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Kind Cumbrians cheered us on as we hiked the last few miles of the wall. Now on to the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations.

The churches of Cumbria are built of reclaimed wall stone, including pagan shrines and inscriptions.

The last few hundred yards of the Hadrian’s Wall path took us down the main street of Bowness-on-Solway, population 1126. It being a warm day in June, there were people out on their business or sitting in their front gardens. Each smiled and nodded, or offered congratulations and last-minute encouragement.

Rambling is a uniquely British pastime, supported by a network of footpaths across private land. We have no equivalent in America, and it’s a wonderful way to see the backside of Britain—its farmyards (complete with ordure), sheepfolds and gardens. The Roman engineers were interested in a strategic fort to keep the Picts out, so the wall misses most settlements and marches resolutely east to west.

These fellows were celebrating a bike ride across England in honor of the Queen's Jubilee.

There were places where I thought those engineers were daft as brushes. In the crags of Northumberland National Park, the wall seesaws crazily across sharp rises and gullies. It’s miserable hiking, so it must have been just terrible for the toiling stonemasons. “Why didn’t they just fill these parts in and make less work for themselves?” I grumbled as I lurched down yet another steep pass.

The wall is an amazing feat of architecture. Much has been dismantled, for shielings, barns, walls, byres and houses. But what remains still stands impossibly true 1900 years later.

There are times on the path when you are walking through someone's back garden.

Bowness-on-Solway is the terminus because it’s the westernmost point where the Solway Firth can be forded at low tide. There was once a large fort and garrison stationed here. Other defenses continue 40 miles down the coast to Maryport. Selgovae raiders weren’t the only problem; there were also troublesome Celts just across the Irish Sea.

But here is where the wall itself ended. The wall’s second-largest fort, Maia, lies under little Bowness-on-Solway.

Drumburgh castle has bits of Roman arch and shrine in its walls. It's a private home today.

The wall is disembodied, but its presence is all around us. In places, it shows as a stiff turf line in low meadowlands. Bits and bobs are baked into churches, houses, and the 14th century pele-tower castle at Drumburgh.

Alas, no wading in the Irish sea for me.

The Cumbria shore looks tranquil but is prone to flooding. Signs warn us against quicksand and fast current changes. We’ve tramped through fields containing innumerable cows, sheep and horses, but it was here that we finally encountered a beast who took umbrage. She quickly decided to boss someone else around.

Our intrepid group, from left: Alison, Doug, Kenneth, Martha, me and wee Poppy, who took at least twice as many steps to go the same distance.

Perhaps fewer people than I imagine really finish the walk. “We just had a party quit in Carlisle,” the publican at The Inn at the Bush told me. “They were in their 30s.” A walker we encountered in Burgh-by-Sands told us that his partner had quit along the way. Yet this is considered the easiest of all the national pathways.

Yarn bombing seemed silly in Manhattan, but is so right for the Queen's Jubilee.

As for us, our feet are terribly blistered. We ache in places we didn’t even know we had. But today we stuff our hiking clothes in a plastic bag and dress for a weekend in Yorkshire. This is the Queen’s Jubilee, and we are looking for lawn fetes and evensong in her honor.

Hoaxes, frauds, and ancient artifacts?

An ancient Scottish Templar lies in state in eastern Massachusetts.

Who needs to go to Britain to see a knight lying in state on his coffin lid?

Yesterday I stopped to paint in the marshes of Westford, Massachusetts with my pal Bobbi Heath. This is low country with oaks, spruces and pines, and the foliage this week is a perfect blend of russets, golds and cool greens.

My husband was flying to Boston from a week potting around England with two of our kids. I’d skipped the trip for Plein Air Brandywine Valley. I’ve seen enough knights reposing on their coffin lids that I wasn’t concerned.

A rubbing of the Westford boulder. It may be slightly enhanced. Courtesy of the Clan Sinclair Association (USA)

We would paint until dusk and I’d collect Doug at the airport on the way home. Of course, that wasn’t what happened. Bobbi is still hobbling from her Lisfranc fracture. What started as a spattering mist developed into the cold, full-throated pissing of a late autumn rain. That’s pneumonia weather.

So, we did what artists love even better than painting: driving around looking at stuff we might paint sometime. And then Bobbi casually mentioned the Westford Knight. We have a fine St. George battling a dragon here in Maine, and I figured it was something like that.

The best photo I could get of the boulder on a dark and stormy night.

Instead, it was a large hunk of granite under a Plexiglas cover, with something unmistakably carved into its surface. Carbon dating it would be impossible, since that only works with organic material. But granite is hard, and it couldn’t have been carved without tempered steel implements. That makes the rock either a hoax like Piltdown man, or a genuine relic of pre-Columbian exploration in the New World.

The rock was first mentioned in print in 1873. At the time, it was attributed to Native Americans. By the middle of the twentieth century, it had been identified as a medieval knight complete with sword and shield.

