Reading: A Walk Along the Wall

My mother mentioned Hunter Davies' 1974 A Walk Along the Wall to me a few weeks ago as something that might be ideal reading for someone preparing to spend their summer holiday walking the Hadrian's Wall National Trail, so I sought out a secondhand copy and read it over the weekend. It's an interesting and enjoyable read, a mix of personal travel journal, history (though I suspect that many of the archaeological details Davies recounts may have been Jossed in the 42 years since the book was published) and reportage of life along the Wall in the early 1970s. It's piqued my interest in the sights of the Wall more than just reading the guidebook managed (though I read most of it with the guidebook and maps beside me) and made me feel much keener on the prospect of the walk than I had been, though in fact what I found most interesting was the glimpse of the world I was born into, which seems unimaginably distant now: a world where the Swan Hunter shipyard was still a thriving concern, with the workers out of strike for an increase in their wage of £34 per week, where many of the farmers, landowners and government officials Davies spoke to had held their posts since before the War, which was still very much a living memory, and where the Hadrian's Wall tourist industry was very much in its infancy, with very few decent hotels and even fewer restaurants to be found. Even on the Wall itself, some things have definitely changed; Davies walked along the top of the Wall remains, where there were any extant, which is very much not allowed now, and occasionally had to pay farmers for the privilege of following the trail across their fields whereas now the whole trail is open to the public, and several features which were barely visible in his day are now fully excavated tourist attractions, although I suspect that if anything the decline of industry and agriculture and their replacement by services and tourism will only have increased the sense of isolation and suspicion of visitors and government officials expressed by some of Davies' interviewees.

It's not a perfect book; Davies doesn't have the charm of a Patrick Leigh Fermor or a Robert Byron, and I was particularly put off him by a quip about having made his wife carry the rucksack when they went hiking in their student days, except through villages for the sake of appearances. I also thought for a while that he didn't know the difference between a monogram and a monograph, but later typos make me suspect dodgy OCR in the production of the 2000 edition I had coupled with inadequate proofreading. It's a book to read for the subject-matter and not for the writing, but it was definitely a good thing to read in preparation for my own walk.