Nine Roman miles west of the wall's starting point at Wallsend, the frontier is already climbing out of the Tyne valley, and here on the edge of Newburn and Heddon-on-the-Wall you can still find it in the fields. Emperor Hadrian ordered the wall in AD 122, a stone barrier across the narrowest part of northern Britain from the Tyne to the Solway, and behind it the army dug the Vallum, a broad ditch flanked by earth mounds that marked the military zone from the civilian south. On this stretch the Vallum is often easier to read than the wall itself, a long shallow trough running through the grass, especially when the evening light comes in low and picks out every bump.
At Heddon, a short ride west, a consolidated length of the broad wall survives at its full planned thickness, and it is the first proper chunk of masonry you meet heading out of Newcastle. Most of the rest round here went into farmhouses, churches and, famously, the Military Road. After the Jacobite rising of 1745, when government troops could not get an army across from Newcastle to Carlisle quickly enough, General Wade's engineers built a road straight along the line of the wall and used it as foundation and quarry. That road is the B6318, and it starts just beyond Heddon.
Which is good news for the ride. The Military Road is one of the great English motorcycling roads: dead straight in long sections, it rises and falls over every ridge like a roller coaster, with blind crests that hide tractors and walkers, so treat it with respect. Further west it runs alongside the best of the wall and the Whin Sill crags. Here at the eastern end you are still on the urban fringe, with Newburn, Throckley and the A69 close by. Newburn has its own place in history too: in 1640 a Scottish army forced the Tyne crossing here and went on to occupy Newcastle, one of the opening blows of the conflicts that led to the Civil War.
Practically, everything you need is within a few minutes. Newburn and the villages along the A69 have fuel, shops and takeaways, and Heddon has a pub with the wall almost at its door. If you are heading west, fill the tank here; between Heddon and Haltwhistle the choice thins out quickly.