Day 22 - Over the Border
Whitley Bay to Dumfries
I’m back on the road after a couple of days at home and actually it’s great to be on the move again. After all, there’s only so much washing-up and dog-walking a grown man can take and besides, I have the taste for travel now. So, suitably rested and with a rucksac full of clean socks, I’m off on the final phase of the trip.
My journey starts with a short Metro ride to Newcastle’s splendid Central Station where I begin the search for my first bus of the day, and one with a slightly odd route number. Bus operators have been assigning numbers to their bus routes ever since the London Motor Omnibus Company introduced the idea in 1906, but generally speaking they have left letters alone apart from the occasional X to denote an express or A’s and B’s to identify slight route variations. This morning’s bus, though, has an even broader range of letters and numbers, and for good reason.
I'm looking for the AD 122 'Hadrian Wall Country' service, a number deliberately chosen because it matches the year in which Emperor Hadrian ordered work to start on his Wall (AD 122), and because this service runs for almost its entire length.
I quickly locate my bus standing outside the railway station with its driver indolently kicking its tyres while enjoying his last fag before setting off. I’m the first to arrive so we stand outside for a while and chat whilst he carefully finishes his roll-up. I compliment him on his well-turned out bus and he grins.
“Aye, it’s bonny, isn’t it?” he laughs.
“We only run in the summer. Last year we never took less than £200 a day, but this year seems a lot slower. Sometimes we're only are taking £20 a day.
“Hope it picks up,” he says, stubbing his fag out on the freshly cleaned tyre.
He sells me a day rover ticket and I climb aboard. A pair of young Japanese tourists follow me and he hands out tickets to them, too. However, before he starts up the engine he wanders down the bus to ask the young couple if there is anywhere particular they want to get off, and when they say ‘Housesteads Fort’ he volunteers to drop them right outside of the gates to the site. I'm impressed. That’s good service by anyone’s standards, though with so few passengers thus far it’s practically a personal service anyway.
We rumble briskly out of Newcastle and find ourselves fairly quickly in the countryside, yet before we leave the city streets we find ourselves passing numerous blunt sections of Hadrian’s Wall set in neatly-tended lawns by the roadside. That's not so surprising given the AD 122 service runs along virtually the entire length of Hadrian's Wall from Newcastle to Carlisle calling in at every important Roman site along the way.
Just as important, though, our route takes in some of the wildest and most beautiful scenery in the north of England as it runs along the northern ridge of the Tyne Valley, offering wide and breezy views across to the Scottish borders, the northern Pennines and the Lake District.
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| Hexham bus station |
We make a brief halt at Hexham which has the faintly rugged, self-possessed air of a border town that has had to learn how to defend itself. Hexham's struggles were not against the Romans, though - they actually brought stability and protection - but from the people who came calling once the Romans had left.
Hadrian's Wall has built to keep the rebellious north at arm's length but after the Romans left Britain in the fourth century the Wall posed less of a barrier to the rough Celts it was originally meant to contain. The whole area gradually acquired a reputation for lawlessness and cattle-thieving with local families such as the Armstrong’s and Robson's, the Turnbull's and Fenwick's on each side of the ill-defined border merrily raiding each other's farms in a lucrative pastime called Reiving.
Market towns like Hexham took a fair old clobbering, too. In 1297 William Wallace, one of the leaders of the Wars of Scottish Independence, swept across the border and burnt much of the town to the ground. Then in 1312 Robert the Bruce demanded £2000 from the town and monastery to spare them from a similar fate. The townsfolk wisely paid up.
Happily today's Hexham seems a lot quieter and, with a little time to kill (if you pardon the blood-soaked allusion) I take a gentle walk around before stumbling upon Bunter’s Coffee House, a perfectly ordinary little country town café on the face of it, but which each night morphs transvestite-like into The Athena Greek Taverna complete with bouzouki music and moussaka. I order a coffee and settle back into the Anglo-Greco chintz to listen to the gossip.
“Apparently, they’re building an Afghan village up at the army camp,” says one man.
“Oh, aye?” replies his mate casually.
“Aye. My mate’s a builder’s merchant and he’s making a killing. He’s sold them hundreds of sheets of plywood so they can build this replica Afghan village... just so’s they can blast it aal to bits, ye knaa…”
The casual violence of the conversation clashes with the cosy surroundings. Will Hexham ever escape its violent past? I sup up and edge carefully out onto the street and down to the bus stop for the next AD 122 bus. This, I notice, has fancy leather seats and proper seat belts, which is reassuring. And an emergency exit in the roof, which isn't.
