Hadrian's Wall Path: Day 3

We were really lucky enough to have an exceptionally knowledgeable and very sweet local show us around the Lanercost Priory -- which is worth visiting because for such a small hamlet, it has 3 William Morris & Co. stained glass windows.  It really is a quite exceptional place.  We had to leave before the English Heritage part of the site opened, which was unfortunate since we couldn't contemplate the ruins -- we had to get on our way.  But we did get to go to a local craft fair in Dacre Hall, which was something out of Keeping Up With Appearances or something.

Here are the windows:

 

The proprietress of the B&B was kind enough to drive us about a mile up to Banks, where we began walking at the first turret that is visible of Hadrian's Wall.  Shortly thereafter, we walked through a wooded area that was so lushly verdant:

Woods near Wall Bowers

But that was nothing, because we got to Birdoswald and decided to take the AD122 bus to the Roman Army Museum at Greenhead.  We didn't visit the museum, but we did start the walk over the crags, which was overall spectacular.

on the crags at Walltown Quarry - that's Hadrian's Wall in the background, with those well-cut stones

The rest of the day got pretty tough, as we were going up and down over the crags to Once Brewed.  We passed the highest point on the trail, only 345 meters (1131 feet - for comparison, Mt. Davis in Pennsylvania is 979 meters/3213 feet), where we spoke with a nice Belgian guy from Ghent who was doing the Pennine Way trail.

Right down the hill from the plinth marking the 345 m point is Once Brewed Youth Hostel, where we stayed and ate.

Hadrian's Wall Path: Day 2, continued

One of the top things about the Hadrian's Wall Path is that the people along the way are certainly friendly and because ostensibly we all speak English, it's really easy to communicate.

Mum and this miniature horse near Crosby-on-Eden

The walk from Carlisle was generally uneventful.  We passed some of the vallum on the west end of the fortifications where there was no wall, but only earthen fortifications.  Mostly we just tromped through a lot of sheep and cow poo.  At one point, we really could've gotten ourselves into trouble because we walked too close to a nursing cow with calf.  But as far as the Wall is concerned, you really don't see the it until the third day, no matter if you're walking west to east or east to west.

When we arrived to our B&B in Lanercost, Mum got a bit lost, because I dropped out of view for about a minute, and she'd made it halfway up the hill to Naworth Castle.  It really freaked me out, because it was really very windy and I knew she wouldn't be able to hear when/if I called out to her.  Anyway, I went up every other nearby road except the one she took, of course.  Finally she came back down and the B&B owner Gillian found her.  Once we settled in, I accepted Gillian's offer of tea, and her husband David came in to say that he'd just invited two other friends in for tea, who were walking across the bridge over the River Irthing.

By talking with these four locals, I learned a lot about the local issues -- for example, Hadrian's Wall is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but to what extent?  Is it just the wall, how far around the wall, etc?  The farming subsidies are also a huge local issue, because of course everyone wants the pretty landscape and local, organic food, but also to have it cheap.  So the way they described it was that farmers whose fields we were walking through were being paid to manage the landscape.  Whether that's true or not, I certainly don't know, but it's an interesting way to describe farm subsidies.  It was during this conversation that I learned about Sarah Outen, who is going around the world by her own power -- she was the friend of one of the gentlemen's sister from Oxford.  Because it also became clear that the local Lanercost Priory was quite important, we arranged to visit it the next morning.

That night, we had dinner at The Belted Will Inn -- half rack of ribs for both of us, with some cider for me.  They were out of their local Cumbria sausage Scotch Eggs, and I was really disappointed because I love Scotch Eggs.  The B&B took us there, and the owner of the Inn drove us back to the B&B.  We passed Naworth Castle, which is a quite valuable estate, still making money from the land and tenant farmers.  Philip Howard is a cousin of the Howards who have Castle Howard in Yorkshire, which is where the Brideshead Revisited movies were filmed.  Apparently Naworth Castle is partly modernized but mostly it's a right proper castle, with suits of armor and everything.

