Woke up quite early this morning. We left the caravan park behind around 9am and headed towards Hadrian's Wall. We had quite a bit of time to
get there, so we made a brief stop-over for lunch in the town of Gretna, which is actually just over the border in Scotland. So today was my
first time in Scotland (even if only for a few hours at lunch time). Gretna is apparently famous for people getting married - mainly because
Scottish law is rather more lax than English law regarding the age of concent, and people used to cross the border to get married when they
were 16. I think the Scots liked to keep their law lax in order to annoy the Brits more than anything, though.
After lunch, we made the rest of the trip to Hadrian's Wall. It's not really a long drive (like any drive in the UK), and we got there around 2:30pm or so. We had booked our B&B room only a few hours before at a tourist desk along the motorway, so we decided to stop in and check the place out when we found it. It's actually a really nice place (maybe just because I'm used to cramped caravans in the caravan parks), and I got a room all to myself! It's got a nice shower, a little TV and facilities for making tea and coffee.
Oh, and speaking of coffee - yuck! The coffee here is pretty disgusting. I think I'm justgoing to stick to tea from now on. I was getting
tired of the instant coffee mum brought with her thermos, so I thought I'd get some proper espresso when we stopped at the tourist place on
the motorway. But I gotta say, it was some of the worst coffee I've ever drunk!
Anyway, once we'd checked out the B&B, we headed over to Hadrian's Wall, to take a bit of a look. The Wall itself was originally built by the Roman emporer Hadrian to keep the Scots out of England (which was then part of the Roman Empire). Apparently, it worked a little too well, because it also ended up keeping the Brits out of Scotland as well! But that was all almost 2,000 years ago and the Wall now is quite different. In most places, it's gone completely, and where you can see it, it's only a shadow of it's former self. When it was built, it was believed to stand 4.7 metres tall, and 3 metres thick. But as you can see now, it's barely head-high.
We actually went to the remains of a Roman outpost called Birdoswald, or Banna by the Romans. It was occupied for the entire 300 years the Wall was manned by the Romans, and after it was probably occupised by descendants of the Roman soldiers who had lived there. In the 1800s it was bought by an English gentleman who started escavating it, and who built a house on top of it. The house is now the visitor's centre where you can look at a display on the history of the fort and such.
It started raining around 4pm, so we decided to head back to the B&B and just took it easy for the rest of the afternoon. We had dinner at the
B&B, which was £15 for a two course meal. A bit more expensive than the pubs we were used to, but very nice all the same. It was called
"beef olives", and I was a bit worried when I'd heard the word "olives" but in fact, there were no olives in it at all. I think it's just called
that because it resembles stuffed olives - the beef is wrapped around stuffing and held in place with tooth picks - actually, very nice!
Having the room to myself tonight was really good, because I was able to watch TV on my own before going to bed, so I stayed up a little later than I had been. Tomorrow we'll be going to more forts and stuff (I think) along Hadrian's Wall, so it's probably going to be pretty relaxing. The day after we plan to go all the way to Edinburough, which will be quite a drive (at least, compared to the drives we've had so far), so it might be a bit more tiring.