Walking the Wall: now in audio
Having brought you all up to speed on what I've been writing this year, I've now recorded me reading the almost half-hour journey through time along Hadrian's Wall that is Walking the Wall (new writing commissioned by Hexham Book Festival this year). You can listen to it at: https://chirb.it/dz5Hp4
It occurred to me that not all of you will be familiar with Hadrian's Wall, or Northumberland. If you want a bit of scenic inspiration you could try this short video on YouTube which zooms over an iconic rural section of The Wall, and try and picture Sabinus in 122AD stuck somewhere not too different, in the drizzle. I had a look on the North East Film Archive and unfortunately people tend to film Hadrian's Wall in amongst other landmarks and tourist attractions, but there's some nice footage about 16 minutes into this fab old documentary.
I don't mention many places specifically, because I used a bit of artistic licence and blurred nearby places together. Places I do mention are Corbridge (the capital of Northumbria by the late 8th century, burnt down by Robert Bruce in 1312), the Carlisle-Newcastle turnpike (which I think is now the B6318 where I was thinking of), Kielder forest, Heddon on the Wall, Benwell (including the temple), Killingworth, Newcastle upon Tyne (including the Swing Bridge and the university), Wallsend and the fort of Segedunum, Tynemouth priory, and the rivers Tyne, North Tyne, South Tyne. I did have general areas in mind when I was writing the historical fiction elements and the successive flash fictions move eastwards along Hadrian's Wall. And of course once we're in modern Wallsend and Richard's been to the Segedunum museum he heads off to Tynemouth priory to have an ice cream and gaze out to sea.
I was inspired along the way by: an actual account of a wren's nest being found in a skull, though this was in an abandoned chapel not at a battle site; farmhouses built from Hadrian's Wall stones; the Tyne Flood of November 1771 when 'coffins were torn out of the ground, and the living and the dead were swirled away in the torrent'; Syrian archers at a fort near Birdoswald; Frenchmen's Row in Heddon on the Wall which had housed 'French royalist priests' who fled the revolution; a Roman hoard dug up near Killingworth in 1811, a couple of years before George Stephenson built his first locomotive there; the battle of Otterburn and other border skirmishes; and twenty-odd years of brief visits to Tynemouth and Wallsend.
If all this has intrigued you, you can either listen to me reading Walking the Wall at https://chirb.it/dz5Hp4 or read it for yourself at https://www.hexhambookfestival.co.uk/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=8c710378-92c6-4194-8186-cbd38fa87397 and as ever if you enjoyed any of it you can always buy me a cuppa at https://ko-fi.com/jysaville