Hadrian's Wall Path: Day 2

It seems it is unclear to either of us how far we walked today because we're not sure in what unit of measurement the signs are, and then sometimes the distances vary as well. My estimate is over 10 miles, certaonly, but I'm working back from the better km estimate because appaently UK miles are longer than American miles?
We started out in kind of bad weather but by the end of the day it was warm and sunny.
It's important to note that we've not yet seen the actual wall, per se, and we won't until tomorrow at Banks.
We're staying at a sweet little B&B near Lanercost Priory, which we will briefly tour tomorrow before stamping our passport at Birdoswald and then heading over the crags to Once Brewed.
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Hadrian's Wall Path: Day 1

Today we biked 15 miles of the 84 mile trail from Bowness-on-Solway to Carlisle, in the rain. We passed lots of cows and sheep grazing on the Solway Firth marsh, and the tide was much higher than it was when we arrived this morning. Because of the rain, I was glad to be wearing my astronaut long underwear, and really we dried out quickly as we got into Carlisle.

Leaving Bowness-on-Solway

It took probably about 2.5 hours or so, and when we got to Carlisle, we visited the very beautiful cathedral and had a nice lunch there. We were able to get good directions to our b&b and get a few last-minute supplies.

We had dinner in a pub across the street and got out just as the Man U v. Barca final game was starting.
Tomorrow we'll walk to just past Walton.

Bowness-on-Solway

After catching the bus in Carlisle, we arrived at Bowness and the B&B keeper was waiting for us at the door. We're staying in a converted former Methodist chapel.
We went to the trailhead to scout it out, and then had some dinner at the King's Arms pub - wonderful people, really. The owners, in the middle of taking care if other customers, answered all of our questions about, for example, tidal flooding. Scotland is just across the Solway Firth estuary.
They have a pig named Joe, who is a pet and who is at least as long as his girth, and has quite long hair.
Perhaps the highlight was their guestbook, of walkers starting or ending- I may post some excerpts later.
We also got our passports, to be stamped along the way - I have a feeling it may become one of my dearest possessions.
Tomorrow morning we set off on bikes for the first day.





Solway Firth watercolor from one of the guestbooks





This cartoon is hanging in our B&B.

Location:Bowness-on-Solway

Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Gateshead Millennium Bridge and Baltic Center for Contemporary Art





I love train stations. Waiting for the train to Carlisle.





Newcastle panorama from the Baltic.

Did you know?
Sting is from Newcastle.

vlog: Souvenirs

I made this quickly this evening:

Souvenirs from Maria Silvestri on Vimeo.

The Great North Museum

Ohh how lovely it is to get to a museum and it's free entrance.  If this is the horrors of European social democracy...  Free museum visits take the pressure off of feeling like you have to get your money's worth and see everything, because you can just see what you want and then leave, edified by what you saw and not exhausted by it.

To me, it seemed like this museum would be a good introduction to Hadrian's Wall museologically, and indeed it was.  As the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli has the best artifacts from Pompeii and Herculaneum, so it would seem does The Great North Museum have the best artifacts from the Hadrian's Wall region.  After our Roman sojourn from 2000-2002, I've gotten to visit some of the far reaches of the ancient Roman Empire: the Ponte del Diablo and the Römanisches-Germanisches Museum.  Because of the need to defend the borders, it seems there was more diversity at the far reaches of the empire than there was in other areas - and from such diversity, a greater cross-section of ancient Roman life appears than it does in Rome itself.  This is something I expect to see more of in the next week or so.

While 9.9 times out of 10 I'm not a fan of touch screen doodads in museums, there was a really interesting interactive display in this exhibit: when a century finished a section of the wall, they carved their name into a century stone.  In this kiosk, you can record your name and then see your initials on the screen, with a soldier walking around it, too:

The soldier is covering his head because it's raining in the video the way it was raining outside today.  

Can you find our initials?

However, museum analysts: my mom did comment on how hard it was to use.  So ixnay on the ioskkay, eh?

