Day 30 Bellingham to Once Brewed Saturday 11 June

Distance 17.38 miles, cumulative 497.48 miles, time 8 hrs 15 mins, walking time 6 hrs 40 mins, pace 2.8 mph, camped and Winshields Farm – Once Brewed.

A wet and misty day on the trail but a good variety of terrain ending with a walk along Hadrian’s Wall.
Not to be outdone by the Scottish Airforce the English Airforce attacked covertly the previous night and left Lynn with more bites than she has had birthdays. The pharmacist provided cortisone cream to supplement the anti histamine tablets and Steve prescribed alcohol to aid a less itchy night.
The path was busier today including a group of 9 adolescent Americans with two adults who stopped us and asked if they were on the PW as they ‘had gotten kinda lost’. Then later we passed two older American ladies from update New York who seemed very able and experienced walkers.
Highlight of the day was meeting walking royalty in the form of Paddy Dillon who is one of Britain’s foremost outdoor writers and photographers. He is the author of the Cicerone guide to the Pennine Way and walking guides to Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, amongst others. Check out the Cicerone blog our photo might be in it. We had a long chat with him and Steve embarrassed himself by discussing his plan to get a donkey. Paddy suggested he look up Hannah Engelkamp who walked 1000 miles around Wales with a donkey called Chico. Look up her website seasidedonkey.co.uk It is not as easy as Steve thought – you cannot lift a donkey over a stile and they only walk when they want to walk. Back to the drawing board. Paddy took our photo for his blog but we did not have the presence of mind to take his. We promised to plug his Pennine Way guide, an updated version of which is due out next March.
We finished the day walking along Hadrian’s Wall which was busy with visitors. As we approached from the northern side it did look impregnable perched as it is on top of the Whin Sill escarpment which drops like a cliff. The wall took 3 legions and 6 years to build and it actually came in on budget, not a PFI project then.
We camped at Once Brewed and used the Twice Brewed pub for our evening feed. The best story to explain the name is that on the eve of the battle of Hexham in 1464 the Yorkist soldiers demanded the beer be brewed again as it lacked fighting strength. It worked, they won and the Lancastrian Army fled.