Hadrians Wall

Today is Tuesday

We woke up to a thick mist, it may have been the weather, it could have been last nights beer.


 

The full English breakfast was fabulous. It was a great evening and a great morning. We were the only guests, and were treated loke royality.  The Inn at the top of the pass will be one of our favourite places to stay, and highly recommended to anyone we know that is going to the UK.

This was our view from the room. 
Sheep and all.

 





 The Kirkstone Inn

Driving down the pass towards Penrith we drove through some more spectacular scenery.

 






 First on our to do list was a visit to the pencil museum, Steven was pretty excited about this as you can imagine. As it turned it out, it was a very good choice. Steven has been a fanatical user of the Derwent colouring pencils, the worlds most expensive, as Amy-Jayne can verify. This is where they are made. It was good, we saw how the ‘spy pencil’ was made, it was commissioned by the war office during the second world war. It contained a rolled up map of Europe and a compass. Steven had to buy a replica.


 


This is a close up of the pencil tip someone has carved. I knew the camera with the macro zoom would come in handy sometime.
Pointless really....

A quick look round the town of Keswick and off we went towards Carlisle castle. We could only visit parts of it because it is a working castle and the British Military are still using it.

It was built around 1100 by William II and has had a hard life, due to it’s proximity to the Scottish border it has seen much action over the years.
 

 










I could be King, and you could be Queen, and we could be heroes, just for one day.

 

 
Tammy wants to take a cannon home, maximum luggage at 30kg each, yep that should work.




 







Off we went to Hadrians wall. This was built by the Romans in 100’s, that’s a long time ago. It was to keep the Scottish out of the Roman Empire (England) as they were considered barbarians, like Tammy. It worked for 300 years until the Roman Emperor called away most of the soldiers to fight overseas, shortly afterwards abandoning England. Many sections of the wall have been removed to build local buildings over the years including as many as three dozen churches and a similar number of castles.(Early recyclers) The wall is nearly 2000 years old and the bits that left are in good condition. Where it has disappeared it still survives in place names like ‘Walls End and Wall Town’.

We chose a section to visit called Housesteads as it has a very long section of surviving wall and also a Roman Fort. We walked along the wall for a few miles. Annoying thing…..It’s OK to pay the entry fees to these places, but the pay and display car parks indicate one pound per hour but have a minimum fee of four pounds, that’s eight dollars and it is getting irritating, greed.

We headed off towards the coast again, this time for a place called seahouses. 


Steven walks like a Roman.


 










 







Tammy treads all over one of Britain's National monuments. 
It's OK we had permission.

  
We chose to go through the minor roads instead of the highways. In a one hour period we only saw two other cars and the scenery was spectacular. We drove through small villages of stone and slate roofed houses. Lots of country pubs. Driving around England is definitely the way to go.

We found a caravan park fairly late at Seahouses and prepared our van for the last night. Tomorrow we take our car back, we are a bit sad and feel we are losing the freedom, and a family member, we have enjoyed for the last three weeks. But tomorrow, we are planning something special.