Friday’s walk started with, gasp, skipping a bit of the trail. When our taxi driver picked us up in Walton and brought us to the lovely B&B in Brampton (just a few miles away, but I’m glad we didn’t have to walk it), she had suggested that for the next morning, when she’d be driving us back to the trail, she could cut off a few uninteresting miles by dropping us at Newtown, a bit further down the hills along the path. We thought that might be a good idea if Rob was going to be joining us. Once Rob decided on another rest day, though, the idea just sort of stuck. So after dropping Rob at the bus stop in Brampton, the cab driver took us to a convenient point in the cluster of houses known as Newtown (I would barely call it a village), and Tracy, Karen and I set off for an eleven mile hike down into the big city (100,000!) of Carlisle.

Once again, Rob made the right decision. As the path comes down off the hills onto rolling farm country, the wall becomes increasingly theoretical. In the hills in the center, we were literally walking next to a Roman wall, or restorations of it. Yesterday’s hard and fast haul to catch a taxi (how ridiculous was that?) involved the occasional bit of ditch and one or two preserved foundations of milecastles. Today’s walk was a walk across country fields so unmemorable that I find it hard to reconstruct much detail only a few days later (yes, I am writing this in retrospect, catching up after a few days off from writing but not from walking). Adding to the memory challenge, my camera began acting up, so I have very few photos to help jog my memory. I’ve had this camera through the three epic walking trips recorded on this blog, so it will be sad if the camera needs to be replaced. I am hoping that it is just a battery problem. But it still has that wonderful digital macro setting, so I can still take flower closeups.

The best indicator that we have come down from the hills into more populated country is the presence of ‘honesty boxes,’ where the path crosses someone’s property near enough to their house that they’ve set up at least a cooler, or in other cases a little shed with a refrigerator. They restock it with drinks and snacks (usually chocolate and small bags of crisps and perhaps bags of nuts) and leave a sign suggesting what to pay for each item.

The path came down into villages of increasing size, with stretches of walking along small country roads. I’ve gotten used to road-walking, but I can tell Tracy and Karen are not fans, and I have to agree that on this day and on Saturday’s walk, the road stretches can be a bit hair-raising when cars go by. But for the most part, this day is a blur of fields and towns and gates and sheep. We did see one area in a field that was clearly the traces of an old bit of Roman occupation (If if hadn’t been right next to a straight-line ditch, it could have been an iron age settlement or medieval village, and in fact medieval village in the shadow of the wall was my first guess, but our trail guide confirmed it was Roman).

After a short but hot walk, we got to the outskirts of Carlisle, where the path joins up with large urban parks and a riverfront trail leading into the city. Along the river path, in our last mile or so, we encountered a gregarious old man who decided we wanted his company, and so walked with us and chatted a bit about the terrible flooding a few years ago and how it covered the entire low area we were walking in at that moment in five or six feet of water. He wasn’t a hiker, just a lonely person who seemed happy enough to attach himself for a while. If we hadn’t been in the city it might have felt weirder.

As often happens when you come into any bigger town or city, we struggled with the directions. The maps aren’t in big enough scale to capture the subtleties of how cities have woven walkers into and under and around the new fast roads in and out of town, so you have to follow directions like this:

Turn left, taking another underpass into the centre of the roundabout just south of the bridge. Turn right once under the road and follow the edge of the roundabout around, turning right again at the next underpass. Follow the path through and continue along it to a road, which is Rickergate. At the road, turn left to head towards the large shopping centre and into Carlisle city centre.

Even doing this with the directions in my hand, we had a hard time of it. Just after noon, as we were trying to get to the centre of that roundabout, we got a text from Rob reporting his arrival in Carlisle, and that he was hanging out in the square outside our hotel, a car-free area of the city set aside for a pedestrian shopping district. About ten minutes of walking later, we joined him. This was not even 1pm, and our hotel for some reason observed their check-in time policy very strictly, so we hung out in the lobby and the square until 2pm, then checked in, hauled our bags up to our rooms, got changed and met up to do a little urban tourism. We visited Carlisle Castle, which still has a military barracks on the ground, and explored the confusing hodgepodge of buildings that suggest that life in a castle probably involved a lot of time spent in dark rooms with the smell of damp stone. Honestly, I found this castle a bit confusing; I’ve toured castles where the information signs do a better job of explaining how the place functioned, and in fact (spoiler alert) I toured one just two days after this in Skipton. But more on that in a future post! I leave you with this, a nice photo Karen got of three happy travelers sitting down to dinner at an Italian restaurant just across the square from our hotel, where we had great people-watching of teenagers going into what we assume was a prom being held at our hotel. Fortunately, they didn’t keep us up all night (well, Rob reported hearing some drama in the night, but my room was blessedly quiet).