Here, at the western edge of Newcastle, the Roman frontier starts to escape the city. Wall mile 8 lies around Newburn and Throckley, with Blaydon across the Tyne and the suburbs thinning into fields as you head west. The masonry itself has mostly vanished under roads, houses and farmland, but the line of the Wall and the great earthwork of the Vallum to its south can still be followed in hummocks, ditches and the occasional consolidated stretch of stone, most famously a little further west at Heddon-on-the-Wall, where a long run survives at nearly its full original width.
The Vallum is the part people often misread. It is not a defensive ditch facing the enemy but a broad flat-bottomed cut with mounds on either side, set behind the Wall, a controlled zone that marked off the military strip from the civilian country to the south. Together they made Hadrian's frontier from the 120s onwards, running from Wallsend to the Solway, and in this eastern sector it was built of stone from the start.
History did not stop with the Romans. In 1640 the Scottish army forced a crossing of the Tyne at Newburn and routed the English, one of the first real battles of the troubles that led to the civil wars. A few kilometres upstream lies Wylam, where George Stephenson was born in 1781, and the riverbanks here are thick with the memory of early railways and wagonways that carried coal down to the Tyne. Today the Tyne Riverside Country Park makes a calm green break between the industrial past and the modern city.
The riding is mixed. Getting out of Newcastle on the A69 or the old West Road is urban and busy, with lights, buses and speed cameras. Once past Heddon, though, you join the B6318, the Military Road built after the Jacobite rising of 1745, which runs arrow straight in places directly on top of the Wall's foundations. It rolls over crests and dips that hide oncoming traffic, so treat the long straights with suspicion. Westerly wind is common and can be strong on the higher ground.
You are in a city here, so fuel, food and parts are everywhere. Newburn and Blaydon have supermarkets and filling stations, and Newcastle has every kind of bike shop if something needs fixing before the emptier country further west.