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| Birdoswald bus stop - with Roman remains |
The AD 122 now runs along what is possibly the finest part of the route – from Hexham to the Chollerford river crossing near Chester's Roman Fort, then hugging the wall to Vindolanda and Housesteads, passing so close to the ruins of Birdoswald fort that the bus practically scrapes itself along its walls. This is real Hadrian's Wall country – wild and open, yet strangely green and hospitable. And all of it defined by that narrow ridge of stone trickling along next to the road
Though tall and intimidating in its day, the wall as it currently stands is a mere shadow of its former self, thanks largely to the Jacobite Rising of 1715 which led King George I to embark on a wave of strategic road-building. The Crown had learnt the importance of being able to move your army quickly to wherever a rebellion may be building – something which the Romans already had a clear understanding of 1,500 years before, incidentally.
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| General Wade |
General Wade was appointed to make a survey of the Highlands and a huge network of roads, bridges and barracks was commissioned both to ensure better control over the Scots and to demonstrate that government was not nearly as distant and remote as they might think. Numerous new roads were built and roads into Scotland were also improved. One of them was the road we are travelling along now, a new road connecting Newcastle with Carlisle which would ultimately become known hereabouts (and is still referred to) as the 'Military Road'.
Now, many people mistakenly believe this road to be Roman because of its name and because much of it is long and straight. The fact that it’s built just behind Hadrian's Wall is seen as the clincher, but that’s not quite the case. In fact, George I's military advisors chose this route largely because it was conveniently close to a ready supply of stone – namely, that huge abandoned wall over there. They built their road alongside the wall, and even on top of it in some places, using the wall itself as their raw material.
And why not? Local farmers had been using bits of the old wall to build their farmhouses and field boundaries with for years. In the 19th and 20th centuries, people also began quarrying along the line of the wall to take advantage of the crags the wall was built on. Quite honestly, it’s amazing that any of it survives.
Yet survive it does, along with a number of huge and impressive forts particularly along its central section. English Heritage describes this as "the most important monument built by the Romans in Britain ". UNESCO clearly agreed - they declared Hadrian’s Wall a World Heritage Site in 1987.
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| The Military Road |
We continue to follow the wall before sliding steeply down into Haltwhistle, an attractive border town with an attractive name – though oddly it's one that has nothing to do with the railways, the name Haltwhistle being derived from the Old English for ‘hilltop’. The town has undeniably benefitted from the presence of the Carlisle to Newcastle Railway which passes through it, however, and trains have almost certainly halted and whistled there over the years.
Haltwhistle also lays claim to be at the geographic centre of Britain by virtue of being equidistant from the sea if measured along the points of a compass. There is even a hotel in the centre of Haltwhistle named the ‘Centre of Britain Hotel’, so I suppose that probably clinches it. True, for this claim to hold water you have to accept that the northern extremity of the British Isles is Orkney. I’m not sure the good people of Shetland would necessarily agree with that.
From Haltwhistle it’s back onto the Military Road towards Greenhead and out onto the moors near Spadeadam where much of Britain’s abortive rocket programme was developed in the 1950’s. At one time, the moorland and forests around here echoed with the roar of Blue Streak rocket engines under live test. Now, there is little to drown out the calls of the rock pipits and skylarks other than the occasional bleating of sheep.
We are soon down off the moors and into Carlisle which, having been surrounded by war-like troops on at least ten occasions, has the distinction of being Britain's most besieged city thanks largely to its proximity to the Scottish border. As the good folk of Hexham can testify, this area had a reputation for getting a bit lively, which possibly explains why the city is also the subject of an ancient curse.
In 1525, Archbishop Dunbar of Glasgow, in a singularly un-Christian act it has to be said, invoked the Curse of Carlisle against those cattle-stealing cross-border families we have already mentioned, the Border Reivers. His curse was remarkably detailed and precise, and surprisingly intemperate for a man of the cloth.
"I curse their head and all the hairs of their head; I curse their face, their brain, their mouth, their nose, their tongue, their teeth, their forehead, their shoulders...”
Whether the Archbishop had personal experience of the Reivers is unrecorded but it seems likely judging by the sheer quality and extent of the curse he lays upon them. In more than a thousand angry words, he calls down "all the malevolent wishes and curses ever known since the beginning of the world” upon their heads. That's some curse.
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| The Cursing Stone |
As the 20th century came to a close, someone thought it would be good for the City to celebrate the new millennium by having the full text of the curse inscribed onto a 14-ton block of granite as a sort of sculpture. Good idea, said the council, in the way that councils sometimes do, and in the face of determined though ultimately futile opposition. The artwork was duly commissioned and in 2001 it was installed in an underpass (that's right, not an art gallery or a public square but an underpass) lined with the names of the Reiver families.
And that's when the trouble really started.
