Not Hadrian's Wall, Northumbria National Park

So this is a rather inaccurately named post. The walls shown below probably aren't Hadrian's wall. In fact I will go so far as to say they definitely aren't Hadrian's wall. Nicky and I decided to go for a walk and neither of us had been to the wall so that's where we settled on. As we left Sunderland and headed towards Northumbria, it started to spit with rain, neither of us had brought coats... you can always rely on England's weather to ruin the day.

We drove for an hour and half, along what seemed to be treacherous mountain paths that were totally alien to me. Norfolk is FLAT, pancake FLAT, I cant drive up and down steep hills. It scares me. A horrible pant wetting kind of scared. One moment you're whizzing along at 60mph and then, suddenly, all you can see is the top of the hill and sky - lovely, blue, clear sky... but no road. My foot slams down on the breaks, the rest of the road reappears as we drive over the crest of the hill, but then its time for the descent. Its the kind of height where your stomach drops and your ears pop, and your lunch threatens to put in a cameo appearance all over the steering wheel and you have to close your eyes, because perversely it makes sense to your brain do that when your driving.

 However the countryside that surrounds the roads is absolutely breath taking.

Anyway, after my knee's had regained some of their former strength, and we managed to actually follow the sat nav instructions rather than just ignore them (what does the robot voiced lady know anyway?) we found a weird shrine thing that was supposed to be on Hadrian's wall. So we set about exploring. There were hundreds of sheep and lambs milling about all over the place, all of whom regarded Nicky and I with the utmost suspicion. It was about 7pm when we got there so the sun was starting to set but the views were beautiful, all that space and grass. It made the ridiculous journey worth it.

We didn't know what this was, but we climbed on it anyway. I hope it wasn't actually apart of the real wall, as according to the website you aren't even allowed to to touch it.

We didn't find the actual wall in the end, at least we don't think we did. Apparently we were going in the wrong direction. Even though we followed sign posts. We did see lots of other walls though, and they were quite nice too. And at the end of the day its only a 2ft high wall made out of old rocks.. just how special can it be? I'll probably go and find out one day.

A wall that wasn't THE wall.