Following a fantastic evening at Twice Brewed where we had a dinner of pizza and Sycamore Gap beer brewed on site, we set out for day no. 4. Before I get to that, I want to say a huge thank you to “Steve” the proprietor of Twice Brewed, a really lovely helpful man.
So day 4 started as day 3 had finished, lots more climbing. The picture above shows just one of the several climbs on route. They are tough. All of the guide books tell you that you can walk the Hadrians Wall path without training and preparation – rubbish. Because of the constant up and downs it takes much, much longer to complete the distances than you would usually expect.
Within a couple of miles of the start we came across once of the most iconic views associated with Hadrians Wall, Sycamore Gap. For those of you old enough to remember, this location was used to film one of the scenes from Robin Hood – Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner. We caught it on the perfect day too!
We stopped at one of the mile castles high on the ridge east of Sycamore Gap for our lunch, there’s nowhere in this section to stop for a pub lunch or a cafe so packed lunches were needed. Thankfully the weather was hot and sunny all day long so no need to find shelter out of the rain.
After even further climbing we arrived at the highest point on top of the ridge and were presented with an Ordnance Survey Trig point, there was one among us who wanted to show us that he could stand atop the trig point. While I was ultimately impressed with the fact that John could make the climb, it was touch and go for a while and could have ended in tears!
The remainder of the afternoons walk was across terrain similar to the above, a steady descent down towards the Tyne valley and Chollerford, where we will stay this evening. Todays route was only 13.3 miles but with the high number of tough climbs it took us around 8 hours and we arrived at The George in Chollerford around 6pm.
The George is next to the bridge that crosses the Tyne in Chollerford and has a garden with river access. The first thing we did when we arrived was take our boots and socks off and plunge our feet into the freezing cold waters of the Tyne!
Tomorrows walk see’s us climb out of the Tyne valley before descending towards Heddon-on-the wall, a distance of 15 miles. We’ve completed 58 miles so far and tomorrows walk will take us to 73.
I’ll report on how it goes tomorrow evening.
Stephen Arnison 