Two-Day Get Away: Day 2

I am beginning my writing after having selected and uploaded all the pictures for this post.  I've been home 12 days now (the same amount of time I was gone), and I am reminded once again of how very much we packed into each day!  After our day at Abbotsford (and England) and Eyemouth and Fast Castle yesterday, we picked up where we left off at the Red Lion Inn of Newbrough.  It's a pub with rooms above, and the same hostess who had served us a refreshing beverage at 11pm the night before, was up serving us breakfast the next morning, and she did a great job!  Toby asked for suggestions about things to see in the area before we left.  The main destination today was Hadrian's Wall, but he wanted to make sure not to miss out on any local specialties.  We found out that Langley Castle was very nearby, and so we made that our first stop.  It's been impressively restored and serves as a hotel, so if anyone is looking for a nice place to stay in Northumbria, Langley Castle seems like a good choice! 

I'd seen peacocks and peahens before, but never a peachick.  They were wandering the grounds of the castle.

The interior was quite luxurious.

Next stop - and one we had booked into - was the Roman settlement of Vindolanda, just south of Hadrian's Wall.  It was inhabited for about 300 years (longer than the US has been a nation!), from about 85AD to about 370AD.  I thought it was a nice touch that they had a sign post pointing out Rome, which is 1,125 miles away!

It's quite an impressive site, and they believe that it will taken another hundred years of archaeological work before they have really done what they need to here in terms of what is being uncovered and understood.  In the picture below you see what look like they might be small pillars in a room or house.  That was a structure for heated floors!  The floor was supported on those and provided space for heating underneath.  Most of the dwellings we saw were barracks that housed 8 soldiers to a room, but the higher social classes had their comforts.

Honestly, it always kind of freaks me out a bit to go to Roman ruins in Great Britain.  I know the Roman Empire extended this far, but I'm generally thinking about either 16th-century or 19th-century English/Scottish stuff, and the Roman ruins take me by surprise.  

The soil here is particularly good for preserving things that wouldn't normally survive -- everything from leather shoes to "wooden leaf-tablets" that are the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain.  I love the pattern on the sole of this shoe.  I could see myself buying a pair of shoes like this today!  For me this brings the people of the time more to life than seeing stone ruins.

Due to the different framing of the picture it's hard to distinguish size, but the shoe above was a woman's shoe, and the item below is a baby bootie.

I was so impressed by the detailed, finely crafted tools they had - from silverware to needles.  Below is a collection of needles and also a needle holder.  (I have a modern one in my embroidery case!)

I know the piece below doesn't look like much, but it caught my attention because it was part of a water clock that could be used year round.  If you enlarge the picture and look closely, you can see the word "September" imprinted along the top.  Time was kept by filling the basin with water and letting it drop out of a hole in the bottom, but there was a twist.  With Roman time-keeping every day (daylight hours) was split into twelve hours, as was every night (darkness), but the amount of daylight and darkness changes throughout the year.  Markings on the bowl that this piece is from would have accounted for the longer summer days and shorter winter days, splitting each one into 12 equal parts.

And I'm always looking for board games!  I was surprised and saddened not to find dice in the museum, because they had been talked about in the tour about having been found on the site (loaded dice in the pub!).  There was also only one board game on display, alas.

After Vindolanda, we headed toward Hadrian's Wall itself at a place called Housesteads.  It wasn't far away, and yet there was another full settlement and barracks there as well.  Now it's mostly sheep wandering around.

It was a bit of a walk to get from the parking site to the wall.  I think the sheep were as curious about me as I was about them.

HADRIAN'S WALL!!!

I had wanted to come here since I'd first heard about it as a child.

I wasn't thinking this would be part of this trip.  It's quite far south from Edinburgh, and it has nothing to do with Napier or any of my other mathematicians, but when Toby suggested it I was thrilled!

We noticed that in their building here (at both of these locations) the Romans used what we called "sugar-cube" shaped stones instead of long narrow ones.

At each mile along the wall, there is a "milecastle."  This was Milecastle 37.

From what I understand, most of the wall is off-limits in terms of walking on top of it, but there was a section here on which we were welcome to walk, so up we went.

It drops off rather steeply here on the north side  .  .  .  making me think of a line from a Howard Nemerov poem: "so steep a snowy darkness fell away on either side to deeps invisible."

We made our way across and down and found that the sheep had caught up with us.

On the way home we stopped in Jedburgh for a brief look at the Abbey.  I had visited here 5 years ago when I was studying mathematician Mary Fairfax Somerville.  She was born in the manse of this abbey, where he uncle was the minister.  The family actually lived up north in Burntisland, but her father was away at the time, a naval officer engaged in the fight of American Independence, so her mom stayed with family at the time of her birth.  It was really nice to get to see this again - something I hadn't imagined I would have opportunity to revisit.

The river here is the Jed Water, where Mary and her aunt and cousins used to swim.

But Jedburgh is associated with more than Mary Somerville, it is also where the founder of geology, James Hutton.  It was in Jedburgh that he found a rock formation that is now known as "Hutton's Uncomformity."  It's coincidental and interesting that we were at Hadrian's Wall and also at Jedburgh on the same day, because  .  .  .

Ugh!  I just spent 15 minutes looking for a comment on these pictures on facebook from my geology colleague Garry Hayes, and I couldn't find it, so I will have to paraphrase and look again later. He basically commented on some of these pictures that Hadrian's Wall was part of the impetus for Hutton's monumental work in founding the field of geology.  During Hutton's lifetime it was commonly thought that the earth was only 6000 years old, and yet Hadrian's Wall was 1500 years old at that point -- fully one-fourth the age of the earth, and yet Hadrian's Wall is hardly shows any weathering, so how can 6000 years of weathering account for what we see geologically in the earth in general?  (My apologies for putting that so poorly; I will try to find Garry's words - his field, not mine.)

There are a couple of monuments to Hutton across the Jed Water from the abbey.  One is this bench that is inscribed with the last words of Hutton's famous book Theory of Earth: "We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end."

Near the bench is this sculpture that gives an idea of the "uncomformity" that Hutton found in this area.

And then we were on our way home - exhausted, but happy.  About half an hour into the final leg of our drive, I noticed a train bridge out the window that looked like the famous one seen in the Harry Potter movies (thought I knew it wasn't the same).  I pointed it out to Toby, and he asked if I wanted to take a side-trip.  Everything in me was saying "no," but my mouth said "yes."  Surprisingly he didn't take me to that bridge.  He turned off in another direction and brought me to a beautiful vista called Scott's View.  The three mountains that can be seen from here are known as the Three Sisters, which seem to me a good match for Yosemite's Three Brothers.

As with so many things, pictures don't do it justice.  It was breath-taking!

But it wasn't just visually breath-taking, the story of it was breath-taking as well.  This stop was completely serendipitous and in no way planned, but our two days away began with a visit to Sir Walter Scott's House and ended with a stop at Scott's View.  He adored this vista -- so much so that when he died, the horses pulling his funeral cortege on the way from his home to his burial place at Dryburgh Abbey stopped here on the way, just as they had done with Scott was alive.

As Scott wrote, "This is my own native land."  

I'm so glad we did decide to stop here too.  It really rounded out our time away, bringing it full circle, and it deepened my appreciation for and understanding of Sir Walter Scott.