WEDNESDAY WANDERINGS : Snow, Sunshine, and Sea Eagles by Marian L Thorpe

visiting around and about,
wandering here and there...

Hadrian's Wall

“I want to go to Hadrian’s Wall in March,” I said.

My husband, to his credit, didn’t flinch. My first book had been published the previous year, and I was thinking about a sequel: one that started with my protagonist standing guard on the Wall on the first cold, wet day of spring.

I’d been to the Wall once before, but in May. I wanted bleak. I wanted snow on the ground and wind whipping in my face. I wanted rain and mud. I wanted to experience what my protagonist in Empire’s Hostage would. 

[note from Helen - you can get the same experience in mid-summer *laugh*]

“All right,” my husband said. “We can go to Skye and look for sea eagles, too.” As long as there’s a chance of a bird he hasn’t seen, he’ll go just about anywhere.

Some months later, on a cold, windy mid-March day, snow sprinkling the Northumberland fields, I stood at Milecastle 39, looking north, imagining. I was wearing layers of Canadian winter clothes, and a lined woolen hat with earflaps and insulated gloves. Nonetheless, I was cold. I thought about my protagonist, in wool and hide, standing watch here on a raised platform six meters or more high. Eyes watering, able only to walk the short distance across the tower, open on all sides to the wind and driving snow. Below her, beyond the ditch, moorland, the heather moving with the wind – or was it the wind?

We spent half a day on the Wall on the northward trip to Skye. When we reached the Wall again on our return south, the weather had changed. Temperatures had risen by a good ten or fifteen degrees, the sun was out, and Vindolanda beckoned.

I walked among the excavated buildings, raising them again in my mind’s eye, absorbing spacing and size. I read placards, and I took a hundred photos. A short-eared owl quartered the field south of the fort, hunting mice. The wind picked up; clouds blew in, and along with them, rain.

We took shelter in the museum for half an hour. I read the translations of the letters with awe at the humanity revealed by them and by the everyday items displayed. A child’s shoe, a woman’s brooch. The life behind that of the military. 

Then we went back out into the once-again sunny day, and took more photos: my husband on the replica guard tower; the farmhouse in its valley, the granaries. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay until Vindolanda soaked indelibly into my memory and wherever it is words come from. 

I needn’t have worried. The White Fort is a central place in my books; that visit shaped my imagined world in ways I couldn’t foresee. Things I saw and learned that day seeped into the books, some without me noticing, some purposely, and I believe changed the trajectory of the story. 

We saw the sea eagles on Skye, by the way, and one of them made it into Empire’s Hostage as well. 

 

© Marian L Thorpe

https://marianlthorpe.com/

< Previous Post