The previous post was completely full up with all the goings on in Scotland – hard to believe that we were there for just two days. Northumberland took up just one full day, but I think this post will be just as long.
We were watching the weather forecasts with a bit of concern as there was the threat of snow north of the Manchester / Sheffield / Grimsby line on the afternoon we travelled up. In the end, we ran into one light snowstorm on the A69, right at the end of the trip. Snow had settled on the tops of the hills and the temperature outside was around zero – so we were driving wary of ice.
The room at the Twice Brewed Inn was much nicer than I’d expected, but cold at first. We thought it was because we’d arrived early, but the following day we realised that the cleaning staff propped the exit door next to ours open for about an hour to get all the laundry shipped down the outside stairs. The room went from cosy to chilly and took another hour to warm up. Not usually a problem as we would have been out at that time, but we’d packed the visit full this time and were sprawled out knackered in the room.
Up early on Thursday and out straight after breakfast. The Twice Brewed is the closest accommodation (apart from Peel Cottage) to Sycamore Gap. That’s the dip in the escarpment near Milecastle 39 where the most photographed tree in Britain fills that gap magnificently. We tried to find it last year and ran out of time before we could get there, but we promised ourselves we’d go back.
We were close, last time we were there – just thirty minutes’ walk from the tree, though it would have been thirty minutes in rain and high winds. This time we were walking on wet rock and muddy ground but in light drizzle at worst. We took the high route to the gap – up a narrow, twisty rock stairway that looked very like Cirith Ungol on the borders of Mordor. I watched the hobbits climbing those steps thinking that I couldn’t cope with that steep climb myself. I can, but just.
The path follows Hadrian’s Wall and runs up, over the peak and down into the trough of a gap – then up another peak, down into a trough where Milecastle 39 is – then up, over a peak and suddenly, you’re looking down on the tree. I gave up at that point on ups and downs – my feet had slipped twice on wet, muddy rock steps and that last descent was near to vertical. We retreated to the milecastle and took the lower path, the flat level track that went around the back of the escarpment. I could imagine the Roman soldiers marching along that hidden track and walking up into full view of any approaching raiders.
We were joined by two people from Florida who wanted to visit this tree because (apparently) Kevin Costner climbed it in the film ‘Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves’. Why they couldn’t send him up a tree in Nottinghamshire is beyond me. We spent a few minutes enjoying the view and then walked back. Missing the spectacular rainbow to the north by about ten minutes, but hey. I guess somebody has captured that shot in the past.
Back down to The Sill, the magnificent visitors’ centre next to the Twice Brewed. Hot coffee and lunch, then to visit their exhibition – Jackie Morris and Robert McFarlane’s Lost Spells. Her artwork is wonderful, and we were seeing it while listening to the Spells, a series of poems about the creatures with recordings of their calls in the background.
Back to the inn for a shower and tea before dinner and stargazing. Yup. It was cloudy. But still, we had a long session in the planetarium dome set up nearby and a few dashes outside to glimpse the stars whenever the clouds cleared away. At the end of the evening the presenter passed around his collection of meteorites. A tiny, dense meteorite. A chip off the rock that exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk in 2013. A piece of the Moon that landed on Earth and finally the most incredible thing – a miniscule fleck from a meteorite which matches the composition of Mars surface rock. Sneeze and it’s gone.
A good night’s sleep before packing away and getting ready for the trip to Scotland. Leaving on a clear, bright, sunny morning on Hadrian’s Wall and driving into… Well, we expected rain, and we weren’t disappointed.
Julia Chalkley 