 2009

No rodents woke me up during the night, it was just the large, loud stag party at about 2am that woke me up, but you can’t really blame Travelodge for that. Sadly in the process of being woken up with a start by the two way tirade of foul mouthed abuse that two of the party were conducting out in the corridor, I managed to do something to my already injured foot to really set if off throbbing, so it took another 50 minutes, and a hobble to the vending machine in reception for some pain killers, before I finally started to drift off again.

By the time I woke up again it was just before 8, and time to get up anyway. The couple of hours sleep appeared to have fixed the worst of the pain in my foot, it was down to just a mild background throb, so I was able to contemplate the busy day I had planned.

At just a couple of minutes after nine I was standing at the bus stop waiting for the AD122 Hadrian’s Wall bus. Sadly, 20 minutes later I was still waiting as the bus had arrived from the garage, but the driver was caught in traffic coming in from, I assumed a different garage. Once driver and bus were reunited we set off.

The bus follows the line of the wall all the way; supposedly, to Newcastle (although there are no buses which do the whole trip and only one a day in each direction that actually make it to/from Newcastle). It dives down little country lanes, and as he was running a little late, at speeds which made for an interesting and bouncy ride. By the time we reached the first major fort on the wall the driver had made up the 10 minute delay he had started with. I stayed on the bus for a bit longer to my starting location of Vindolanda.

Having taken in the sites of Vindolanda and its museum I wandered back to the car park and caught the bus on to my next stop, the Roman Army Museum.

After taking in the museum I had a wander around the nearby Northumbria National Park visitors centre and a small, but very dramatic part of the wall. Then it was back onto the bus again for my final destination of the day.

Birdoswald Roman Fort is much smaller than the site at Vindolanda, but benefits from actually being on the wall. When I visited there as a “Living History” session taking place, which made the site very busy, and hefty chunks of it closed off to visitors.

Outside the fort there are some substantial remains of the wall stretching for over a mile, down the side of a hill and back up the other side. I had a wander part way along to the start of the descent at a mile fort, but by now I could feel my ankle really starting to twinge so I thought it would probably be wise to wander, slowly, back to the bus stop, getting there with nearly half an hour to wait, but still able to walk.

By the time we arrived back into Carlisle my ankle had started to seize up so it was quite painful hobble down to the station to book a ticket for the following morning, and then back to the hotel to rest my foot for a while, at which point I also spotted that I had managed to get myself burnt, which given it’s a bank holiday weekend in the UK should have been impossible.