Great rides: Riding Roman roads

We spent the day chasing a dark grey raincloud. My friend Claire, often ahead of me on the hills and behind me on the flats, merrily pedalled along in her pink cycling jacket, which popped pleasingly against the implausibly dark line hovering in the sky, always just ahead of us.

The weather did little to puncture our mood, however, because we were enjoying the second of a nearly perfect three days of cycling. Coastal paths met billiard-smooth tarmac with barely a car in sight, and the scenery stretched before and beside us, first on remarkably flat land and secondly on remarkably hilly.

We were roughly tracing, at least for the central part of the ride, the route of Hadrian’s Wall, an engineering marvel of the Roman era. But for now the road ran, with barely an incline, alongside the coastline on off-road paths and quiet roads. That first day the drizzle set in shortly after leaving our train at Whitehaven.

Right as rain

We’d planned our trip weeks ahead, Claire taking a couple of days away from her infant son and partner, so a little thing like three days of predicted rain wasn’t about to stop us.

We arrived at our B&B in Silloth early evening, soaked but happy, and our hosts delighted us with conversation and delicious home-made food, before we dangled all our clothes over a heater and I tried in vain to sleep in the resulting sauna. Claire had no problem nodding off, I’m pleased to report.

The next morning an equally top-notch breakfast, including home-made bread, set us up for day two. As we stepped outside, a dramatic squall saw Claire and I run for different shelters. Once the rain ceased pummelling the dripping trees of the town’s waterfront park, it revealed the most remarkable view.

Standing before the Solway Firth, with Scotland beyond encased in a grey-blue damp, was one single windswept pine, defiant against the elements. The hills of Dumfries and Galloway were distantly lit across the deep blue water in spotlights of golden sun.

We hid under a few more trees during the few moments when we outpaced that cloud that morning, stopping for a snack and a photo somewhere along the road to Carlisle. I was wrongly convinced if I closed my mouth and grinned, you couldn’t see my cheeks were hamster-full with flapjack. We almost died laughing examining the pictures that evening.

We were a bit damp, and Claire had some waterproof socks I was admiring. Struggling to get my bike into the big chainring since its last service, we stopped at Bikeseven cycle shop in Carlisle, hoping for a fix.

This turned out to be a very good decision, as they also gave Claire a shorter secondhand handlebar stem at a very good price – her upper body was looking awkwardly stretched out on the bike. The mechanic waved a magic wand over my bike as well; I’d just needed to push harder on the lever, it turned out.

Staff also let us order a delicious local pizza to eat at a high table in the shop. To top it off they stocked matching waterproof socks to Claire’s, the purchase and application of which made my feet sing with delight. We were only halfway through our day by this point, and the road was about to turn uphill, so we took our pizza-filled bellies and my newly cosy, dry feet and headed out.

The edge of empire

Bowness-on-Solway marks the start of Hadrian’s Wall, but we saw no evidence of it until long past Carlisle, when it practically walloped us over the head. This is partly because much of the wall was dismantled over the years, to be used in local buildings – long before heritage conservation was a concept.

Construction of the original wall began in 122AD, during Hadrian’s reign as emperor. Claire and I tried to work out how many generations of people this unfathomable timescale will have spanned – and failed.

We rode in silence for a while, pondering the enormity of human history and its vagaries. Claire is a stronger rider than me, despite a lopsided single pannier, which stayed on the same side of the bike for three days and sometimes jumped off the bike on the more vicious speed humps. On flat roads she daydreamed and dawdled behind but on the hills her killer instinct kicked in and she quickly overtook me like a wonkily laden mountain goat.

Personally, I was worried about the hills. We’d chosen this coast-to-coast route as a gentler alternative to the more famous but lumpier C2C (Sea to Sea) route. I later learned I’d plotted our route wrong, somehow including a double scaling of the hilliest part of the ride by adding our waypoints in the wrong order. This left me pleasantly surprised, by the end of day two, at the ease of the remaining challenge.

Once we’d ascended to wild Northumbrian hill country, we had our first sighting of the wall. We leaned our bikes up and gazed at one of its 80 milecastles. These regularly spaced watch towers, one Roman mile apart, would have been patrolled by men tasked with keeping the empire safe from local people that propaganda at the time depicted as barbarians.

We contemplated the remains of this structure, little more than a two-storied tower surrounded by wild grassland, and thought of the soldiers posted here long ago. Many of them had been ordered to march on foot from southern and eastern Europe to this posting.

Hadrian himself was born and raised in a villa south of modern-day Seville. He and many of his companions may have felt they had travelled to the very end of the earth when they arrived at this cold, damp wilderness.

This border represented the northern reach of what the Romans considered civilised territory. Beyond it lived the Picts, the Roman name for a diverse collection of northern British tribes. These people were so called for their tattoos, the name stemming from the Latin word pictus, meaning painted.

Digging it

Claire and I, meanwhile, were on the lookout for our own blue-painted imagery. The red and blue NCN signs pointed us off a steep main road and around an awkward chicane barrier to a wall of an off-road path.

Claire the mountain goat practically hummed her way up it but I’d lost my momentum and had to get off and push. I like to think I looked suitably epic finally cresting that ascent in slow motion.

We enjoyed a sharp drop into Haltwhistle but not the 100m climb back up to our B&B. If you’re staying at the Milecastle Inn or Bridge House B&B, both of which are on top of the hill beside the Military Road, I’d recommend skirting the town and instead staying on the flat Military Road that shadows Hadrian’s Wall.

We enjoyed a hearty dinner in the Milecastle Inn and some alcohol-free beer claiming to be isotonic, then fell into a deep sleep in our thankfully cool twin room.

After meeting our B&B owners’ runner ducks the following morning, who produced our breakfast eggs, we cycled the short distance to Vindolanda. We arrived just ahead of opening time and stashed our bikes behind an outbuilding in the car park as bicycles and archaeology shall not mix, apparently.

This Roman fortress predated even the wall, and we spent a good hour or so admiring the site and its remarkable finds, from jewellery to carts to shoes and the famous writing tablets. In Vindolanda the earliest example of a woman’s handwriting was discovered – a birthday party invitation. This showed these outposts of the empire housed families, not simply male soldiers.

There is also among the earliest examples of a public toilet, where users sat on a communal bench above a cleverly plumbed trough. Privacy is perhaps a modern concept. The fort was eventually abandoned and much of the remaining property was burned. In the damp soil the flames fizzled out, however, and the half-burned goods remained remarkably preserved.

Today, an estimated 27% of the site has been excavated, and it’s a race against time to discover the rest as hot summers, caused by global heating, dry the soil, exposing artefacts to the decaying effects of oxygen. A final stiff climb after Vindolanda and we were on a broad road with fine views of rolling hills.

After this we found ourselves whizzing down a seemingly endless series of descents to the outskirts of Newcastle. Despite the climbing, it felt like we enjoyed more descent than we’d banked by this point, and our final day’s ride was punctuated with whoops of happiness – and no more rain.

We managed a final sandwich in a golf club on the outskirts of the city, right beside the path, then hopped on our train home.