The final few miles!

Well we finally made to the end! Although you can't see by the photo with sore aching legs and feet but we made it never the less, and the sun finally came out for the final few hours of walking! Andrew was also in good spirits as we were stopping at the same campsite so he didn't have to carry the tent etc on his back on the last day! When we got to Bowness-on-Solway we found the Pub was shut until 4pm and we had got their at 12.30ish and our bus was at 2pm so we took advantage of the bench below the finish point looking out on the Solway sitting in the sunshine trying to dry our feet off as they had got very wet today trudging through lot's of standing water along the route! It was quite a week with quite a lot of highs of fantastic views and a great sense of achievement and a few lows with aching feet and legs, blisters etc but nether the less a great week and really worth while and the bonus that less than fortunate kids will benefit from it.

When we got back to the campsite it was sunny enough for the owner to cut the grass and he had made a very good job of cutting around our tent, when he saw us he made us a celebratory cup of tea, which was very much appreciated, so thank you West View Campsite! We spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in the sunshine looking towards the mountains of the Lake District contemplaiting what we had just achieved!



Flood Tide warnings! It was amazing watching how fast the tide comes in along the Solway, not high enough to flodd the road on the day we were there though!



Last long haul from Burgh by Sands to Bowness...a very long road!


End of the Walk at Banks, Bowness on Solway.

Day 6

Another long day which has taken us down off the hilly bits past
Carlisle following the river Eden. There is less evidence of the wall
but the ditch is still noticeable in places. The day was full of
sunshine and showers and a short burst of thunder shortly before we
reached camp! The last few miles of today were very undulating which wasn't much fun on our already tired legs so it was good to see a sign to our campsite saying it was only a mile away but a mile can be a very long distance when your legs don't want to move any further! The last half a mile along the road to the campsite seemed to take forever, however when we got to camp the owners were very friendly and made us feel really at home and made us a cup of tea and let us sit in their conservatory rather than sit squatted in our tent.

Day 5

Well after a very long day which started with us climbing back up on
to the crags where we left the wall yesterday and stopping for a cup
of tea at Birdoswald fort where last year we came across the Hadrains
wall walk we finally made it to the campsite with sore tired legs!


Heading down to the river before climbing up to Birdoswald Fort where we stopped for a well deserved bowl of soup and sandwiches!

Day 4

Well today was hard work lots of crags to climb but the views were
worth it. We also gave an offering to Mithras at his temple when we
passed by and was rewarded with a day of sunshine! We also visited Housesteads Fort which was quite a place and sat for a break at Sycamore Gap which is where they filmed the meeting of Kevin Kostner and Morgan Freeman in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. Due to the steep drops from the crags there was no ditch built along a large stretch of this part of the walk. It is quite amusing as you pass some of the mile castles in this section as it would have been impossible to pass through the northern gateways due to the sheer drops on the other side, it seems a mile castle was built every Roman mile, whether it was appropriate or not!


Mitras's Temple..thank you Mithras!



Milecastle Number 37


Sycamore Gap, no sign of Robin Hood!!

Day 3

Well the rain stayed off most of the day and we made good progress and
saw some large sections of the ditch and valum, and at the end of the
day we visited Chesters roman fort which was quite an impressive
structure with a large part of the walls remaining in particular the bath house which has particulaly high sections remaining. We also found a very nice oasis at St Oswalds tea shop where we had a very nice cup of tea and baked potato for lunch which was quite fortunate as the previous place where it showed a tea stop symbol was closed and we were to early for the pub! We also got to see the first real visible remains of a mile castle (19) although covered in turf still obviously visible, although stood on it was a group of cows, which looked quite amusing as though they were gaurding it! Tomorrow the hilly sections begin!



Cows gaurding Milecastle number 19



Bath house at Chesters, possible lockers for the soldiers clothing before entering the bathing rooms.

Day 2

Well end of day two which has taken us through the rest of Newcastle up onto the line of the wall itself at heddon on the wall which of course was a photo opportunity! We found a well placed cafe and filled ourselves with tea and cake before heading on. We then picked up the line of the ditch and the valum, the wall itself was not visible at this point and after realising that if we sped up we could get to the pub in time for food so we sped past the reservoirs to the call of food. We managed to get to the Robin Hood inn just in time for a very needed pub lunch! Just a few miles on we reached our campsite and a well earned rest and a chance to dry off after getting caught in a downpour! We also used our poles for the first time today, and although at first we felt a little silly I hate to say it but within a very short time we realised how much of a help they are when you are carrying everything you need on your backs!



