Boyd Tonkin 

Walking Hadrian’s Wall: discovering the secrets of the landscape

Boyd Tonkin joins author Graham Robb on a walking trip in search of cols and passes – parts of the British landscape you often won’t even find on a map
  
  

A dip in the landscape with a large sycamore growing from it and Graham Robb and Boyd Tonkin nearby
Branching out … Sycamore Gap, famous for its appearances in Hollywood films. All photographs: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Observer

Kevin Costner, eat your tights. “Are you film stars?” asks an optimistic family of walkers. Photographer Murdo MacLeod is pointing his lens towards Graham Robb and me as we stroll down the slopes of Sycamore Gap on a brilliant and breezy day in early June. We reassure them: of course we are! Here, halfway along Hadrian’s Wall as it marches from the Tyne to the Solway Firth, a solitary tree stands in a dramatic gap or fissure in the rocky ridge that the enigmatic Roman monument follows on its 84-mile route from coast to coast. Although unknown to Ordnance Survey maps, Sycamore Gap may be fondly remembered by location-spotting fans of camp and corny Hollywood romps.

At this miniature pass, Costner’s dashing outlaw hero in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves confronted the brutal henchmen of Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham. The visitors know that. Popular memory celebrates what respectable geography and cartography ignores. That, you might say, is the theme of our trek along this segment of the wall, east of Carlisle. On this stretch, half a dozen natural “cols” (the lowest point on the saddle between two mountains) form gateways or crossing-places in the upland line that the second-century Romans embellished with their stony demarcation. This is a walk against the grain: a hunt for features of the landscape and the past that are hidden in plain sight.

“People say, why was Hadrian’s Wall built?” Robb had explained as we’d set out a little further east at Milking Gap – also invisible to the col-scorning Ordnance Survey. “The answer is: it was there already.” Like its visitors, the Roman fortification – or show-off garden-fence, perhaps – dutifully plods along a geological marker: an “igneous intrusion” of dolerite rock, to be pedantic. The wall has become our mythical idea of the ultimate imperial frontier. Yet the 11 cols that cross it open up handy – and picturesque – north-south passageways. They slice through at the landscape’s lowest points, discreet shortcuts for “merchants, drovers and thieves”. And for trippers: “You cross a col in two directions, and you get two views,” says Robb. “It’s an obvious place to stop. There is a meeting of the ways, and cols often mark farm or parish boundaries.”

Although feted in France as highlights for hikers and cyclists, on this side of the Channel cols have tended to drop off maps. “It’s almost as if the landscape itself is culturally determined: that we didn’t have them in Britain,” Robb reflects. We do. Embracing Ireland as well, Robb catalogues and annotates 2002 of them in his new book Cols and Passes of the British Isles. They range from the suburban Sydenham Gap near Crystal Palace in south London (who knew?) to the “magnificent saddle” of Am Blaid (“the Mouth”) in the archipelago of St Kilda, 100 miles from the Scottish mainland. Topographical exactitude aside, you will never read a wittier gazetteer. One of Robb’s tables matches energy-restoring meals to selected cols, from the dainty “half a goat’s cheese salad” for soft Sydenham to the heroic “four scones with jam and cream” scoffed at Moll’s Gap in County Kerry.

East and west of Sycamore Gap, the passes of Hadrian’s Wall concertina into what Robb calls a “theme-park” of cols, some also known as “nicks”, “doors”, “swyres” or “howses”. As the wall path climbs up or plunges down in calf-punishing rollercoaster curves, the lateral cols trace much gentler slopes. Pay attention to them and the landscape alters. At Milking Gap a local farmer disputes the name itself. It’s called Black Sike, she insists. Walk with Robb and the very ground beneath your feet can start to wobble, dissolve and re-form.

You might consider Graham Robb to be the Robin Hood of historical scholarship. In bold, even cheeky, raids on the past, he rescues forgotten kinds of knowledge from what historian EP Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity”. That audacity leaves the sheriffs of academia fuming with outrage. Born to Scottish parents and raised in England, Robb became a junior don at Oxford, but made his name as the prize-winning biographer of French literary giants (Balzac, Rimbaud, Victor Hugo). Around a decade ago, he set out on another journey. Literally: for his 2007 book The Discovery of France Robb cycled 15,000 miles around that country to find out by pedal-power as much as by archival research how, via government, education and tourism, the post-revolutionary French had forged a unified nation out of an anarchic patchwork.

Later, in The Ancient Paths, travelling on his wheeled steed he argued the controversial case that the Celtic peoples of pre-Roman Europe had planned and built an intricate network of highways, settlements and fortresses thanks to their sophisticated understanding of astronomy, surveying and engineering. Cue a chorus of scholarly splutters, especially when – thanks to a misunderstood gag that one tabloid deemed “too good not to print” – he seemed to be claiming that he had located the site of King Arthur’s Camelot. In Wigan. Before the paper belatedly got the joke and the “story” was taken down, so he reports, below-the-line comments suggested “Mr Robb has been at the sherry”.

Above Caw Gap, at the western end of our walk, we perch on the wall and ponder the gulf between data on the maps, or in textbooks, and facts on the ground. Robb took to bicycling research – usually in the company of Margaret, his Tennessee-born wife – to enhance his prose as much as to deepen his erudition: “I liked a subject more if I thought it was going to make me a better writer.” On the road for The Discovery of France, that method crystallised near the source of the Loire as he contemplated “the volcanic cone of the Gerbier de Jonc. I started describing it, and the book expanded from that point.”

A relaxed and observant cyclist, Robb likes to deflate the macho feats of Lycra-clad speed-freaks with their fancy gear and blinkered vision. “The bicycle is one of the most efficient inventions ever,” he says, “and you should exploit that efficiency.” Notice more; suffer less. Companionably, his books champion slow tourism, and indeed slow history, against “the national penchant for challenges and quests”. Forget the peak but enjoy the gap (or nick, or swyre, or howse). He credits Margaret with a decisive voice in this approach: “She had no desire to be a boy and climb to the top of the steepest hill.” A senior academic librarian when they lived in Oxford, she now serves as a magistrate for their gorgeous if remote home district on the England-Scotland border.

On the wall, the weather has over-delivered. Unbroken sunshine trumps a dull forecast. T-shirted hikers adhere to Roman orders as they toil up and down the ridge, ignoring the smoother paths of the natural cleavages that punctuate the line. Will Robb’s rescue of the cols prompt competitive cyclists and walkers to tick them off, as with summits? “Some people are going to want to ‘bag’ a col,” he suspects. Fine: so long as they stick to foot or bike. After The Discovery of France appeared, he met travellers who had re-traced his routes – but ignored his purpose. “I thought I’d made it obvious how much you will miss in a car. But people kept saying, ‘Oh, we drove through France using your book.’”

Slow down, look hard, and the vanished vistas of a secret history – and geography – may come into focus. As Robb says about the lesser-spotted British col, “It exists in reality. It exists on old maps. But somehow it has fallen out of mind.” Walk, or cycle, against the grain, and fresh perspectives will transform your view of the past and of the land. In any case, “It’s great fun rediscovering something that has been lost.”

Cols and Passes of the British Isles by Graham Robb is published by Particular Books (£20). To order a copy for £14, go to bookshop.theguardian.com. Boyd Tonkin travelled to Carlisle courtesy of Virgin Trains (virgintrains.co.uk)

 

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