A rubbing of the Westford Boat Rock. Courtesy of the Clan Sinclair Association (USA)

This was in part due to the influence of TC Lethbridge, English archaeologist, parapsychologist, explorer, and all-around crank—in short, just the sort of man we should have over to dinner. Lethbridge, while classically trained, came to believe that the archaeological establishment wouldn’t countenance any thinking outside the usual academic platitudes.

Lethbridge was consulted about the Westford carving, and he suggested that it represented a 14^th century hand-and-a-half wheel pommel sword.

Enter the Clan Sinclair Association (USA). They believe their ancestor, Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, discovered the New World around the year 1400. Sinclair apparently landed in Nova Scotia and then potted down the coast to Massachusetts, where he wandered inland.

My last evening at Plein Air Brandywine Valley. Courtesy of Bruce McMillan.

They believe that the rock commemorates a fallen member of Sinclair’s party, Sir James Gunn, a Knight Templar. Historians counter that the Order of the Knights Templar had been publicly disbanded ninety years earlier. This presents no particular historical challenge to readers of dime-store fiction. We know that Knights Templar popped up everywhere for hundreds of years after they were banned.

There’s also a matching oval-shaped boulder in Westford’s library. It has a sailing ship and an arrow carved into its surface. “Archaeological evidence indicates this was probably carved at the same time as the Westford Knight carving,” the Sinclairs wrote. There is, of course, no archaeological evidence anywhere, because of that pesky carbon-dating problem.

There are relics all over the northeast that defy categorization, including the Spirit Pond runestones found in Phippsburg, Maine. We have proof that Vikings visited the New World. Are all these old stones fakes, or are some of them real artifacts?

If I were younger

I’d join an archeological expedition searching for Old Norse sites in the New World.

The beach at L'Anse aux Meadows. Can you imagine landing a Norse longboat through those rocks? (Photo by Carol L. Douglas)

I do a lot of scrambling around on rocks. Over the past few years that’s become increasingly difficult. Yesterday, I had a cheilectomy on my right great toe. It’s going to be followed by the same procedure on the left foot, although whether I can squeeze that in before my first event of the season—Santa Fe Plein Air Fiesta on April 28—remains to be seen.

Hallux rigidus is not necessarily caused by old age; it can be the result of overuse injury. Me and Shaquille O'Neal, all the way.

Apparently, you can’t just saw off a piece of bone without discomfort. It hurts like hell this morning, so I will do what my doctor ordered, which is to rest and keep it elevated. This is an opportunity to catch up on my reading, starting with some Old Norse news.

Recreated settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows. (Photo by Carol L. Douglas)

Last week, Birgitta Wallace, a senior archaeologist with Parks Canada, told Live Science that she has a pretty good idea where the fabled Viking settlement of Hóp (Vinland) was located. She’s narrowed it down to an area of eastern New Brunswick, bounded by Miramichi and Chaleur Bay.

A straight line drawn between these points is about sixty miles long. A long peninsula extends out between them into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, making her guess an area of several hundred miles of remote coastline. Compared to other estimates, that’s quite specific—archaeologists have placed Hóp as far south as the Hudson River.

The large circle is where Birgitta Wallace believes Hóp is located.  The small circle is the location of L'Anse aux Meadows.

The only verified Norse site in the New World, L'Anse aux Meadows, was discovered based on just such an educated guess.

According to the Icelandic Saga of Erik the Red, Thorfinn Karlsefni and his company found Helluland (Baffin Island), Markland (somewhere in Labrador), Kjalarnes promonatory, the Wonderstrands (possibly Labrador), Straumfjörð (location unknown) and, finally, Hóp. This last was a bountiful place, where no snow fell during winter. Not Maine, clearly.

The inhospitable landscape of northern Newfoundland. (Photo by Carol L. Douglas)

Historians had long believed that the Old Norse name Vinland meant that the settlement contained wild grapes. That meant that Hóp had to be south of New Hampshire because, with few exceptions, wild grapes don’t grow any farther north.

Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his wife, archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, doubted that theory. They believed the name meant ‘land of meadows.’ Based on Eric the Red’s descriptions, they narrowed down their area of search to the northern arm of Newfoundland. In 1960, they started asking the locals if there were any old Indian sites in the area.

One of the foundations excavated by the Ingstads. (Photo by Carol L. Douglas)

In 1960, local George Decker led them to a group of mounds near the village. Residents had called this “the old Indian camp.” These grass-covered bumps turned out to be the remains of eight Norse houses, dating from 1000 AD and definitively connecting the site to the Icelandic Sagas.

Wallace is back to thinking about grapes. Chaleur Bay means “bay of torrid weather.” It’s warm compared to Maine. Grapes do grow wild there. Wallace thinks that region contains everything described as being at the legendary Hóp: wild grapes, salmon, barrier sandbars and natives who used animal-hide canoes.

Based on the Ingstads’ experience, Wallace should, by all means, scout around the bay. And if she’s successful, it will give me something to read about when I get my other foot operated on.