Bridget Jones

I walked my two Roman Miles with Rob in early summer. It is special to me because it was somewhere I walked with many friends over the lockdowns of the last two years. The landscape shows where there was once a milecastle and The Vallum cuts deeply through one section.

The path goes through meadows and woods and is boggy in places. The view over the Tyne Valley, where I live now and over the escarpment to the land beyond the Wall, where I used to live, is wonderful. I was thinking as I identified the plants and spotted the birds, that maybe using their Latin names might be part of my design.

When we got home, Rob opened his copy of ‘the Englishman’s Flora’ by Geoffrey Grigson at the entry for the plantains and I was immediately drawn to Plantago lanceolata. The Wall is a long distance walk and the name plantain means a footprint. The seedheads are called soldiers, feuchters and waybread. I played a game with them as a child. The leaf blades of Plantago lanceolata are like the spearheads displayed in Corstopitum Museum. The little symbol is a decorative button also on display there.

I’ve been reading Wendell Berry’s ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ and one of the poems ‘On the Hill Late at Night’ perfectly describes standing on the Wall and feeling the growth under your feet and the history of the place.