Cycling Northumberland

[lethargic_man]

On the seventeenth day of Av A.M. 5766, the spirit of the Lord opanayaim moved upon lethargic_man, and he did gird his loins (that's a lie; I didn't actually have a belt on) and mount his bike, and set forth from the house of his parents. From Gosforth he journeyed through Fenham, down Two Ball Lonnen (isn't that a wonderful name?) and to Denton along the West Road, where the stumps of Hadrian's Wall appeared along the road. Hadrian's Wall in theory continues through Newcastle, to terminate at Wallsend, but in practice this is the first point beyond the fort of Segedunum at Wallsend where there's anything to see.

From Denton, and Newcastle's feathery western edge, he travelled west through Throckley and Newburn along the Military Road (the B6318), which runs along the route of the wall. I'd been hoping to see the wall the whole way as I went, but in practice most of the time there was little to see; the wall had been looted for stones in antiquity. Further west it runs along the escarpment of the geological formation known as the Great Whin Sill, but here sometimes there weren't even hummocks to show its path, let alone a Vallum running to the south!

Between Newburn and Heddon-on-the-Wall (like Hendon, but with a really bad cold) lies the village of Walbottle. Having been familiar with Tolkien's comments on "-bottle" names, and the village of Nobottle in the Shire, since an early age, this name conjured up associations of Tolkiana to me; it was only afterwards that it occurred to me to be disappointed that it wasn't painted green.

A few miles beyond Heddon the map shows a Roman fort called Vindovala. Further west are the well-excavated forts of Housesteads and Vindolanda, but if there was anything to see there, I couldn't see it.

Continuing along the road, a sign pointed to Horsley on the left, birthplace, no doubt, of Thomas Horsley, whose bequest was used to found my old school, in 1545, as described in the school song:

Horsley, a merchant-venturer bold
Of good Northumbrian Strain
Founded our school, the silly old fool,
He must have been insane.

Or that was how we sang it anyway.

One of the things about the Romans was the way that when the landscape put hills in their path, rather than winding their roads around them as anyone else would, they ignored them completely and continued in a straight line up one side and down the other. The Military Road did not let me down in the way of hills, and often I was forced down into first gear climbing up them. The longest bike ride I have ever done was the 75-mile trip from Berwick to Newcastle along the Northumbrian Coastal Route last summer, but that was almost wholly flat, and with the wind at my bike the whole way. This time I had a strong wind from just west of north, and lots of hills, and I wasn't expecting to make anywhere so good a mileage.

Not far from the highest point on my route, almost 700 feet higher than where I started, I came across a cross and a sign at the side of the road, and stopped to read it. It informed me this was the site of the Battle of Heavensfield, where in the year 633, the forces of Oswald king of Northumberland, who had journeyed from the northeast along the Roman road called the Devil's Causeway, joined battle with those of Cadwallon of Gwynedd, who had come from the south along Dere Street. Cadwallon (or Cadwaller) had combined forces with Mercia to bring down the Northumbrian kingdom and by now had dismembered it into its constituent kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, and killed first King Edwin and then both of his heirs. The Welsh, heavily outnumbering the Northumbrians, had taken victory as a given, but the Saxons, fighting both from desperation and religous zeal—Oswald being Christian, and educated at the monastery of Iona, the Holy Isle off the west of Scotland—trounced the Welsh and restored the standing of Northumbria. Desiring to Christianise Northumbria, Osric despatched St Aidan check to found a monastery at Lindisfarne, from where Christianity spread around England, and which was responsible in due course for the famed Lindisfarne Gospels (and, of course, Lindisfarne mead :o)).

If you were standing at this point, the sign said, you wouldn't have seen much of the battle; Hadrian's Wall would have been standing straight in front of you, twenty feet high. There wasn't the slightest trace of it now.

Shortly after Heavensfield, the road began a steep and prolonged descent into the valley of the North Tyne. I'm not sure I've ever cycled as fast in my life; I'd have gone even faster had falling off a few years ago not put the fear of tarmac into me, and now I hit the brakes until I felt in control.

At Chollerford, I stopped for lunch at the King George hotel, where I had come many times as a child... only this time my lunch was packed: sandwiches and a Granny Smith sitting on the car park wall watching the river.

The Hadrian's Cycleway website informed me that west of Hexham there was a high hill to cross to get to Haltwhistle, where, if I ran out of oomph, I could get a train back home. As I was already finding the ascents difficult, the prospect of crossing the Pennines did not appeal, and I decided to head for home. Once home, however, I was surprised to discover from the Ordnance Survey that the Pennines in fact stopped just short of the South Tyne valley, and that the route of Hadrian's Wall to the west was in truth much lower than them.

Nevertheless, once past Hexham the road does head up, and the landscape becomes more rugged, and the fields give way to pasture land then, as one follows the South Tyne south into the Pennines, heather-clad moorland at the top of the valley walls. I came that way two days later with my parents, en route to Cumbria, where we had a look at Long Meg and her Daughters, a neolithic stone circle that was so completely unadvertised, there wasn't even a car park there. Instead, people had to park at the side of the road, which, en route to a farm, passed through the middle of the stone circle! The circle itself was in the middle of a cow field, which led to the somewhat bizarre sight of such tourists as had managed to find the place wandering around freely intermingling with grazing cows.


Coming back (via the watershed at Hartside on the Alston road, and the distant sight of the Lake District in the southwest, and Scotland far away in the northwest, on the far side of the Solway Firth) to my cycle ride, I crossed first the North Tyne then the South Tyne, failed to get a view of their confluence, and made their way into the market town of Hexham, where I was much amused to see a car warehouse called Hexham Horseless Carriages. Hexham's penchant for amusing signage also manifested itself in the form of the Old Gaol, which, the sign announced, had been "welcoming visitors for six hundred years".

My journey back was on the road on the south side of the Tyne, and largely downhill; it took me through Stocksfield, where a childhood friend of my brothers came from, and Prudhoe. Most people probably know the name Prudhoe through Prudhoe Bay, the oil terminal on the north coast of Alaska; I first encountered the name as I had a friend at school from there. Also in this neck of the woods was the original Washington, where George Washington's ancestors held the manor house for several centuries. (There's also a New York on the map in the eastern Tyneside conurbation, but I don't think it's of any great antiquity. I don't know, though.)

Crossing the river back at Ryton, I made my way back through Westerhope (to avoid the big hill on the West Road, which by this stage I was in no state to manage) and home to a well-earned cup of tea. Total distance: 56 miles, weekly total 88 miles. A good journey, I reckon. I wonder which route I'll choose next time.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Sounds as if you enjoy your new bike! Hope you had nice weather for your trip!

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Sounds as if you enjoy your new bike!

I still have another week and a half to wait for that to be delivered. This trip was carried out on my father's even more ancient (sixties vintage) Carlton Corsa (http://oldschoolbicycles.com/id4.html) (still in good condition as only five hundred miles on the clock, of which I'm now responsible for over a quarter!). Sadly, my Peugeot looks like it might finally have given up the ghost today. :-(

Hope you had nice weather for your trip!

A couple of brief showers was all I had to put up with. I was lucky; on Sunday it bucketed it down all day (which is why we headed over the Pennines to the drier Cumbria).