April 4, 2026
I’m back on the boat! The boat went back in the water at the start of the week and it is mostly going well, particularly after having a lot of maintenance work done during the winter. The worst part of the whole experience so far is that the weather is horrible. It is currently blowing at 25-40 knots and raining cats and dogs.(update: the marina tells me they recorded 49 knots. It was snowing on Sunday morning. I have added that video at the bottom)
One of my objectives in coming to the UK was to see some of the history for this old world and Hadrian’s Wall seemed to be a really good choice. Given the weather in Scotland, perhaps Northern England would be better (it isn’t so much better).
I travelled to Carlisle which is well past the start of the wall route, but it’s too cold to ride the whole wall route (National Route 72) and the hotel rooms are plentiful. I decided to do an out and back ride from there to Birdoswald Roman Fort. The ride to the fort was about 27km with the wind at my back on the way out, fun ride. Then I turned around to come back into 35kph headwinds a ‘feels like’ temperature of 1C and a few splashes of rain. I still enjoyed seeing the countryside but I was frozen when I got back to my room.
This morning the weather was not better, and so I switched my approach and decided to drive the route and visit some of the key sites. This was far warmer and drier, despite the persistent rain.
I visited Lanercost (there is a nice old bridge from the 1700s) and Bardoswald Fort, Housesteads Fort, Chesters Roman Fort and Museum and Corbridge Roman Town.
Part of the plan was to stay in Newcastle for the night and ride on Sunday, but it turns out the weather wasn’t that much better in Newcastle upon Tyne and likely wouldn’t get better. Given that and having seen much of the wall, I returned to Largs to endure the brutal wind and rain on Home Free.
