
The key to this trip was the AD122 bus service which is laid on for tourists from late March or April through October. The bus links all the important sites of Hadrians Wall and often has a guide on board describing the landscape and explaining the history. Other bus services can be used along parts of the route, so the idea is that you can chop and change at your convenience, flashing your 'rover' ticket as you do.
The trouble with bus services in the UK is that they have been privatised and are owned by companies out to make a profit. We are told that a free market leads to competition and lower prices, but it has been my experience it leads to a worse service and higher fares. This is because the bus companies only want to operate along the busiest routes, at a frequency that maximises their profits.
Beforehand we could complain about public transport to accountable, elected officials - but these days we are at the mercy of faceless corporations who are beholden only to shareholders who want dividends, not fairness. What little government influence remains ends up in the form of tax incentives, with taxpayers expected to subsidise private companies to run extended hours and maintain a skeleton service to smaller villages.
Privatisation has also had a detrimental affect on tourists trying to travel around this country. It is difficult to track down information about fares and connections because of the need to approach each transport company individually. Because they are private companies, the bus operators do not like to share information with their competitors or sometimes even disclose their own discounts. A website like Traveline does attempt to offer a route planner, but the fare information is non-existent so budgeting is impossible. And
This all meant it was almost impossible to buy our bus ticket to start the bl**dy trip out of Carlisle. We boarded a bus (not the AD122, mind) that would have been included in the rover ticket. The driver had no idea what we were talking about and could not have sold us the rover ticket anyway (he said). We called in at bus station's ticket booth. This at last set the wheels of bureaucracy in motion so 15 minutes and £30 later we had our two rover tickets valid for any specified bus in the region for the next 3 days. By now the 11am bus to Brampton had left.
We trudged back to another bus stop near the train station to wait for the AD122, thoroughly peeved at the tattooed squadron of knuckle-draggers that seem to comprise the majority of Carlisle's population.
The AD122, a small bus built to navigate narrow country lanes, arrived on time with a guide on board. He used his microphone to point out places of interest and offered some trivia, but we were hardly on board for 15 minutes before pulling into the town of Brampton. We wanted to start our walk here and thanks to the guide's local knowledge he made sure we alighted next to St Martin's church. According to him, the stained glass inside was not to be missed. Outside, we saw this reminder of the area's Roman past.



The photo at the top of today's entry is what you might expect to see in Brampton's tourist literature. It certainly has all that you would want in a small English town: old-fashioned streetlamps and chimneypots, a church tower, the Georgian windows of the local pub...




This ancient complex of buildings includes a small church nearly 300 years ago inside the ruins of a much larger priory, practically all of which was constructed from stone looted from Hadrians Wall. The church is free to enter when it is open, while the ruins are an English Heritage site. One of Christian's perks from work is that he has free entry to English Heritage sites, which was good because we only had 20 minutes before the bus was due (if only we'd been able to catch the bus we intended...never mind).


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