“I think it’s my heart”, I say at the desk.

The receptionist picks up the phone and speaks into it, unhurried but certainly not dawdling. I’m led to a waiting nurse. They’re all watching me. Waiting for me to do anything…dramatic.

Oh god. Not like this. Please.

I’m led to a crisply-sheeted bed.

“Just hop on, we’ll change the sheets afterwards”, the nurse says as I look down at my muddy boots. I clamber on, leaving thick chocolate smears everywhere. Someone will end up washing this bedding. What will they think of me?

Then I remember why I’m here, and the terror drives all else away.

Once my shirt is off, gel stickers are stuck all over my torso. Then wires are attached to each one. I’m told to lie still. So naturally I tense up.

A button is pressed.

This is my first ECG - and I’m almost disappointed. There’s no lightning, no whining of a generator spinning faster and faster. No red lights or klaxons. They don’t even have those double electrodes with the spark running up between them, like any real machine involved in life & death situations. I don’t feel anything except the ever-present band of tightness across the left of my chest, and the numbness in my left arm.

The nurse (she could be a doctor, I’m a little distracted right now) goes away for a while. I think about things. About the irony of it all. How I’m just 3 months away from changing everything in my professional life, from taking the career risk I’ve spent 3 years slowly, erratically working towards. Just a few more months…

Well, maybe sometimes dreams are meant to stay dreams. C’est la vie, eh?

I fight down bitterness, anger, self-disgust, fear. How could I have done things any different? Easily, the answer comes, along with a list of regrets as long as my frighteningly numb arm. Easily, Mike. Wrong decisions, opportunities you failed to grab as they went past on the way towards someone braver, time you didn’t spend with people, places you never went. It could be that you simply blew it.

So, I’m suffering from…go on, say it…..

Heart failure.

Maybe heart disease. Maybe cholesterol, the way my Dad went. Something really bad. All I have is guesses. I’m not a doctor. I just know I’m in the right place for what is happening to me.

What now? Medication. No more walking through rainstorms. Nothing that will push my heart too badly – so that’s flying ruled out, then. And therefore most of my travel plans. Maybe it’ll require surgery. What did they call it on E.R? “Angioplasty”. Sounds like a type of Play-Doh. Ah, I remember now, it’s when they widen…

The nurse has returned. She’s holding some kind of print-out.

**********

I sit in the reception area.

I look at the ground.

I look at the clock.

I look at the ground again.

Just 5 minutes have passed. I’ve got almost an hour to go. I should pull out my book, carry on reading The Cambridge Introduction To Narrative, because I’ve got a lot of reading to do before I fly out to TBU Umbria. I’ve got a lot of planning for what’s happening just before TBU. I’ve got so much to do.

I look at the clock again. Another couple of minutes gone. But I can’t focus on anything but the ground. All my thoughts have stopped.

It’ll be another 48 minutes before the bearded doctor (or he could be a nurse – I’m currently a little distracted) comes out at 2.17am and tells me that my blood test, like my ECG, says there is absolutely nothing wrong with my heart, suggests it’s virus-related muscle cramps, and tells me I’m good to go home, back to my travel plans and work-related plans, back to everything I’ve been working towards and momentarily thought I’d lost – and then I’ll take almost an hour to walk the couple of miles home through the cold, because I’m so wobbly-legged, so knocked senseless by the events of the evening.

But for now, I stare at the ground.

Time passes.

But that’s okay. It seems I have a little more than I thought.

Image: rosmary

(click banner for overview)

They say it’s impossible to take a bad photo of Hadrian’s Wall.

There are two reasons why this rule doesn’t apply to me right now.

1) My camera just died.

2) I’m nowhere near Hadrian’s Wall.

In fact, I’m in a field. The remnants of Hadrian’s Wall cross many fields on their way from South Shields to Bowness. Evidently this isn’t one of them. This entirely Wall-free field is freshly ploughed, and as I trudge round its seemingly endless fringes, I find myself wearing more and more of it. By the time I find the exit I should be around 30 feet tall.