Soon after the stone was installed, the area around Carlisle was ravaged by Foot and Mouth Disease. The city was then swamped in a devastating flood which destroyed hundreds of businesses and homes, as well as all the local buses (great news for bus spotters, apparently, as Stagecoach and Arriva were forced to bring in all manner of spare vehicles from all over the UK to run their routes). Then a large factory closed. A boy was murdered in a local bakery. Carlisle United were relegated. These and many more misfortunes were each blamed on the Council's millennium sculpture which had, as its opponents had always warned, resurrected the dreaded Curse of Carlisle.
So unsurprisingly there was another campaign in 2005 to have it removed but a High Priest of the British White Witches called Kevin (no, honestly, I'm not making this up) warned that such an action would only make the curse stronger. So the stone remains in its underpass as the oddest and least popular work of public art in the city.
Of course, up until the 1970's many people felt that the real curse of Carlisle was its brewery which exercised bewildering control over its customers. The Carlisle State Brewery – 'state' in that it was actually owned by the government – was a unique experiment dating back to the start of the First World War when the government began building a vast munitions factory just north of Carlisle and became concerned about the drinking habits of its locally-billeted workforce and its effect on productivity.
The government's remedy was to limit all pubs' opening hours to 11am to 3pm and 6pm to 10.30pm - a measure which was not repealed until 1988, incidentally – and nationalise all the breweries and the pubs in an area of 320 square miles around Carlisle for the duration of the war, and for 12 months thereafter. Pub managers effectively became civil servants with little incentive to sell alcohol as they were guaranteed sizeable commissions on sales of food and non-alcoholic drinks. Prices were fixed, ‘chasers’ were banned, the buying of rounds was outlawed and the strength of its beer was reduced.
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| State brewery 'New Model Inn' |
Astonishingly, far from prompting an outbreak of civil disorder the scheme flourished and continued to do so long after the war, so much so that by 1950 the Labour government was floating the idea of extending state management to other towns in the UK - something which the incoming Conservative government of 1951 quickly quashed. It took until 1971 for the Carlisle State Brewery to be re-privatised. Though now gone, the scheme has left an indelible mark on pubs everywhere in the form of an extremely attractive and distinctive style of architecture – an Arts and Crafts style called 'New Model Inn' - which was created by the schemes principal architect Harry Redfearn and has been widely copied.
From Carlisle my road turns northwards over the border into Scotland, through an area which for all its bracing and unremitting flatness and featureless -ness still manages to form part of not only the 'Tourist Route to Edinburgh' but is also on the 'Solway Coast Heritage Trail' and the 'Burns Heritage Trail'. Do I sense the faint whiff of determined marketing here?
I decide to put it to the test. Having breached the Scottish border at Gretna, I immediately begin Shortbreading – a game of my own invention in which the winner is the first to spot something by the roadside that is outwardly Scottish in a way only a marketing executive would consider authentic. Sure enough, scarcely a mile into Scotland I spot my first pub car park sign imploring customers to 'Haste Ye Back!', presumably because “Come Back Soon” didn't sound Scottish enough. Does anyone really say 'haste ye back' in normal conversation? Well, maybe they do. Anywhere, I won today's game... hmm, must remember to buy some shortbread.
At least Gretna gives me my first clear view of the vast Solway Firth to the south with the mountains of the Lake District piled up behind like some kind of improbable film set. This stunning view of dark mountains viewed over sparkling sea is complemented a little further down the road as the Galloway Hills start to make their presence felt, whilst to the north east the Scottish borders hove mistily into view. This largely overlooked area of Scotland is a superb place if like me you enjoy a bit of peace and quiet, and I can’t wait to explore it further.
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| Dumfries |
I'm staying in Dumfries tonight, the so-called Queen of the South and a rugged little place which has that look of slightly impoverished greatness that is the hallmark of many Scottish provincial towns. It has, however, one saving grace – a boisterous river coursing through its heart and crossed by a couple of spirited stone bridges. I wander around happily for a while, though I’m struggling to keep my bearings which is odd. My wife swears that in a former life I must have been a pigeon because I never seem to get lost, but it all turns to ashes in Dumfries. None of the streets seem to go in straight lines and it takes me ages to find tonight's hotel.
And why is everyone driving so fast? Is it something in the water? Well, possibly.
Dumfries happens to be the hometown of Allan McNish, motor racing pundit and twice winner of the Le Man 24 Hour race. It's also home to the former touring car driver David Leslie. Formula One racer (and grand prix TV pundit) David Coulthard was also born here, while Sir Frank Williams who actually owns a Formula One team, was educated here. Ian Callum, design director for Jaguar, and his brother Moray, the design director for Ford in America, were both born in Dumfries. So - there is more than a whiff of high-octane fuel hereabouts. It’s no wonder I can scarcely cross the road.
Lets hope tomorrow's bus driver isn't a local...
NEXT: Dumfries – Glasgow - where I come across an unusual coach, a coastal road that takes my breath away, and enjoy a reunion with a road-eating monster.
Map courtesy of those awfully nice people at Google
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