Waistland

I went alone, on purpose. That is worth saying up front, because a good deal of what follows is about being by myself and I would rather not have you think it happened to me by accident.

I’d burnt myself out at work and wanted a walkabout, and I had a list of things to think about while I had one: how to be a better father, a better coworker, a better human, and a better husband. Eight days of walking seemed like enough time to make a start on all four. When you’ve lost track of where your work stops and the rest of your life begins, there are worse places to think it over than beside a wall, the oldest technology there is for deciding where one thing ends and another begins.

In AD 122, the emperor Hadrian ordered a wall built across what’s now England, where the island pinches in at the waist. Most of it came down over the following centuries—cut stone is useful, and it went into farmhouses, churches, and field walls—but the footings survive in long runs, especially through the rugged middle. What’s left makes a path: 84 miles, coast to coast, about a week if you aren’t in a hurry.

I was in no hurry at all. I walked it from the 27^th of August to the 3^rd of September. It can be done faster, but I wanted room to wander and think, so I followed the relaxed itinerary in the seventh edition of Hadrian’s Wall Path by Henry Stedman. I stayed in bed-and-breakfasts, inns, and pubs each night. Inn to inn on foot is how half the fantasy novels I’ve read get from one chapter to the next, and I’ll admit I liked being in one.

Stirling

I went up to Stirling for a day first. It was not on the way to anything, but we’d lived there as a family for a month, six years earlier. Somewhere in that month I realized my wife and I had arrived at the same city by two different roads. I left with that unsettled and never went back for it. I wanted to see if it was still where I’d left it.

The first thing I did was stand in front of the house. I’d been nervous on the walk over, though I didn’t know about what. It looked the same, and I felt sad in a way I couldn’t have explained to whoever lived there now.

I spent the rest of my time there looking for the old haunts. I walked 20,529 steps without going anywhere in particular: in and out of shops, up toward the castle and back down again.

In the morning I took the train south, over the border, to Carlisle. I hadn’t found what I came for, and I told myself I’d come back a third time. That was the last day I spent not walking. Everything up to it was somewhere I’d already been; everything after, I’d have to walk to.

Bowness-on-Solway

The train got into Carlisle in the rain, with an afternoon to spare before the bus, so I spent it there. I went into the Marks & Spencer and bought food for the next day, an errand that feels enormously competent when you are about to set off across a country.

Then it was the cathedral, and then the castle, where I bought an English Heritage pass on the theory that I was about to walk past a great deal of English heritage. I used it twice the whole trip.

I’d be walking back into this city on my own two feet in about a day. It didn’t occur to me to think about that at the time.

Bus 93 out to Bowness-on-Solway was noisy and warm and cost me £3, and much of the next day’s walk went past the window in reverse, village by village, while I sat still. It dropped me in front of the pub, and I walked down to the Shore Gate House B&B, where I was staying.

He was right about the pack, and, as it turned out, about the nuts. I carried that bag the whole way across England and brought half of it home. There is a point past which a person does not want another nut, and I found it.

I left around nine the next morning with a full breakfast in me and a packed lunch in hand, and walked a long flat day along the shore, through bracken and bramble and villages and a soggy wood.

I also got my first blisters, somewhere in the second half of the afternoon, and spent the last few miles walking in the particular way you walk when you are pretending not to have blisters.

Carlisle

I’d never walked into a city before. I knew, in principle, that you could arrive somewhere without having to put a car anywhere. I hadn’t known it would feel like anything.

I stayed at a B&B in the city center called the Ashleigh House, run by a lovely woman named Leanne. I had thought about going out for dinner and then did not, on account of my feet, and ate nuts on the bed instead.

I had an early breakfast in the quiet company of other solo travelers. Then I walked to the Boots on the corner and bought a fresh pack of bandages and one of every blister treatment they sold. I didn’t know what was ahead, but I knew there wouldn’t be a pharmacy in it.

It was ten before I got moving. Hadrian’s Wall Path runs straight through the middle of Carlisle at a busy intersection, which made me impatient to get back out. Leaving on my own two feet was as good as arriving on them had been. There are a lot of small towns strung along the road east of the city, and then, gradually, there aren’t, and it’s farmland and pasture.

