Farewell to the Dales

fionaell
Jun 10, 2019
2 min read

We awoke on our last day in the Dales to a brilliantly sunny day...no, wait, it was raining. (Image quality rather severely reduced to make uploading possible here in the middle of nowhere.....)

We headed off north towards Scotland, first stop, Hadrian's Wall.

First stop actually turned out to be Lanercost Priory, just down the road from Hadrian's Wall. Lanercost was an Augustinian priory, and then a home for a favoured family after the dissolution of the monasteries. The nave of the priory church is still the parish church, and it was restored by the Howard family in the later 1800s - and they were mates with William Morris et al, so it has a dossal (cloth hung behind an altar) by Morris, and windows by Burne-Jones. All these layers made it hard to interpret. Also, it was raining and cold!

The best part about it was that the stone all came from Hadrian's Wall, so it was a great illustration of what happened after the Roman's left.

The church

Morriss' dossal

Norman arches and pinkish stone

Burne-Jones window

In the ruined bit... warming room and storage under the refectory.

The former transept of the priory church

The cloister (flattened) and the buildings behind that were re-made into the Tudor hall - the upstairs floor is still used as the village meeting hall.

At Birdoswald Roman fort it took some imagination to fill in the gaps about where the 1000 soldiers from Romania lived and what they did. Most of it is un-excavated and the rest somewhat worn down by time.

But the wall marches away over the hills from here in a satisfying manner.

Facing stones: there were foundation stones, facing stones and rubble that filled the gap - it was high and wide enough for a Roman to patrol the top of it.