Heddon-on-the-Wall announces its pedigree in its name, and just east of the village, on the slope down towards Newcastle, you find the longest surviving stretch of the Wall in the eastern sector. It is a section of broad wall, built to the original specification of about ten Roman feet thick, before the builders further west were told to save time and stone by making it narrower. Standing beside it, with fields falling away towards the Tyne, you get a strong sense of the scale of the project: this curtain once ran unbroken for eighty Roman miles.
The vallum is visible here too, a long shallow trough with low banks that runs parallel to the Wall through the fields, and on a low sun in winter or late evening the earthworks show up beautifully. Down in the valley, the village of Wylam is the birthplace of George Stephenson, the railway pioneer, and the cottage where he was born in 1781 still stands beside the old wagonway along the river. It is a pleasing coincidence that two great feats of engineering, separated by sixteen centuries, sit within sight of each other.
Heading west from Heddon, the B6318 Military Road begins in earnest. Built in the 1750s for troops chasing Jacobites, it runs dead straight for long stretches, rising and falling over ridges with views opening north to the Cheviots on a good day. The early miles are open farmland with long sightlines, and it is tempting to wind it on, but hidden dips can conceal cars and tractors, and local police know the road well. Rain and low cloud can arrive quickly from the west. East of Heddon, the A69 and the city traffic take over.
Newburn and the western suburbs of Newcastle are a few kilometres away and have all the fuel and food you could want. Heddon itself has a pub and a small shop, convenient for walkers starting the Wall Path. If you are heading west, it is worth knowing that the services thin out quickly beyond here until Corbridge and Hexham, so top up on the edge of town rather than waiting.