Europe Trip: British Heritage Blitz (Northumberland)

Hadrian's Wall, Northumberland National Park

Before we left, I bought British Heritage Passes online for us to use in the UK. The passes seemed like a great deal because you could get into lots of castles and palaces with them...but due to confusing roads, bad weather, and places we had to be at certain times, we ended up not using them as much as we thought we would. Our day of travel to Edinburgh (our last day with our car) was deemed "British Heritage Blitz"--in which we would try to use our passes the most possible times to get our money's worth out of them.

We woke up early, got lunch/snacks at a grocery store, and headed off to Hadrian's Wall--the northernmost border of the Roman Empire. This part of the trip really captivated my imagination...it was crazy to think of the Roman Empire stretching all the way to this point and all the land to the north being the wild unknown. I loved traveling north...the scenery got bigger and more vast, the history got "older", the names of places got a little stranger, and the accents stronger (but the radio stations didn't get any better). And, if you got injured, you could be picked up by an "invalid carriage." That didn't have anything to do with the story, I just wanted to put it in somewhere.

Jeremy enjoying driving on the British side of the road/car

Kaci manning the command station...usually 4 maps going at once, sometimes the opening and closing of the maps got in the driver's line of vision but he didn't complain too much.

Again, I didn't take any pictures of the scenery, but it was hard to capture the beauty with a craigslist camera and amateur photography skills. Here's what wikipedia has to say about Northumberland:

"Being on the border of England and Scotland, Northumberland has been the site of many battles. The county is noted for its undeveloped landscape of high moorland, a favourite with landscape painters, and now largely protected as a National Park. Northumberland is the most sparsely populated county in England, with only 62 people per square kilometre.

The area was once part of the Roman Empire and as Northumberland it was the scene of many wars between England and Scotland. As evidence of its violent history, Northumberland has more castles than any other county in England, including the castles of Alnwick, Bamburgh, Dunstanburgh and Warkworth."

Alnwick Castle, which I think we might have seen out the window of the car

We drove along Hadrian's Wall (the Roman Wall) to Housestead's Roman Fort. We had learned about this fort (or a fort near it) at the British Museum and the movie (that I don't recommend) King Arthur. The British Museum had letters written by soldiers who were stationed there--most likely bored and cold much of the time but under constant vigilance due to attacks from the Saxons and Kelts and Merlin and blue people...(oh wait, that last part was from King Arthur). The first recorded writing by a woman to another woman was from here...an invitation to a birthday party for her son. The fort is on a sheep farmer's (are they farmers? I don't know) land...you opened and shut his gates and stepped in his sheep's poo on the way there.

I liked how un-gimmicky it was...a few signs and no reconstruction (the only evidence of maintenance we saw was a woman scraping moss off the rocks with what looked like a credit card). The rest was left to our imaginations.

It's interesting to think about the centuries following the Roman Empire's fall when these forts and sites wouldn't have been considered special or worth preserving...the lady we talked to confirmed our suspicion that many of the stones from the fort are now in farmer's houses or fences because of the ease of not having to cut new ones.

Jeremy checking out the best example of Roman latrines

If you click on the picture, you can see how the latrines were used...ew

Next we headed to the coast to see Bamburgh Castle. It was a cool castle on the coast--from it you could see two other castles.

The castle dungeon with bloody mannequins and a tape playing moaning and clanging sounds. The castle had a lot of used weapons on display, but I didn't take any pictures because I was too busy cringing at the thought of their uses.

After the castle, we went to Holy Island...the place where Christianity was first brought to England by St. Cuthbert in the 600s. Holy Island is only an island during high tide, so we drove across a road that is only open in low tide. It was beautiful. It seemed strange to learn of the life of St. Cuthbert...who seemed only to want to be left alone, who even moved to a more remote island to get away from people, yet was constantly pestered to do things for the people and whose remains are now enshrined at Durham Cathedral and considered to have magical powers and are a pilgrimage site. Holy Island is where the monks created the beautifully illustrated Lindisfarne Gospels (a far better use of their time than monks we would learn about later in our travels). The gospels are considered a rare work of ancient art...and we just missed seeing them in London. Next time, next time.

There is a castle out on that penninsula--click to enlarge

We had to hurry on to Edinburgh to drop off our car by closing time, so we didn't get to explore as much as we wanted. The border crossing was as uneventful as crossing a state line in the U.S., and I read the "Edinburgh" and "Is Scotland Really A Country?" sections aloud from Rick Steves' guide book as we traveled...more on those topics tomorrow.

Next Stop: Edinburgh (which I will write about carefully because my new Scottish friends will probably be reading this) :)