Day 3: Site-seeing – a rest day
As one might expect, we slept like logs after the exertions of the night before, and it was nice to get up safe in the knowledge that we wouldn’t have to drag our aches and pains onto the path again. But free time brings its own challenges! What to do? Well, when there is a substantial Roman fort nearby, one does the only possible thing. We walked down the street and spent a pleasant couple of hours wandering through the 19th Century excavations that made up Chesters.
The blurb says that it is the best preserved cavalry fort in England, and it’s certainly impressive with key excavations revealing the gatehouses, the princeps, the bath house and and barracks. For me, the real interest was in the intervention of John Clayton, who inherited the estate in 1832 and spent the next 60-odd years uncovering the ruins that his father had, to an extent, hidden under a lawn. Clayton and his fellow antiquarians purchased many sections of wall and practiced early archeology on the sites, and the collections are so extensive that they make up for the rather brute force methods they employed.
Clayton purchased Housesteads and other sites as they came on the market, and English Heritage credits him with having saved the Wall. What’s quite amazing is the fact that, even now, 90% of the site has not been explored except by ground mapping, and archeologist know that the fort itself is surround by the ruins of the town. So someone lucky archeology is one day going to be able to do a full vertical survey and answer all the remaining questions.
The Fort controlled the river valley and the Roman bridge, whose abutments you can see across the Tyne, along with the wall itself. It’s another place where the stories that may be told about the site await some more information, but bits of the fort are apparently all round the local area, as the Saxons starting dismantling it for churches and houses in the 7th and 8th century.
We did a very nice lunch in Hexham, thanks to the local bus service – AD122! A sharing plate of Northumberland delicacies did not include black pudding, much to Paula’s relief. We had time to top up the wet weather requirements, just to make sure that it didn’t rain again. This was a real necessity because Paula’s passport was water damaged during yesterday’s walk and we will have to ask the High Commission for help in get replacement documents. We also got a nice surprise, because Hexham Abbey is a bit of a treasure, with amazing leftovers from the medieval church that the Reformers seemed to have missed and a sense of great height. It’s Early English, so it doesn’t have all the vertical lines of later buildings, but it has amazing solidity and lots of interesting architectural features.
We got a sense that, like many parishes in England, it was making a valiant effort to maintain a historical presence in a great building and offer something special as a Christian community. It would have been lovely to hear one of their THREE choirs! But we had dinner booked and some packing, so off we went.