It rained most of that day. It was also the only day I walked with anyone: a French woman, a student in Germany, walking the same stage I was. She told me her name, and I tried it twice and got it wrong both times, so it never stuck.

We walked and talked for a few hours in the wet. She was full of life and ambition and hope, and it was good to be near. At some point she took my travel journal and filled the last page with things to do in Lille, where she was from, and things to look out for the next time I’m there. It’s the only page in that journal I didn’t write.

We said we’d probably run into each other further along the path. We didn’t; she was a much faster walker than me, and I expect she finished a day or two ahead.

I’d have liked longer with her. I hadn’t understood, until she was gone again, quite how much I’d wanted somebody to talk to.

There’s a whole mini-economy along the path in Cumbria: honor-system snack shacks, small cafes, benches put out by people whose houses you are walking past. Somebody had converted a bus shelter into a library, with a bench in it. I sat there a while and aired out my feet.

Newtown

I stayed in Hadrian’s Wall Studio, a room an enterprising couple named Lizzy and Mike built onto their house, tucked in behind one of the snack shacks. I walked straight past it the first time by. The shack hid the studio, and the group of Italians resting outside hid the shack.

The next morning I set out on what became my favorite day of walking on the entire path.

The ground starts to move here. Gentle at first—the path lifts out of the flat and begins working across the ridges instead of around them—and by mid-morning I was properly among it. The way wound through villages and pastures, crept between farm buildings, went over streams on plank bridges and through a stretch of beech wood with the light coming down through it in bars. There was a lot of manure to negotiate. There were also cows and sheep who stopped chewing to watch me cross their field, and stiles of every conceivable design, the English having invented endless ways to get a person over a wall without letting the animals follow.

And there was, at last, the wall.

Not the footings-in-a-field version I’d been getting glimpses of for two days, but courses of it—waist-high, shoulder-high in places—running off ahead across the fields for as far as I could see. For a long stretch the path runs in the narrow channel between the wall and a wire fence, so you walk the whole way within arm’s reach of it. Two thousand years of weather and farming and stone-robbing, and the exact line where an empire decided to stop is still standing.

Gilsland

I had a few moments that day when I said to myself, this is so cool, and the best of them was catching sight of the stone buildings of Gilsland from up the valley. It was pride, mostly, and there was nobody around to say it to but me. After crossing the river into Northumberland and climbing the winding streets of the town, I arrived at the Samson Inn.

It was a community pub with no televisions in the bar, and it served the best food of anywhere I stayed. This includes the packed lunch, which is what you end up judging an inn by when you have to carry it up a hill.

I ate a meat pie, went upstairs, wrote, and did not get back up. My feet had produced some new and inventive sores. I wish I could have stayed a week. Instead it was time to start the steepest part of the trek.

The morning was gentle and lied about the rest of the day. There were easy climbs in and out of valleys, through little settlements, ruined castles up on the hills, narrow bridges, snack sheds hidden in the woods. Then, at Walltown Country Park, the path went into the aptly named labyrinth. Why anyone would put a maze in a section where several National Trails converge is beyond my ability to understand. Getting lost in there was, however, an omen.

It’s after Walltown that you start to see—and climb—the crags. They are beautiful, and you spend the rest of the day going up and down these sons of bitches. The first few weren’t so bad. By the end my 20-pound backpack had stopped being equipment and become a liability with straps.

I sat down on a bench between some of the climbs next to two Englishmen who had clearly done this before. They knew the flooded pits down among the crags were old quarries, and they knew a blister walk when they saw one.

Further on, I found a rock to sit on and ate the sandwich the inn had packed for me. Then I remembered it was my birthday. The sandwich and the sitting down—with two thousand years of wall a few feet away—made a fine little celebration, even if I was lonely. I had come out here expecting to be.

The rest of the day was more of the same, except that going up got harder after each time down. In the late afternoon I reached a monument marking the highest point on this stretch. It was a relief until I looked past it and saw where I was sleeping: in the distance, and looking small. Forty minutes. At least it was downhill. The ¾-mile climb back up could be tomorrow’s problem.

