It was January, and I needed to get out of the house; away from emails and the effects of a seemingly never-ending Christmastide. The punitive bell of Lent was still months away. When my wife said “I’ve never seen you look so unwell,” it was time to act.
I texted an old pal: “My 19-stone body is badly in need of pilgrimage. I’m going to walk Hadrian’s Wall in winter. Can you join? Restoration of body, liver and soul urgently required.”
“I’m with you,” replied my 53-year-old friend Hugh Warrender, a former hedge-fund manager turned music-manager of left-wing American mega rapper Yasiin Bey. “But as you know, I’ve recently had a heart attack. My coronary artery was 99 per cent blocked. I’ll need sign-off from my cardiologist. And I’ve checked the forecast for Northumberland. There’s biblical weather on the way.” A few days later he texted back with the all-clear.
What makes the ideal companion? In the Canterbury Tales, pilgrimage is consecrated by companionship. The more colourful the group, the better. Hugh worried about leaving his two silvery-grey whippets behind in London. Considering that Hadrian’s Wall is sheep-farmer country, his dogs were not extended an invitation.
Hugh’s obsession with kit reminded me of Apthorpe in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour. The moment we sat down on the train to Carlisle, he pulled out an industrial-sized phone charger (“good for 3 days”) and a blood pressure monitor. Producing his “Emergency Medical Kit”, he gave me instructions about what to do if he had a cardiac arrest in the middle of nowhere. He pointed at some mini-capsules of nitrate acid. “Spray under my tongue and call a doctor.”
We had made other journeys together, including a pilgrimage of sorts to Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion and a road trip to Johnny Cash’s boyhood home in Arkansas. “This is exactly the challenge I need,” said Hugh, as we arrived at Hexham, “to remind myself I’m still alive.”
My own grail was a two-fold quest inspired by the 2020 discovery of a 1400-year-old lead chalice at Vindolanda, a Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall. Built from AD 122 by the Emperor Hadrian, the wall marked the north-west boundary of the Roman Empire. Decorated with religious symbols, the chalice is thought to be the oldest ex-ample of a Christian-graffiti artefact in Britain, which has changed historical assumptions about post-Roman Christianity in the British Isles. Images on the chalice include a happy bishop, a congregation at Mass, a fish, a whale and a monogram said to represent Jesus Christ. The Guardian described the find as “without parallel in Western Europe”, with evidence of an early Christian church as well.
My second reason for walking Hadrian’s Wall was that, ever since the age of 16, I had been fascinated by the idea that the legendary King Arthur was a Romano-Christian 6th-century general called Artorius, victorious at the Battle of Badon in 518 – as chronicled by Nennius in Historia Brittonum. In Morte D’Arthur, Malory describes how Arthur was mortally wounded at the Battle of Camlann in 537 by his son Mordred.
Although disputed, RG Collingwood argued that the site of this legendary last battle was by Hadrian’s Wall, at the 12th Roman fort of Camboglanna (now the hamlet of Castlesteads), located on a high ridge overlooking the River Irthing in the Cambeck Vale. Alas, as I read in my guidebook on the train, the fort was destroyed and levelled in 1791, when a Scottish landowning family called the Johnsons built Castlesteads House over it.
Our first stop was Hexham Abbey, where there has been a Christian church for over 1300 years. The Saxon crypt, reached down a narrow tunnel of ancient stone steps, is one of the earliest Christian sites of worship in Britain. Not for the claustrophobic, it felt like entering the chamber of some ancient Roman catacomb.
Another highlight was the huge sandstone memorial to a 1st-century Roman cavalry standard-bearer, aged 25, whose name was Flavinus. It was found under the flagstone floor in 1881 and was used as a plundered form of building material. The history of Hadrian’s Wall, indeed, is a history of recycling, stealing and re-purposing of stones and artefacts into other local buildings. In the 19th century, Hadrian’s Wall revival enthusiasts started rebuilding important parts of the wall again.
Our walk began in clear blue skies, with a taxi dropping us off at the ruins of Brunton Tower (Turret 26B). Turrets like Brunton were typically built two to every Roman mile, as military shelter posts. After about an hour freezing hail began to pound down on us, with the skies turning an ominous gunmetal grey. A bitter north-eastern wind was gathering speed. After changing into our “wet gear”, we soon found ourselves drenched, frozen and clinically numb from being hit by hail stones the size of marbles. By the time we reached Chesters Fort, Storm Dudley – with wind speed warnings of 90 mph – had arrived.
Thankfully, we saw a sign saying “Walwick Hall Hotel”; set in 100 rolling acres of farmland, it was almost certainly the best place to stay for walking Hadrian’s Wall.
