There is an old joke that Hadrian's Wall is easiest to find where it has gone. In the western suburbs of Carlisle it has, for the most part, vanished under houses, roads and fields, and what remains is a faint line of ditch and bank that only becomes obvious when you stand in the right place. The vallum, the great earthwork that ran south of the Wall, is one of those traces. It was a flat-bottomed ditch with a mound on either side, a sort of military boundary zone that kept civilians, and raiders, from the soldiers' side of the frontier. It was dug on the orders of the emperor Hadrian, who came to Britain in AD 122, and it is one of the more puzzling pieces of Roman engineering.
Drawdykes Castle, a name on this ride, is a small tower house on the line of the Wall, a reminder that medieval and later builders reused the Roman stone when they could. Much of Hadrian's Wall disappeared this way, carried off to build farms, churches and bridges, and what remains is partly an accident of survival.
For a rider it is mostly a suburban stop, but the setting is a pleasant one. The River Eden runs close by, with wooded banks and water meadows, and the roads towards Stanwix and the old fort cross it in gentle curves. The surface is good, and the traffic is steady, with commuters and school runs at the usual hours. The ride out to the countryside is quick, and within minutes you are in a quieter land of hedged fields and low hills.
Carlisle, with seventy-eight thousand people, has everything: fuel at the edge of town, plenty of cafes, and the castle and cathedral in the middle. The border country around it was fought over for centuries by the English and the Scots, and the reivers, who raided across the frontier in the Middle Ages and later, left a mark on the language. The word blackmail may well come from this region.
Cumbrian weather is wet and changeable, and the best days are in late spring and early autumn.