Heddon-on-the-Wall to Wallsend

Things got better! Some walkers omit this final (or first if you're walking from east to west) section of the Hadrian's Wall Path on the basis that it is through a built up area and hardly follows the route of Hadrian's Wall. Both of those things are true, and the path is mostly tarmacked, which is not great for the knees. However, perhaps because we have lived in Newcastle, we fully appreciated the green swaths of land that we walked along, through some areas that we'd remembered as very run down, and it was also interesting to view the sights of the city's waterfront, at the slow pace that walking brings.

To start with, we returned to the route of Hadrian's Wall Path and followed it through Heddon-on-the-Wall. We had some difficulty finding a section of Wall which the guidebook waxes lyrical about, but when we did find it, there was indeed the base of something (apparently a post-Roman pottery kiln) built into it.

The Waggonway is a former railway line, built in 1748 to transport coal from Wylam to Lemington dockside, for shipment down the Tyne. The locomotives "Puffing Billy" and "Wylam Dilly", the oldest surviving locomotives in the world ran on this route. If we'd have turned right to follow the Waggonway upstream rather than downstream, in about a kilometre we'd have reached the small cottage which was George Stephenson's Birthplace, now owned by the National Trust. I remember walks along the Waggonway with colleagues from work around 1980, and I used to think that Stephenson's famous locomotive The Rocket (of which there is a model outside the cottage) ran on this line too. In fact, The Rocket was built for Stephenson's Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1829, by George's son Robert Stephenson. The concentration of railway pioneers and pioneering with links to this small former mining village is phenomenal.

Just before Blayney Row we turned right, back down towards the river, with Ryton Church clearly visible on the opposite bank. We followed close to the river to the Tyne Riverside Country Park, where we stopped at the toilets in the former visitor centre (now Hedley's Riverside Coffee Shop) then skirted the slipway (with more small children out with their grandparents than boats today) and continued past the Tyne Rowing Club and Newburn Bridge. Hadrian's Way took us slightly away from the river again, on a pleasant green corridor past Newburn-on-Tyne and on the Lemington. Here there was a row of shops, but we continued on through the delightfully named Sugley Dene.

In order to pass the busy A1 we headed a quarter of a mile or so to the north where there was a footbridge; here we were within three miles of where we used to live in Kingston Park and the road we were crossing (which was not the A1 then) was strangely familiar. We headed back towards the river through the green expanse of Denton Dean, passing dog-walkers and people playing football. We descended towards Scotswood and the iconic (well, for us who have lived here!) Scotwood Bridge, passing a delightful modern statue "Yesterday, today, forever". At one level, the statue is simply a memorial to the 38 men and boys who lost their lives in the Montagu View Pit Disater in 1925, when an inrush of water flooded the mine shaft. However it is so much more: a delight mixture of human history (miner and pit pony), celebration of regeneration, and hope for the future (children, one taking a selfie on her mobile phone). There is even a frog, with one of the local schoolchildren who were involved in the design saying "Scotswood is like a frog, it’s not very pretty on the outside but it’s beautiful on the inside".

Across the river to the south, there were good views to Anthony Gormley's "Angel of the North", which coincidentally we had visited at closer quarters last October when on a 40-year reunion with friends from undergraduate days at Durham University. The Angel stands 20 metres tall, with a wingspan of 54 metres.

Closer at hand across the river were the Dunston Coal Staiths, first opened in 1893 as a structure for loading coal from the North Durham coalfield onto ships.In the 1920s, 140,000 tons of coal per week were loaded from the staiths, and they continued to be used until the 1970s. Since then they've had a mixed history of restoration, fire and restoration, but the staiths are believed to be the largest timber structure in Europe.

Then, round a slight curve in the river, there were the seven iconic bridges bridges linking Newcastle with Gateshead across the Tyne. In order, we passed underneath the Redheugh Bridge (the third bridge on the site, the current modern road bridge was opened in 1983, whilst we were living in Newcastle), the King Edward VII railway bridge (opened in 1906), the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge (carrying the Tyne and Wear Metro, whose opening also took place whilst we were living in Newcastle, actually in the year we were married - 1981), the High Level Bridge (with a lower deck carrying the road whilst the upper deck carries the railway; opened in 1849), the Swing Bridge (opened in 1876), the Tyne Bridge (opened in 1926) and the Millenium Bridge (a pedestrian and cycle bridge, opened in 2001). Actually I'm getting ahead of myself; we were enjoying the walk but wanted a break so we stopped for coffee and cake at a cafe called Great Coffee on the quayside.

The Quayside was bustling with activity. We'd passed the "Quayside Seaside" and on the opposite side of the river, near the Millenium Bridge, was the Sage Gateshead and then the BALTIC Centre for Contempory Art, in a former flour mill. Coincidentally, in the September after we completed the Hadrian's Wall Path and, because I was really slow completing my write-up of this walk, whilst I was writing up this page, I was in Newcastle-upon-Tyne for a conference whose conference dinner was at the BALTIC. The night-time view from there is really spectacular.

Back to the walk...After passing grand Victorian buildings we walked past upmarket modern blocks of flats and crossed Ouseburn Bridge then took a less picturesque detour away from the river. Back by the Tyne, we reached the colourful St Peter's Marina and crossed the drawbridge at its entrance.

We continued to walk downstream around St Anthony's Point, on a walkway fringed by woodland that felt miles from the centre of the city - though there was a works of some sort on the opposite bank. We were diverted away from the river rather sooner than shown on the map, but the route goes up through Walker Waterside Park and then along a cycleway (a disused railway line) was pleasant.

The guidebook says "from here the walk to Segedunum couldn't be more straightforward: keep to the cycle path, with just two road crossings". Actually the route at the second road crossing didn't seem that straightforward, but it didn't present any real problems and we were soon approaching "Wall's end". We followed a signed footpath to the right to where work was in progress on the recently discovered site of the old bath house, then we continued to the main Segedunum site. Here there are the remains of the fort that was at the eastern end of Hadrian's Wall, a reconstruction of a bath house, and a museum and tea room.

We had to get back to Norfolk today so time was quite tight, so we didn't pay the entrance fee to the museum/Roman remains/reconstruction, but we caught the lift up to the tea room for celebratory refreshments. There were good views from here of the Roman site, with the former shipbuilding yards on the Tyne behind. There were also good views across the river to Hebburn. In the cafe was the woman who appears to have been the organiser of the walk along the path by the nine scout leaders (some of whom we had met from time to time along the path), now with bandaged feet so sadly unable to walk herself. She was waiting for the three separate groups of walkers to arrive, but our time was tight so we had to move on.

We headed to Wallsend Metro station, whose signage is in Latin as well as English, and caught a train back to Newcastle Central Station for the long (but straightforward) journey back to Norfolk.