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We were up in Newcastle for a long weekend and we decided to head up to Hadrians Wall for the day. Weather wasn’t particularly brilliant but we had raincoats … or so we thought! Callum announced that he had picked Dad’s jacket up by mistake so he didn’t have a coat. We either needed to divert via a shop to get Callum a coat … or he could just wear Dad’s. It was the latter option!
We headed North over the Tyne Bridge, picked up the A69 and headed West.
First stop of the day was at Housesteads Roman Fort which falls under both English Heritage and National Trust. From the car park, it’s a half mile walk to reach the Roman Fort … and the rain really started to come down. There’s a little museum by the fort and every man and dog headed in here to shelter from the rain … you could hardly move.
In the end we carried on regardless and explored the fort. The views were still pretty cool in spite of the rain. The wall is actually pretty impressive – wide enough for two soldiers to march side-by-side. The north and south gate houses were still evident as were other buildings, thanks to the descriptive panels dotted around.
Our second stop of the day was the English Heritage property at Chesters Roman Fort and Museum. The weather had brightened up a little so we wandered over to the Roman Fort first. This was the fort built at the point Hadrians Wall crossed the River Tyne.
The excavations covered huge area – very impressive for the mid-1850s … but then the guy responsible for the excavations just filled them all in!
The bath house by the river is one of the most intact they’ve found (so far!) and it is very impressive.
We then wandered over to the new exhibit – Cavalry 360° – a huge musical instrument standing 3.5 meters high and 12 meters across. It uses 32 wind turbines to create the sound of 500 cavalry warriors thundering towards you. Sadly we were too early to see this operational as it doesn’t open (or start working) until November 2017.
We could see the dark grey clouds rolling in, so started to head back to the car. We got as far as the museum when the heavens opened once more. Nothing else for it but to explore the museum. Loads of artifacts from the excavations – more interesting than we thought it would be.
After leaving Chesters, we started to make our way back to Newcastle … still raining, but we had had a great day.