Here’s where this field is.

I’m feeling quite proud of myself. It normally takes me at least a couple of hours to lose my bearings and start floundering, but I’m barely 40 minutes out from Hexham. I know what I did wrong: I used my brain. Assuming I knew where I was, I extrapolated a shortcut to where I wanted to be, and abandoned the reassuringly obvious path I was on.

Most of my misadventures start like this.

But here’s the thing: I’m suddenly much happier.

I’d stepped out my Hexham town centre lodgings just before 10am (nice people, generous breakfast, dreadful and overpriced room – and so I’m saying no more on the subject), onto damp, cold streets under leaden skies. It’s December in the north of England, so the odds of rain occuring are around 1 chance in 1. (I later find out this estimate is somewhat optimistic).

For all that it’s bitterly cold, Hexham smells delicious – a cocktail of wet limestone and violently displaced ozone. Heading north over Hexham Bridge, this airborne tang gives way to a post-rain earthy smell as the land rears up under my feet and the sky starts throwing water at me. I burrow into my layers and don inner gloves and Sealskinz, pulling on a woollen cap and covering it with two types of waterproof  hood. If I’m getting sodden today, it’s not without a fight.

Hexham isn’t the best place to start walking the central, most rugged section of Hadrian’s Wall. For that, you’d be best served by staying at the George Hotel in Chollerford, just north of a superbly preserved patch of Wall at Brunton Turret. Hexham is miles away and at the bottom of a long hill scored with the kind of paths that are delightful in the sunshine and racing watercourses in the Winter.

Wanting to get it over with as quickly as possible (apologies to the cute little villages between Hexham and Chollerford), I turned to my map. I’d spread it out on the floor of my room the night before, having to weigh the corners down because of the wind whistling in the cracks in the window frame, and surveyed my route. I was following the guidelines of Hadrian’s Wall: The Wall Walk (Cicerone) by Mark Richards, a Wainwrightian walker’s guide I’d treasured for years, all gorgeous hand-sketched maps and meticulously inked-in illustrations.

It proved flawlessly reliable.

Sadly, I didn’t.

Is this….is this where it goes across the fields? Because this looks different. That house seems to have been rebuilt across the road. And that wood has moved 200 yards, like it’s auditioning for Macbeth. But it KINDA looks about right….yeah? Oh to hell with it, time to cheat – what does Google Maps say? Ah. It says “no signal”. Well – I’ll see where this path ends up. If indeed it is a path.

20 minutes later, I’m in a field, nowhere near Hadrian’s Wall, the “path” has been buried under churned earth – and I’m curiously happy.

Don’t get me started about how much I love maps, both paper and digital. I truly, worryingly adore them. But there’s a downside to maps, and it’s the same downside as travel guides or online recommendations or even the most luminous pieces of travel writing, and it’s this: they dictate an experience to you. Maybe as a wry “You know what would be fun?”, maybe as a “Thou Shalt Not Deviate from The Path”, from a whisper in your ear to a steel ruler across the knuckles. To whatever degree, they take you away from your natural instincts. Sometimes that’s not such a bad thing – for example, my natural instinct is to immediately get lost – but it’s always a distraction from what your senses are telling you. There’s a temptation to relegate your senses to a secondary, more passive role. You’re merely along for the ride.

Worse, your focus is on the material that guides you- so you’re less Here than you would be without your guide. You’re just not paying attention.

(Multiply this by A Significant Amount if you’re using a phone mapping app).

Pay attention, Mike.

I look at landmarks as I’m scraping a couple of kilos of toffee-like earth off my boots with a stick. I can see a farmhouse, presumably with a drive that connects it to a main road (probably the one running into the imaginatively-named village of Wall). I listen. I hear cars. A distant hiss of wheels scything water from puddles. I look harder. Movement. There’s a road, approximately…er…some kind of distance away. (I’m not very good at distances either). I look for gates, plotting a route down. I see the river, through the trees. Why didn’t I see the river before? Because I wasn’t looking.

