It’s still dark as we leave the house. Perhaps slightly ambitiously for a day trip, we are retracing the steps of very annoyed Romans: we have been posted to the very Northern edges of the Empire. We do, however, have the advantage of a people carrier, and roads that are not only straight but also tarmacked, so barely two hours later we’re pulling off the M6 at Penrith and heading up Hartside Pass. As far as I know the Romans did not have the luxury of a warm and comfortable café at the summit, and neither do we. It is inexplicably colder inside the café than outside, so we munch bacon rolls in our coats. The view down over the Northern lakes to the Solway Firth is worth the stop though.
Back in the car and northwards. We get briefly confused in Alston before finding our way up to the Roman settlement of Vindolanda. I doubt this was ever a first choice posting two thousand years ago, though it must have been a welcome sight to the traveller. Bigger than I expected, the fort boasts a decent bath-house, and a tavern the size of a respectable Wetherspoons. Not a bad place to be, and certainly better than the more exposed hill forts closer to Hadrian’s Wall. The modern visitor centre and museum is well done, with an impressive cross section of the finds across the last half century of volunteer staffed digs. And there have been plenty. Anya likes the jewellery, Alex likes the dog skeleton. Both are obviously amused by the selection of pretend penises. The Romans did like to draw willies on things. Also extensive is the collection of written communications, much of it amusingly banal – ‘what’s it like there? Can you get a decent pint?’ If the Romans had had Facebook they have got nothing done.
Whilst we’re lucky enough to get a chance to look round before the weather comes in, it gets pretty wet pretty quickly, and we move on, vindscreen vipers at full speed. Next we want to go stand on the Hadrian’s wall itself, so a few miles down the road we stop briefly at Housesteads. We are lucky again as the skies clear just for a few minutes as we stand atop the wall. I wonder if they’ll rebuild it if Alex Salmond gets his way? I imagine they’ll need something to keep the English middle-classes out as they cram themselves under lorries heading North in search of free University tuition.
Having concluded that being Roman, even here, wasn’t a bad life, we head east a few miles and later by a few centuries. Vikings also feature today, and Hexham suffered from them more than most. Nipping out to burn down Hexham was a Viking’s idea of a good Saturday night. We are not here to pillage, all we want is a decent sandwich, which we find shortly before all the water in the Atlantic falls on the Tyne valley. It’s a pleasant town even in the rain – quietly prosperous and most likely home to the people with the better jobs in Newcastle. The Abbey (or more accurately bloody great cathedral) is well worth a visit, partly because of impressive gothic architecture that seems even more vertical than usual, but mostly because you’re still allowed to wander around for free, with only a polite collection box at the exit, rather than being accosted by someone in a cassock asking for a ‘voluntary’ contribution, which seems increasingly the case.
Fed and extensively watered, we set off south again with Anya’s socks stuffed in the air vents to dry them out. We’re due in York to see the Viking themed illuminations, but first have to drive through monsoon conditions (rainstorm, not knitwear – in case you’re middle class and confused) The sky is pitch black at 3pm, and explaining the principles of a Faraday’s Cage to Anya isn’t helping her nervousness with the lightning.
When we get to York the weather has calmed slightly, and we’re able to enjoy the spectacle of Erik Bloodaxe shouting a lot whilst being projected onto the side of an incongruously neo-classical museum, and a more fitting tale of something or other impressively projected onto the medieval keep of Clifford’s tower (couldn’t hear that one properly as we were too tight to pay to get in.) It’s interesting how much the Vikings have dominated York culturally in the last thirty years since the pioneering Yorvik museum opened. York of course was a Roman and Anglo-Saxon settlement before that, yet the Vikings seem to drown everything else out. I wonder what they’d make of it? Basically they’ve triumphed a millennia and a half late, mainly through the medium of interactive museum exhibits.
Despite the children being practically unconscious by this point, we take a turn round some of the non-Viking themed attractions. There’s a Finnish fairy tale adaption projected onto a church that seems to involve a bad acid trip, a space hopper, and someone trying to do a Black Francis impersonation. There’s a garden full of flaming torches and Tim Burton-esque back projections – immersive and quite surreal. But best of all is the annual lighting competition at the Railway Museum. A hall full of locomotives is impressive enough in the day, but at night, atmospherically lit with theatrical lightning and smoke machines, it’s like being on a film set. Magical.
What did the Romans ever do for us? Loads. But the missed opportunities are sat here in this hall. The Romans understood the principles of steam propulsion from the Greeks. They had weapon-grade metallurgy. They also had reasonably complex wheel and gear technology. If Hadrian and the rest of the chaps had given it a little bit more thought and glued the lot together, they’d have got up to Vindolanda a hell of a lot quicker on an LNER Class A4.
SoupyDave 