CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
68 km from Carlisle to Carlisle, about 1 h 24 of riding. The stops in between: Hadrian's Wall between the road to Laversd, Eight Roman inscriptions in the Roman quar and back through Hadrian's Wall between the road to Laversd. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Just outside Carlisle, among hedges and grazing fields, a short protected length of ground marks where Hadrian's Wall once ran between two farm boundaries. That is all the official name means, and the honest truth is that there is very little to see: a gentle bank, perhaps a slight ditch, the alignment of a hedge that follows the Roman line because nobody ever bothered to move it. What makes it worth a pause is the bigger picture. The wall here was heading for the crossing of the River Eden, where it met the fort of Stanwix on the north bank, the biggest fort on the entire frontier, home to an elite cavalry regiment a thousand strong.
Read the complete Hadrian's Wall between the field boundary write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Hadrian's Wall between the field boundary is where the day begins. Next is Hadrian's Wall between the road to Laversd.
East of Carlisle the Eden valley opens into a wide, quiet plain of dairy farms, hedges and red sandstone villages, and Hadrian's Wall crosses it with very little to show. Here the Wall was not built of stone at first. West of the river Irthing the Romans made it out of turf, a sloping rampart of cut sods with timber milecastles, and only later rebuilt it in stone. What survives in the fields around Laversdale is mostly a line of banks and ditches, visible as a ripple in the grass and in the pattern of the hedges, and the road that you follow probably owes its direction to the old frontier. It is a fine place to understand that the Wall was a system, not just a fence: a ditch, a barrier, a patrol road and a back ditch called the Vallum.
Read the complete Hadrian's Wall between the road to Laversd write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Hadrian's Wall between the road to Laversd comes up about 18 km into the recorded legs. Next is Eight Roman inscriptions in the Roman quar.
Building Hadrian's Wall took an enormous amount of stone, and the Romans quarried it wherever they could find good sandstone near the line. In the woods and crags around Banks and Lanercost, east of Brampton, several of these quarries survive, and on the rock faces the soldiers who worked them left their marks: names, unit symbols and short inscriptions carved into the stone nearly two thousand years ago. Coombe Crag, near the Wall here, is one of the best known, with names scratched by men who were probably bored, tired and far from home. Finding them takes a bit of searching and some imagination, as the letters are worn and lichen-covered, but there is something deeply human about them.
Read the complete Eight Roman inscriptions in the Roman quar write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 34 km into the recorded legs you reach Eight Roman inscriptions in the Roman quar. Next is back through Hadrian's Wall between the road to Laversd.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Hadrian's Wall between the road to Laversd write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Hadrian's Wall between the road to Laversd, late in the day. Next is Hadrian's Wall between the field boundary.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Hadrian's Wall between the field boundary write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Hadrian's Wall between the field boundary. That is the ride.
Hadrian's Wall between the field boundary → Hadrian's Wall between the road to Laversd is 18 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Hadrian's Wall between the road to Laversd → Eight Roman inscriptions in the Roman quar is 16 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Eight Roman inscriptions in the Roman quar → back through Hadrian's Wall between the road to Laversd is 16 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Hadrian's Wall between the road to Laversd → Hadrian's Wall between the field boundary is 18 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.