The more I look around, the more obvious it is where I must be. And I’d seen this if I’d been paying attention to my surroundings instead of my map…

My phone pings. Network found. I could switch the GPS on and find out where I am, exactly, to a couple of meters. Oh, technology is amazing, isn’t it? It does it all for you. You don’t even have to think.

I pull my map out, spend a few minutes working out where I need to go, and then stash it away for the next hour.

My phone stays in my pocket for the rest of the day.

Images: Kloniwotski, Paul McGreevy, photojenni and Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2011.

The rain twists slowly across the landscape. It hisses around me, making the world sound like a dead channel, and it clatters against the back of my waterproof as I hunch over my rucksack to fish out my camera.

What a view.

“Please, let nothing change – this is perfect,” I say to myself, ignoring the fact that physically I’m in a fairly miserable state. However, just for a few minutes I will be able to banish what my rational brain is telling me – that my so-called waterproof trousers obviously aren’t, that I’m standing on a Northumbrian hillside in the rain on December 29th, while other people are laying on the floor and groaning from being mince-pied and turkeyed to the brink of death, and it’s only a matter of time until my boots fill with water, at which point Full-Blown Misery will commence. For a few minutes, I can put the camera up to my eye, and the world will recede, the same way it does when I’m tapping out or scribbling down words. For a very short while, it will be nice to not be here.

I compose my shot, hold down the shutter release…

That’s odd.

I check the batteries. Oh well, I’ve had these rechargeables for years – I know they’re topped up because I did it last night, but maybe their charge has shallowed out with use. Fair enough. I dig out the pack of brand new batteries I bought at Hexham Tesco the day before, spend a few moments cursing because my fingers are too cold to lever the plastic away from the cardboard back, and pop 2 fully-charged AA cells into my camera.

I turn it on.

After a few seconds, the power indicator flashes red – and it shuts down again.

Alas. After ten years, my trusty point & click Kodak Z740 is no more.

But I can’t complain. I knew it was coming, which is why I’d been scanning point & click camera options for the last year. I wasn’t using it to learn to take photos – that’s what my Canon EOS30D is for.

Still, ten years is a lot of photos, even for someone as erratic with a camera as I am…

Ten years is a good time for a camera to last. But it’s a royal pain that I’ve discovered this at the beginning of my walk. Well, c’est la merde. I shove the inert, suddenly useless lump of metal back into my rucksack, turn and trudge onwards.

My Kodak Z740 is dead.

(Oh HAI,  just-arrived Panasonic Lumix).

All photos: Mike Sowden.

We step through the doors (modern, efficient, out of place) and into Hexham Abbey…and the world goes silent.

After a few seconds, I realise that’s not quite true. The great outdoors – which currently consists of a howling wind throwing frigid rain up your nostrils – is being held at bay, somewhere very distant. It’s only when we’re halfway down the Nave that its fury gets through to us, as a distant roar you imagine you can feel in your knees. It’s a savage night, and Hexham is taking a battering.

I wander up and down, trying to remember the church architecture parts of my Archaeology degree. Luckily (or unfortunately) I don’t have to, as my companion knows a thing or two on the subject.  He points things out, and I nod sagely in an attempt to hide my bewilderment. What I’m finding most fascinating, as always in such structures, is the world-building. Step into a building as big as Hexham Abbey or York Minster and you really do feel you’ve stepped through a doorway into Somewhere Else – a transporting, transformative experience, to use a banal phrase that conveys little of the feeling of having been, well, conveyed. I’ve just come in from Hexham – but it feels like I’ve left Hexham.

It’s easy to slip into a timid, unquestioning reverence in places of worship, especially if you’re English. Shuffle around, make the right noises with slow, unhasty gestures, ponder on Godly things, pop some money into the donation box and file out. There’s a pressure to behave in a certain way, the same as in airports. There are roles to slip into – in this case, being a non-believer, I’m only dimly aware of them.