First time setting up camp, something we got used to doing quite efficiently!

Day 1

Well end of day one and a bit of an adventure to say the least! After
arriving at kings cross to find nothing going further than Doncaster
so thanks to Virgin and Northern rail for rescuing we got there via carlisle only 3
hours later than intended! Well we have done the first 8 miles which
went well apart from a few sore spots from my rucksack! Tomorrow is
about 13 miles and we get to see the first real bit of the wall. The first section of the walk was all road and pavement walking which is always harder than walking on softer ground, at least there was some interesting structures along the way to keep our minds off our suffering bodies!


Baltic Art Centre




Cranes at Swan Hunter ship yard at the start of the walk next to the Segedunum Fort.

A weighty subject

Well our rucksacks are packed and ready to go as you can see from the photo below where we trying them out, looking at the photo they don't look too heavy although looks can be deceptive, we were very surprised that what seems so little can weigh so much! As you can see we needed to lean against each other to stay standing...well OK not quite that bad but I think we will be glad we are taking walking poles...neither of us thought we would ever be saying that!

One week to go!

As from tomorrow there will be just one week to go before our adventure along Harian's Wall Trail, our (very heavy) rucksacks are packed ready and we are as ready as we can be, with a few ingenious solutions to keeping the bulk and the weight down, although after picking our rucksacks up you may think differently though! I now really feel for those who backpack around the world with their life on there backs in the very large rucksacks!

Last real training!

Well these next two weekends are our last chance to get some serious training in before the big event as we have a fairly packed schedule between now and then, hopefully the weather will be kind and we can pack a few miles in over the next two weekends!

Five weeks and counting!!

Time is flying! Only five weeks to go before 'D Day', departure day that is. Which means only five weeks left to get practicing both walking and packing our heavily laden rucksacks!

More practice!

As we had a free weekend we decided to head up to the North York moors for a bit more practice for walking the wall as it is getting close in terms of getting an opportunity to get some more serious practice in! So on the Saturday we headed to The Bridestones on the edge of the Dalby Forest where we managed to fit in a walk of about 11 or so miles on a round walk to the Bridestones, see below!


One of the Bridestones which is looked after by the National Trust.

We then drove over to Ravenscar, the town that never was, in the early 1900's developers bought the land and set out plots ready to sell to build a town to rival Scarborough, however due to several factors, like the fact you can't get to the beach due to cliffs and severe erosion it was never built, although there are some tell tale signs like bit's of roads and pavements and the brickwork's which was going to be used to build the town! After stopping for a nice cup of tea in the tea shop we managed to walk another 3 or so miles walking down to the disused brick works and the Alum works which made and interesting end to the day.

On the Sunday we took it a bit easier with a 7 1/2 mile walk out from where we were staying over Bransdale moor, which apart from being very windy on the top of the moor and quite busy with Land Rover and motorcycles on discover Yorkshire trails, it was still an interesting walk and near the end we spotted a yellow skunk cabbage on the edge of a woodland which was in flower.


Yellow Skunk Cabbage.

Cleaning the act up!

No, we haven't been doing things we shouldn't have! Just finding more ways to keep the weight down. As we don't want to end up at the end of the walk all smelly from all that hard work we have come up with a bit of another wacky idea to lighten the load whilst keeping clean at the same time. Instead of taking bulky and heavy shower gel and shampoo we decided to decant the contents from their original bottles and into re-cycled squeezy drinks bottles, remembering to label them so we don't get them mixed up! See the pictures below!

We have the technology!!

The test message below was sent from my phone with thanks to google mail and their mobile service so we will be able to send text message type posts along the walk!! Although no pictures and they will only be short but we will at least be able to update you all through out the week how it is going, then will do a full report when we get back!

test

test

Pillow talk

Ok not quite what it sounds :-) There are some luxury's we have decided we couldn't do without, a decent pillow being one of them! It will be bad enough having aching leg muscles and sore feet so the last thing we want is a sore neck and a bad nights sleep. As we have to travel light a normal pillow is out of the question so we have done a bit of research on small lightweight camping pillows. After a bit of web trawling and looking in camping shops we decided hollow fibre pillows was the way to go small, light and comfortable!Anyway the only problem with the pillow of choice was the cost, starting from around £5+ each, that would have meant at least £10 for two pillows which are less than half the size of a normal one!! Not to be defeated we struck on the idea of making our own!! So we went and bought a normal hollow fibre pillow for £2 and two pillow cases for £1.50, so a grand total of £3.50 for two pillows!! Just in case your interested below is how I made 2 camping pillows from one normal pillow, with the advantage I could make them to suit, although they are slightly heavier than one we could of bought by about 80g I think they are much more comfy.