Once Brewed

This junction has become a bit of an attraction, and the Twice Brewed Inn is most of the reason. The restaurant was heaving. I did not entertain the idea of dinner for even a moment. I had a packet of instant porridge I’d picked up in Carlisle, and it was fine, and I was asleep not long after.

I slept through the night, the first time I’d managed it on the trail, and woke with most of the crags out of my legs. The only interruption was a cow, coughing outside my open window sometime while it was still dark.

I was apprehensive about starting again. I did my stretches properly that morning, for once, and checked twice that the pack was balanced before I put it on.

Sycamore Gap comes early in the day. The tree that made it famous was cut down deliberately, not quite two years before I got there, and people there grieved it like a death in the family. I had expected to feel more than I did. It’s a stump in a dip between two crags, with a steady traffic of people arriving to look at where a tree used to be, and I stood among them for a minute. Then I noticed the ring of small starter branches coming up from the stump, and walked on thinking about those instead.

There is nowhere to stop between Once Brewed and Chollerford. No village with rooms, no inn, nothing. You come to appreciate that around mile ten, when quitting stops being one of the options available to you. I had the legs for the distance, at least, which had not been true the day before.

I passed one couple on that stretch, going the other way, Americans, from the Bay Area. He designed the robots that build circuit boards, which meant everything I have ever done for work sits on top of something he made. I told him so and he looked delighted. His wife pointed out that they had come all the way to England to stop talking about computers, and we all moved on.

That stretch is also a long time alone inside your own head, which I suppose was the point of coming. It just felt different now that there was no getting out of it.

I thought about my kids for most of those hours. Not in any organized way—you don’t get organized thinking out of hour six—but circling the same few things over and over. How to be there for them. How to get behind whatever they decide they want, including the versions of it I wouldn’t have picked for them. How to set them up so that later on they have options, which is the one thing I hope I can give them that will still be worth something in twenty years.

Talking to them was harder than thinking about them. The inns had spotty internet, the cell coverage came and went with the terrain, and a call was never a reliable plan. Before I left I’d set up a small private social network, just for us, and we posted back and forth on it all week. It worked when nothing else did: my kids and me, on a network with a population of three, from the middle of Northumberland.

Chollerford

The George Hotel was a bit more “posh” than the places I usually stay. It was also an old building with stone walls, cracked plaster, and peeling paint. The tub was grubby, and after five days on the path a bath in it was still close to a religious experience.

I slept badly there, and couldn’t pin it on my feet or on livestock. For five days my mind had bounced from one thing to the next. That night it finally quieted down and went back to what it does at work: picking up problems and trying to solve them. The trouble was the size of them. Lying there, none of them looked like something I could solve on my own.

The walk out was the gentlest since Cumbria. Part of the morning went through wet woods, quiet in the way they are after rain, with the path soft underfoot for the first time in days.

The two Englishmen from the bench turned up again that morning. They’d remembered the way I was walking, and before I could say much of anything, one of them was holding out a handful of painkillers. I took them, and said thank you instead of that I was fine, which is what I’d been telling everyone for months.

The brambles were ripe along this stretch. Dozens of people walk this path every day and the berries just hang there, being passed by. I ate my fill, then ate some more, and reached East Wallhouses in the middle of the afternoon with purple fingers, no regrets, and less worn out than I’d been in days.

East Wallhouses

The Robin Hood Inn is just a building on the side of the road. Three rooms upstairs, a pub downstairs. Everyone working there was welcoming and generous in a way that felt like no effort on their part.

I had another meat pie and while I ate it, I eavesdropped. A farmer and his wife came in and took the seats they clearly always take. The arrangement, as far as I could tell, was that she drove him down, sat with him while he had a couple of pints, and drove him home again; both of them talked to the bartender the whole time. The bartender was leaving for good. She had a winter at a ski resort lined up and a list of countries after that, and she talked about them the way people talk about a plan they’ve already decided on and are just waiting out the clock on.

I liked her right away, and it took me a minute to work out why. Some of the easiest company I’ve had has been people in the middle of leaving somewhere: the dining room of a bed-and-breakfast, an airport gate, a pub in a village of forty. There’s no preamble with them. You say you’re walking for eight days and they ask which way, not why. Since then I’ve been trying to be the one who asks which way.