But I’m walking far too softly, too far into my thoughts. Something in me is disgusted. “You’re here to observe and learn, not disappear into yourself”. I want to take photos but my camera is dying – it’ll die tomorrow, on the Wall (which is why these aren’t my photos). I want to rebel, the same way I did when I momentarily found myself at the back of York Minster one day, just past midnight, everyone waiting for me outside, and I stood at one end, faced down into the vast cavern of one of Britain’s most famous sacred spaces, and whistled a few notes of the X-Files theme tune. (Let me tell you – it sounded incredible).

By a blocked doorway is a 9 foot high sandstone slab. It’s pitted and softened by time, but the figure of a horse-rider wielding a staff can still be seen, another man cowering on the ground as the horse rears over him. The rider is armoured (plumed helmet and all) and his sword is sheathed, while the naked, wild-bearded man on the ground is clutching his in apparent desperation. It even looks like the rider is kicking the prone man up the backside (now there’s symbolism for you). It’s a powerful scene. What’s truly remarkable is that it’s 2,000 years old – and we know who the rider was.

Flavinus was the standard-bearer of the Petrian cavalry, a Roman mounted unit based at the fort of Coria (modern-day Corbridge) south of  Hadrian’s Wall around AD 80. Since many troops manning the Wall were Romanized auxilia (Latin for “help”), and since the Ala Petriana came from Gaul, it’s possible Flavinus was by birth a Celt. Through his 7-year military service he diverted some of his pay into a regimental burial fund. We know these details because like the modern variety, Roman tombstones were inscribed – and this is the marker for the last resting place of Flavinus, dead at the age of 25. It’s believed to have been brought from Corbridge by the builders of the Anglo Saxon abbey of St. Wilfrid, Bishop of York, in the late 7th Century. By the 12th Century the Benedictine abbey had become an Augustinian priory, and the tombstone was positioned face upwards in the east end of the cloister. There it was found in 1881 by Charles Clement Hodges. And here it is today.

It’s far from the only piece of Roman stonework in the abbey, or in Hexham, or in the many historic buildings dotting the landscape along Hadrian’s Wall. This is another sign that history is populated by people acting like people. If you’re building a garden wall and there’s a handy pile of bricks nearby, hey, why not? If you’re building a 7th Century abbey and there’s a handy pile of Roman stonework nearby – why not? Stone is precious, and people make do with what’s available. For that reason, it’s possible to find the structural handiwork of the Roman Army in the unlikeliest of places in this landscape – sheltered from the ravages of time by being wedged out of the way, forgotten but still useful, until that building crumbles or is taken apart and someone knows enough about what they’re looking at to call an archaeologist…

I’m heading towards the door, but James beckons me over to some steps leading under the floor, from which someone is emerging.

“Can we have a look”?

She agrees (evidently we don’t look the type to steal Baby Jesus), and down we go.

It’s dry down here, and the air is thick and close.

We’re in the crypt of St. Wilfrid’s. It’s tempting to say we’ve stepped back into the 7th Century, but these are chambers and passageways with 1,400 years clearly visible in the deeply pitted stones, the scrapes and splats of repairwork mortar themselves as severely eroded – the unsettlingly friable look of the stonework, a feeling that vanishes when you lay a hand against it, and returns again when you lift your hand and see the powder on your fingers.

We walk to the end of one passageway, and stop.

James points at a slab in the ceiling, not itself doing anything special – but there are letters, broken off (the other half of the inscription is now in the Nave), eroded and partly defaced:

The Emperor Caesar Lucius Septimius  Severus Pius Pertinax and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Pius (Caracalla), Augusti, [and Publius Septimius Geta Caesar] built this granary with the detachment of the…

Sometimes the search for ancient history doesn’t require transportation into another world. It’s right there, embedded in yours.

Further reading:

Hexham Abbey: Flavinus and Crypt.

Images: Dick Penn, NightFall404, Mike Quinn, Paul McGreevy and nicksarebi.