These bronze harness mounts from the 2nd-3rd century CE were some of the finest artifacts on display:

These figures were all throughout the exhibit, providing more personal stories of life along the Wall in Roman times.  I'm posting this one so that my friends E & A can see that I wasn't making up the thing about the Phrygian cap:

Aux armes, citoyens!

I wasn't expecting such excellent highlighting of the Cult of Mithras, but I guess I should've, because it was a cult very popular amongst Roman soldiers.  I certainly learned some new things today.  The cult of Mithras has a legacy that we still are connected to today, because of Christianity's adaptations of pagan customs.  I excerpt some sections of a BBC article about it (and if that's not enough, here's another link):

Mithraism and Christianity had many similarities - baptism (although Christians used water instead of blood), bread marked with a cross and wine taken in a ritual meal, Sunday as a holy day, and the idea of brotherhood of members with a priest who was called 'father'.
Mithras himself was born of a virgin on 25 December, and lived a celibate life. On 6 January following his birth, the infant Mithras was visited by Magi. He is often pictured between two torchbearers, one pointing upward to heaven, the other downward to hell - just as Christ was crucified between two thieves, one of whom repented while the other did not.
Interestingly, an inscription to Mithras exists which reads:

'He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation.'

St Peter's Basilica in Rome stands, in fact, on the very spot on which the last Taurobolium - the blood-baptism of the bull sacrifice - took place in the 4th Century in what is called the Phrygianum, referring to Phrygia, the place of Mithras' origin. This is according to David Fingrut, Mithraism: The Legacy of the Roman Empire's Final Pagan State Religion, 1993.
It has been argued that the Emperor Constantine, long regarded as the founder of Christianity as a state religion in Rome - and now known to have been a follower of yet another solar cult, that of Sol Invictus - simply overlooked the amazing similarities in the different mystery cults of his day in the service of unity in his far-flung empire.

There was also an interactive feature where you walked into a small, windowless room, and were transported in time to a Mithraeum. One of my favorite archetypal visual symbols is often found in Mithraic imagery, Christian imagery, and other forms of folk art:
 

Altar detail, The Great North Museum

But now that we're on this Mithras thing, I may as well illustrate the Phrygian cap idea: As you see in the picture above, the devotee of the Cult of Mithras is wearing one, ceremonially. It's the hat Mithras wears in reliefs as he's killing the bull. After wide use in ancient imagery, it then was adopted as a symbol of freedom in the French Revolution, American Revolution, and the (French) Revolution of 1830 - see Delacroix's painting, Liberty Leading the People, and then various Bolivarean Revolutions.  Because I'm weird like that, I have made one prototype and will probably make another, to bring back the Phrygian cap.

This was I think last year sometime?  Goofy me - but Phrygian Cap v. 2.0 will be better.

My only criticism of the Hadrian's Wall exhibit was that there was no intro text and it was difficult to understand how to use the exhibit - even though it was self-guided and circular, with no intended route, which I prefer.  It'll be interesting to see what's left at some of these sites after seeing what's there from them in the museum.  Also, perhaps because of British museological style, there was a lot of restored and filled-in fragments, instead of just fragments left alone.  Controversial.

Lowbrow, I know

I'ma try and sneak in something lowbrow here, because it was soooo funny:

Grainger Street, Newcastle Upon Tyne

While mum was turning away and pretending she didn't know me as I was taking this picture, she was totally laughing too.  ... reminds me of a certain classic SNL sketch.

Food Souvenirs

I was just reading this article on Serious Eats, and it of course is very timely.

The main question is: What are your favorite food souvenirs to tote home?

Since I know a lot of lovely, interesting people will read this post, I thought I'd open it up to us, the lovely little community that reads this blog - don't be shy.

Over the years, Team Silvestri has brought back, among other things:

• a dried poppy seed bulb
• bryndza cheese and slanina
• dried mushrooms
• Cadbury chocolate-covered whole hazelnuts

I think that since we've got such good Italian and fresh markets in Pittsburgh, we never brought anything from Italy as much as we have from Slovakia.  Until I have my own sheep in my backyard, I'll have to keep bringing it back.

How about you, dear readers?