I woke before anyone else, as I had at every inn on the walk. You learn the order a building wakes up in: a car or two on the road outside, clanks from the kitchen, then the pipes knocking as the first showers start, then zippers—packs and suitcases being closed up in the rooms around you—and finally the dining room below filling up with voices.

It was a clear, cold morning. Sometime after noon I passed the last of the wall. It doesn’t end so much as run out: a wall two stones high, dwindling into a line of footings in bleached grass, a wire fence keeping pace alongside, houses in the trees beyond. I stopped and looked back along it for a while.

Five days is long enough to get used to walking alongside something. Somebody was posted here for years and then sent somewhere else. I wondered whether he missed it. Six months earlier I’d been offered a posting of my own, to Portugal. I said yes, then backed out, partly because I had a feeling my marriage was a little shaky and I didn’t want an ocean between us while it was. I had the rest of the day to walk and think, and no wall for any of it.

Newburn

The Keelman was the first place I stayed that had a proper desk. Up to then I had written sitting on made beds. A week of that gives a man opinions about furniture. I spent the evening at the desk, fixing small broken things on my website. Nobody was waiting on any of it, and it was still the first thing shaped like work I’d done since I started walking. I’d come out here because work had laid me waste. Fixing things didn’t feel like a relapse.

At breakfast on the last morning I got talking to a couple who had kept pace with me the whole way. Same inns, same benches, arriving a few minutes apart. In a field somewhere past Chollerford the man had gotten out his topographic map and offered to let me look. He seemed concerned I was going to get lost, and about equally concerned that I understand he wasn’t. I took a photo of the map with my phone so he could see me do it, and never opened it again.

That morning I asked them where they were from. It took me a second to read the bewilderment on their faces, and when they said Kentucky I knew I had heard it before. Days before, probably. I asked, sheepishly, whether this was the second time they’d told me. It was not the second time, or the third. They may have been at the first bed-and-breakfast too, back in Bowness. I still don’t know.

When I got home I found them in a photograph from the third day: two small figures going up a grass track toward a big tree, packs on, backs to me. I had been taking a picture of the tree.

The rain that last morning was the settled kind, with no intention of stopping. I walked three hours in it, down along the river and into Newcastle.

There’s more path past Newcastle. A few more miles east to Wallsend, where the wall really ended. I didn’t walk them. I’m not much for ceremony, and by then the blisters had gotten big enough to make the decision on my behalf.

Newcastle upon Tyne

I stayed in a flat near Leazes Park and did not leave it for an entire day. I wrote. I rested. I did some brainstorming and some research and then rested again. I washed my clothes and then myself, in that order, and ate toast, and rested some more. My feet needed the day more than I needed the city and they were much better for it, but it still felt like a day thrown away. I was all the way over there and never saw the center of town.

Eight days of a single instruction—get to the next place—and then none at all. It took longer than I expected for the walk to wear off.

Edinburgh

I took the train back north on the 5^th of September and spent four days in a flat on Fleshmarket Close, off the Royal Mile. I went up and down it every day and never got used to the name.

On the path, strangers talk to each other without needing a reason. You are both walking the same way with the same trouble in your feet, and that turns out to be introduction enough. In Edinburgh the streets were full of people and I said nothing to any of them the whole time. They were going to work or were on holiday and I was just a man trying to clear his head. The only thing we had in common was the pavement.

Stirling is fifty minutes up the line, and Waverley station is at the foot of Fleshmarket Close. I told myself there would be more time later, and that the right way to do it was not alone. I had four days and I didn’t go.

By the last day my mind had gone home ahead of me, and I was left in Scotland waiting for my body to follow it. Somewhere in those days whatever I had worked out stopped sounding like conclusions and started sounding like things I had decided while tired.

I went out there with a list of four. Eight days is a lot of hours to spend on four questions, and I gave them the hours. By Newcastle I had something that felt like answers to most of them. The one about being a better husband stopped being mine to answer about a week after I got home. It had been last on the list, which I’ve since had time to think about.

I am less sure of my answers now than I was then, which may be what a year does to an answer, or may be what they were worth.

I crossed a country, though. That part happened. And my feet are fine now.