What cycling Hadrian’s Wall taught us about heritage
Amber Denton, a heritage consultant, spent two days cycling the length of the Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site with her fiancé, Shaheryar Malik, a Creative Director and a saddlebag. Here she reflects on what experiencing a site at the pace of a bicycle taught them about design, community and conservation.
I spend a good deal of my working life writing and thinking about heritage values from behind a desk, so when the chance came to experience an entire World Heritage Site end to end, slowly and under our own steam, we jumped on it. Shaheryar and I rode Hadrian’s Cycleway over two days, west to east along the National Route 72, from the salt marshes of the Solway Firth to the mouth of the Tyne at Wallsend. We came home with sore legs and a changed sense of scale and understanding of what is meant by the value of such a historical site.
Hadrian’s Wall was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987 and now forms part of the transnational Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site, which reaches across Europe from the north of England towards the Danube. We knew about that before we set off. However, what we hadn’t appreciated, until we were moving through it at fifteen miles an hour, was how much of the site’s significance lives in things you cannot photograph. The age and scale of the monument are impossible to capture on camera. A car covers it too fast to register, and a photograph holds too little; only the steady cadence of two days meandering around what is left of this beautifully designed piece of engineering lets the sheer length and power it took to build settle into you.
At Bowness-on-Solway, the western end of the frontier, there is no upstanding stone to mark the spot. What survives is the setting rather than any structure: the wide estuary, the grazing cows on the marsh, and the line the Romans chose to hold. Standing there, we found it a useful reminder that this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) rests on far more than visible ruins. The wider landscape, the buried archaeology, the documentary record, and the strong likelihood that the buildings around us held reused Roman stone all carry the story. There is something very special about standing in the middle of such a significant site, imagining the bigger and longer picture of how the Wall and how each and every one of us make up what becomes history.
A few miles east, the church at Burgh by Sands reinforced the point in physical form. Roman stone, originally quarried for the Wall, was carried off over the centuries and built into churches, farmsteads and field walls across the north. At Burgh, a doorway cut from that reused stone still stands. The great frontier hadn’t disappeared; it was dispersed into the everyday fabric of the communities that grew up along its line, becoming part of their buildings and their boundaries. It is exactly the pattern of continuity and reuse that conservation has to document carefully and respect, and it is far easier to discuss when you have run your hand over the evidence.
The same church carries a plaque, drawn from David Olusoga’s series Black and British: A Forgotten History, marking the first recorded African community in Britain: soldiers stationed on this stretch of the Wall during the Roman period. That stopped us in our tracks. Stories like this matter enormously to how we understand and present World Heritage Sites, and they are too often left at the edges of the interpretation. A frontier is, by its nature, a transient place of movement, encounter and change. Remembering the wide variety of people who lived and served here is central to making heritage more representative and more widely owned, and it is something I want to carry more deliberately into my own work.
The Wall is still very much an open question for researchers, which we found genuinely exciting to see first-hand. In Carlisle, where the frontier is visibly built into the fabric of the medieval castle, we also visited an active excavation uncovering a Roman complex, a dig that World Heritage UK had kindly pointed us towards and clear evidence that significant discoveries are still being made. Riding on, we passed the Banks turrets, a couple of milecastles and then Birdoswald Fort, all within a few miles of one another. Further east at Vindolanda, the celebrated writing tablets continue to reshape what we know about daily life on the frontier. Watching the public’s appetite to witness all of this, I came away convinced that ongoing research and open access to it are among the strongest arguments we have for keeping these places funded and well managed.
For two days the route introduced us to a steady stream of people: walkers, runners and cyclists, alongside the residents whose villages the frontier runs through. Each in their own way, preserving, marking and setting their own piece of history. Experiencing a World Heritage Site by bike, along an established low-impact route such as Hadrian’s Cycleway, struck us as one of the most sustainable ways to engage with a landscape of this scale. It also builds the kind of first-hand connection that, in the end, underpins public support for protecting these sites. You defend what you have come to love, and it is hard to love a place you have only ever read about.
The frontier concludes at Wallsend, where the last of the stones run down towards the Tyne. There is no grand monument there, only the quiet sense of having travelled the length of something that has shaped this part of the country for nearly two thousand years. I work to help conserve and study places like this. These two days reminded me that they are also meant to be travelled, visited, understood and shared. The more people who experience them, the stronger the case for their future, and I will be making that case a little differently from now on.
This is part of an ongoing journey for both of us discovering the world through heritage, design and cycling. To find out more about our next adventure from London to Lisbon follow us on Linkedin, Instagram, and find us at ThreeYearsFromNow.com
Images © Amber Denton