Wall

You can't climb every weekend. This weekend the wife and I went up to the quiet county to walk sections of Hadrian's Wall with my mother-in-law. We stayed in the excellent beggar bog B&B which is o'er the wall from Queen's Crag, run by a climber and does really excellent cooked breakfasts. Heartily recommended for those looking for a luxury bouldering break.

I found the days walking along the wall fascinating. Mind-boggling to think a centurion could stand on that wall looking south, let his minds eye roam over thousands of miles to the edge of the Sahara and know it was all one single Roman empire. It struck me how much the pace of life has changed out of all recognition. The wall was built over a ten year period, by two teams starting from either end of the country. That's an average of 16 metres a day, though they would have to have gone a bit faster than that since they also built forts and milecastles in those ten years. How could they stand it? There are sections on the wall where you can see to the end of the earth, and they would have inched along those hillsides at a measly 16 metres every day. It must have felt like their entire lives would be spend placing bricks in a line.

Was this as unbearable as I think it must be, or has our modern pace of life changed our sense of time forever? If something takes me ten days I begin to think of it as a ceaseless task. On our way along the wall we met a man who was walking the route from coast to coast with two fell-ponies, descendants of the original ponies who helped build the wall. He was doing it to draw attention to the plight of the ponies who, apparently, are endangered. The ponies make slow progress on the rough terrain and he was moving at around five miles a day. We met him on Saturday and again on Sunday, barely any further on. It will take him over two weeks to complete the walk, at which point he'll turn round and start walking back...

Some shots below.