9th July, Birdoswald and back.

Slept really well last night. Woke a couple of times with cold shoulders and had to get up once to go to the loo but that was pretty much it. Had an incident with a slug though. It was crawling about last night near the bottom of the bunk ladder and I teased Lucy it would be up there after her, but we went to bed and forgot it. This morning I put on my sandals to go to the bathroom and when I got back and took them off there was something stuck to my bandages. The slug had crawled in them during the night and I had squashed it when I put them on. Yuk! The alarm on my phone got us up at 7.30. Could have stayed in bed. Did get up though and had breakfast in the cafe- fried egg butty, brown sauce and oodles of tea. Set off for the days walk at 8.40am, up the road to Once Brewed and left at Youth Hostel toSteel Rigg. The days rest had made a huge difference, we were both off like teenagers up the cat steps towards Housesteads (Lucy of course is not long past being a teenager). We walked about 5 miles on the crags, but then we had a half mile before we started. Got to the road at 11.55 and the bus came just 2 minutes late. We thought we had missed it!

We travelled by bus to Birdoswald and went to the fort. There are very well preserved gateways but not an awful lot else excavated. Then we started back towards Gilsland and Greenhead. It was a very good section of wall to start, up to 10 courses high in places and past a well preserved mile castle before dropping down to the River Irthing.