East of the crags the Wall country softens into the Tyne valley, a green landscape of meadows and woods, and near Corbridge you meet something the Wall itself never had: a town. Corbridge Roman Town, known to the Romans as Coria, grew up at the crossing of the River Tyne and the great north road, Dere Street, and served as a supply base for the army and a market for the civilians who followed it. The granaries and fountain survive, and a museum holds finds such as the famous Corbridge Lion, a sculpture of a lion devouring a stag. The label puts us on a stretch of Wall and vallum near Herd Hill, a few kilometres north-east.
The ride is lovely. From Corbridge a road follows the Wall westward along the Tyne's north bank, past farms and woodland, with views over the river valley. Narrower lanes lead north into quiet farmland and moorland, where the surface is rougher and the traffic almost nil. The valley is at its best in May, with hawthorn in flower, and in October, when the beeches turn gold. Note that fords and flooded lanes can occur after heavy rain, so take care. A few kilometres west, at Heavenfield, a small church marks the place where King Oswald raised a wooden cross before winning a battle in 634, an early moment in the Christian history of Northumbria.
Corbridge has about three thousand people and a good village centre with shops, cafes and a petrol station nearby, while Acomb is smaller. Hexham, seven kilometres away, is the nearest sizeable town, with just over eleven thousand people and an abbey of great age, whose Saxon crypt was built with stones taken from Roman buildings. A coffee and a slice of cake in the abbey grounds is a fine way to spend a morning.
When you stand on the Wall here, notice how low it is, and how often it has been robbed for farm buildings. Roman stones were useful, and the people of the valley used them for a thousand years. The same stones are in churches and barns, and in walls that now mark field boundaries.