Most people meet Hadrian's Wall in the wild middle section around Housesteads, where it rides the crags of the Whin Sill. Out here at the eastern end, a few miles from Newcastle, it is a quieter, more domestic affair, and that is part of its charm. Heddon on the Wall, four kilometres away, keeps one of the longest surviving stretches of the wall's full broad foundation on this side of the country, a solid run of masonry beside the road, and the ground around it preserves the vallum, the great flat-bottomed ditch with banks on either side that the Romans dug just south of the wall to mark the military zone. Begun under the emperor Hadrian in AD 122, the whole frontier ran from the Tyne to the Solway, and it is part of the Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site.
The road you will want is the B6318, the Military Road, which starts near Heddon and runs west toward Chollerford and beyond. It was built in the 1750s after the Jacobite rising, when General Wade's army had struggled to move between Newcastle and Carlisle, and the engineers simply laid much of it on top of the Roman wall, using the stones as foundation. That is why it runs so ruler-straight, rising and falling over the swells of the land like a roller coaster. Those blind summits are the hazard: there are hidden dips where oncoming cars disappear, and the road has a reputation for serious crashes, so overtake only with a clear view.
The Tyne valley below is green, wooded and gentle. Wylam, just down the hill, is where George Stephenson, the railway pioneer, was born in a cottage by the river, and the old wagonway along the Tyne is now a path. Prudhoe, across the river, has a castle and the nearest proper supermarket and fuel, with Hexham further west a handsome market town with an abbey and good cafés.
Northumbrian weather changes fast, and wind and rain can sweep in from the west in minutes even in summer, so pack waterproofs. On a good evening, though, the light over the fields is soft and long, the curlews call, and the line of the vallum shows clearly as a shadow across the grass.