Introducing William Hutton, the first man to walk Hadrian’s Wall
I’d like to take some time off over Christmas so, starting tomorrow, William Hutton will be posting entries on his walk across Hadrian’s Wall.
William Hutton is the first recorded man to walk Hadrian’s wall since the Roman period. He set out to do this in 1801, and wrote his journey up the following year. He was by no means a young man when he did this, being seventy-eight. Even more astonishing, he walked it twice, once in each direction, and also travelled to the wall by foot from his home in Birmingham. In all he calculated his trip to be over six hundred miles.
The book was The History of the Roman Wall, which crosses the island of Britain, from the German Ocean to the Irish Sea, describing its Antient State and its appearance in 1801. The entries are from the walk he describes starting at Wallsend in the east to Bowness in the west.
Knowledge of the wall has come on a bit since then, and many of the names of sites have changed, but these have been kept as in for the entries. Partly because this is a historical document, but mainly because it’s also an exercise in laziness for my part.
As the entries come online you’ll be able to follow them by clicking on the map below. The map is not entirely accurate. Some sites like Wallsend have been set with pinpoint accuracy. Others like Watch Cross have been guessed at and put in roughly the right place. This won’t matter unless you zoom in on the map.
