Walking Coast To Coast Via Hadrians Wall Path : Useful Notes
This is a fantastic walk to do, writing this up made me realise that I have to go back and do it again. We spent just under 4 days walking it, but it would have been better to take longer, we spent the next 2 days hobbling around with painful feet.
Our original plan was to do the first 15km to Newcastle city centre on the first day, followed by 4 days of 20km each. However, each 20 miles took longer than we had anticipated due to carrying heavy back packs up and down hills and we had not planned for the sheer quantity of stiles and gates that had to be negotiated. With hindsight I would suggest that 7 days would be ideal as your feet would have more time to recover each night.
We used 88 litre ruck sacks which were about right for the amount of equipment that we had to carry which included tent, sleeping bag, cooking gear, food and water. We did see people with larger ruck sacks but they seemed to be struggling and we saw some walkers who had emptied part of their back load into plastic bags being carried by hand. Whatever you do, plan it properly and do some fully loaded practice walks before you undertake the walk – then throw out everything that you really dont need.
If you only want to see the Roman Wall I would recommend going from Brocolitia near Mile Castle 31 to Banks. The rest of the route is great and interesting in its own right but the roman artifacts are few and far between to the East of Brocolitia and West of Banks.
Dont believe the distances given on the signs -they are not necessarily accurate.
There are web sites and guides that indicate where locations such as shops and cafes are located – dont rely on them as many are temporary, seasonal, have restricted opening hours or are not accurately located. Having said that, there are several places where enterprising locals put out honesty boxes and refreshments that we were not expecting to find.
We were extremely fortunate with the weather, apart from the first evening we managed to do the whole route in shirt sleeves and did not take out our rain coats once. There were a few soggy places that would obviously be much muddier in wet weather so be prepared.