Our timely arrival in a hailstorm reminded me of the scene in The Way – Emilio Estevez’s 2010 film about walking the Camino de Santiago – where a small band of exhausted and hungry pilgrims surrender up their credit cards and swap their usual flea-infested hostel beds for a night at a Parador hotel (the luxury chain of historic-building hotels owned by the Spanish government).
Certainly, for us bedraggled and drenched pilgrims, the Walwick Hall country-house hotel, with its welcoming glass-walled indoor swimming pool, sauna and spa, was as close as we were ever going to get to experiencing the lifestyle of a Roman fort commander, whose villas had under-floor heating and steam baths.
There are also six award-winning self-catering cottages (Chesters Stables) converted from stables that formed a famous 20th-century stud yard. The stables were originally built in 1891 for the Chesters House estate by owner John Clayton, dubbed the man who “saved” Hadrian’s Wall by rebuilding significant parts of it.
On our second afternoon, we retreated back to Hexham, as it was clear our walking gear was inadequate to deal with Storm Dudley’s head-winds. Next day we hit the trail looking like a pair of Michelin Men in goggles, gloves and ski gear. A couple of hours later, with the rain unrepentant, we stood beside the Whin Sill wall of Housesteads Fort – which had once been the last frontier of the Roman world.
Whin Sill was the inspiration for the Ice Wall in Game of Thrones. George RR Martin, the American author of the hit fantasy-novel series, imagined the Night’s Watch guarding the Wall after a visit to Housesteads. He said that he felt “the sense of this barrier against Dark Forces”.
His character Maester Aemon says: “The Night’s Watch is the only thing standing between the realm and what lies beyond.”
Below us was a cliff-like drop across a rocky bluff down towards a vast, sweeping plain – originally a dark forest – where the marauding barbarians would have launched their assaults. It was their eventual success – some 300 years after the wall went up – that led to the seeds of Christianity. The dramatic landscape was filmed in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.
As the sleet pelted down, we continued along a narrow track that wound along the craggy wall, until we got as got as far as Sycamore Gap, the location of the iconic tree on Jesuit-owned land that was cut down in 2023 during a moonlight storm. We took a photo and marched on towards Vindolanda, where the chalice is now on view. A sign at the fort said “Rome: 1,125 miles”.
After walking back from Vindolanda in the dark – past 6pm – we crashed for the night at the famous Twice Brewed, a walkers’ pub, which brews its own stout and ale. After the famous sycamore was felled by a vandal, the pub offered a £1,500 bar tab reward for catching the culprit.
The early 5th-century chalice at Vindolanda suggests how the Christian faith flourished under the Kings of Northumbria. Meanwhile, the hilltop church of St Oswald’s is built on the site of the Battle of Heavenfield (AD 633) where King Oswald raised a large wooden cross and prayed in front of his warriors before defeating King Cadwallon.
At Lanacost Priory, a spectacular 12th-century Augustine priory with an embroidered dossal by William Morris, we saw a Roman centurial stone (inserted upside down) which forms part of the 12th-century stone structure.
As for the second part of my quest, Arthur’s last battle of Camlann, we hit some luck. On a noticeboard at the Twice Brewed pub, we saw a business card for a local Blue Badge Guide called Anna, also an authority on local Christian sites. She showed us the majestic scenery around Walltown Crags and Birdoswald Fort. When I asked if she knew anything of Castlesteads House, she replied: “Oh yes, I know the Johnson family. The grounds are closed to the public but I can try and give them a call.”
An hour later Hugh and I were sipping tea in the kitchen of Castlesteads with the lady of the house, a Catholic Herald reader. Local Mass times were stuck to the fridge. She kindly showed us around the walled garden under which the Roman fort’s foundations still lay. In a potting shed were various Roman artefacts.
Was this where Artorius finally fell in battle? Who knows, but it was a magical experience to just re-imagine Malory’s words from Chapter IV as King Arthur fought to the death with his son Mordred: “And never was there seen a more dolefuller battle in no Christian land.”
There was only one scary moment when I thought I might need to whip out the nitrate-acid tongue spray. It was during the steep ascent to Birdoswald, when Hugh began panting and turned pale. At his 54th birthday dinner at the String of Horses pub near Carlisle on our last night, celebrating the arrival of his whippets (taken up on the train by his London dog-sitter) as a birthday surprise, we agreed it wasn’t his heart that was the problem. It was the two deplorable £12 bottles of Chilean Merlot we had drunk the previous night.
This article first appeared in the March 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, and receive our limited-time Easter offer, go here.
(Photos: iStock, Getty, and by author.)
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