Step one - Take a normal hollow fibre pillow, carefully cut one end open and take out the filling and put aside

Step two - Cut the pillow cover in half, hem and sew up one side of the one that has two open ends, split the filling you kept aside in half and stuff both pillows, then sew up and hem the final side to leave you with two smaller pillows.



Step three - Take a pillow case and put one of the half size pillow inside and measure and cut the pillowcase to size and sew up the cut side to leave a half size pillowcase.

Up and running!

Our website is now fully up and running now (Click on link on right hand side bar), so please feel free to have a look around at all the different pages. There is a quick history of the wall and a page on the logistics of how we plan to walk the trail. And don't forget to have a look at our wall of sponsors!!

On a roll!

Everything seems to be moving quickly now, today was our first day collecting sponsorships which went very well! Thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

Take a look at our Sponsors Wall of Fame to see who has donated so far.

Booked!!

Things are getting closer and closer!

We have now booked the train tickets and confirmed with all the campsites dates of arrival etc. Although some seem to reckon we are a little mad...we could have told them that! Still a few things to still organise before the off. For example we need to do a practice run of packing, walking then unpacking fully laiden rucksacks!

Birdoswald

Just experimenting with adding photo's to the blog so I thought I would add one of an entrance way into Birdoswald fort on Hadrians wall from when we were there last June!

37 Miles!

As hoped we upped our training last weekend and managed to do 3 days of back to back walking in practice, building up from 10 miles on the first day, 15 on the second and back down to 12 on the third making it a total of 37 miles in 3 days! I have to admit the last mile on the second day was a bit of a killer and made me think why are we doing this...however despite the aches and pains we did carry on to do 12 miles the next day and it was worth it, not only did we not ache as much as I thought, (apart from really bad pain from my ankle which I now have a lump on my bone, which I not sure if it was due to the walking or if it was already there and I made it worse, just need to re-adjust how I tie my boots next time to see if it fixes the problem), we was left at the end of the 3 days feeling really positive and although know it will be a real challenge, it is do-able! And as a bonus the last day was really nice, sun came out and a lovely walk to boot! We also saw over the 3 days several large birds of prey...not sure what they were, 2 hares and 2 groups of young stags just to make the weekend complete.

Food glorious food!

As we will be traveling very light we plan to eat at least one good meal a day, either pub or cafe or the like and carry dried meals with us for instant just add hot water food snacks. After doing a fair bit of research and realising proper dried camping food you find in camping shops is very expensive and can be a bit bulky/heavy. We have in our search found what is hopefully the solution, dried snack pots from the supermarket which range from pasta to potato to rice dishes. Today we are testing a pasta bolognese flavor pot, which is eatable but could do better! So far the potato with sweetcorn and tuna rated highly and also did the pasta with cheese and ham, tomorrow I'm going to try a rice one! The idea is that we empty the contents into sealable bags so we can carry as many as we need, just need two dishes and boiling hot water and we will be away!

In Training!!

Ok if all things go well with my roster and I get three days off in a row our plan is to try 3 days walking based from my front door doing at least 10 miles each day, with a rucksack each, though not packed to the full weight we will be carrying as we haven't worked it out yet!! Also we want to start gently and work out way up in weight and size off our rucksacks and also the distance walked!! I'll update on here how we get on!!

The Begining!

OK better give you some background! Last June myself and my partner were up on a camping holiday in Scotland for a week then the Lake District, on the way from Scotland driving to the Lake District we decided to visit Hadrian's wall...that's where it all began, whilst browsing in the gift shop at Birdoswald he spotted a book on the Hadrian's Wall National Trail, us both being a bit nutty decided that would be a great idea! Also whilst we were at it we may as well collect for a good cause, in this case for the charity called The Railway Children (See separate link for more info!!)

Anyway to cut a long story short! We are now at the serious planning stage and beginning of training!! I hope to use this blog as a diary of the run up to the walk and when we get back, how we got on!! Also any other useful bit's of info along the way!!