In search of The Wall
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After wrapping up at Harrogate, where I met up with my wonderful UK team from Transworld Publishers (below),
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 it was time for some sightseeing. My husband and I, along with my literary agent Meg Ruley, headed off in search of Hadrian’s Wall. First we pulled into the little town of Alston in the gorgeous Pennines, where we spent two nights at a country inn called Lovelady Shield. Every Sunday, the inn serves an exquisite eight-course dinner. Here we are, Meg and I, feeling happy and well-fed.
Our one and only goal during our trip north was to visit Hadrian’s Wall.Â
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We had no idea how difficult it would be to find it.
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The first place we headed for was the ancient site of Vindolanda, where over a hundred samples of writing from the Roman Britain era were discovered. They were little “postcards” written on thin slices of wood, and preserved by the oxygen-poor mud of the site. These writing samples give us very human and intimate peeks into the lives of real people. There’s a note from a woman to her sister, asking her to please come for her birthday party. In another note, a man implores his brother to please send cash as soon as possible, as he’s in dire need of it. Also found in the mud were leather shoes, so well-preserved they might have just been discarded by their owners. The exhibit was astonishing and immensely moving, and I could have spent a week there.
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But it was time to move on. We still hadn’t seen the wall.
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Next we went to the Roman fort at Chesters, where a diagram of the site showed the wall being present right there in front of us. But where was it? We thought we spied a small bit of it, half-buried in the grass – but no! It couldn’t be that unimpressive, could it?Â
We drove on to the Roman town of Corbridge, and along the way, we kept seeing signs pointing to Hadrian’s Wall. Invariably, these signs seemed to point to … nothing.Â
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We began to wonder if the wall was a fraud, something devised by the British tourism agency to fool visitors into coming north. Meg started calling our journey “Where’s Wall-do?” and “The Emperor’s New Wall.”
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At last, defeated, we headed toward Newcastle to turn in our rental car and climb on the train back to London. But we needed gas, so we stopped at a little town to fill our tank. In exasperation, we asked the gas station clerk if the wall happened to be anywhere nearby.  Oh yes, she told us.Â
A few minutes later – we finally found it.
Mission accomplished!
And finally — a photo I couldn’t resist sharing. It was taken at the castle in Knaresborough, where we encountered the official “keeper of the ravens,” with her young charge. This raven is only about six weeks old, and it sleeps in the keeper’s bedroom along with her other ravens.