Post-symposium excursion

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Participants are invited to join us on a post-symposium excursion to Hadrian's Wall on Saturday 10 August (9am-9pm). We will start at the local visitor center, the Sill, and walk along the most scenic part of the Hadrian Wall (about 7 km over undulating, unpaved hiking paths) to the Housesteads Roman Ford. Our trip leader will be Ian Jackson, a Wall history guide for the National Trust and a geologist with the British Geological Survey for many years. As well as the outstanding history and geology of this UNESCO World Heritage site this is a stunningly beautiful landscape. We will end the day with drinks and dinner in a local Northumberland pub.

The cost for this excursion is £45, payable to Northumbria University. The fee includes transport, entrance to the local visitor centre and the archeological sites and dinner.

More details about the excursion:

Our trip will explore the history, landscape and geology of Hadrian’s Wall country and how it shaped the Roman occupation.

The hike will take us along a classic section of the Wall and the Whin Sill escarpment, a 297 million year old igneous intrusion that is the original Sill of geological science. But this is also a landscape shaped and sculpted by ice and meltwater and those Quaternary glacial events had an influence on Hadrian’s plans too.

The landscape here profoundly influenced the Roman occupation, from the route of their defences to the exploitation of natural resources - building materials, metal ores and much more.

Our guide, Ian Jackson, was born in Carlisle and did his degree in geology and geography at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Ian is a Chartered Geologist and Fellow of the Geological Society. He spent 18 years surveying the geology of parts of the north of England for the British Geological Survey. Later he was responsible for national and international programmes that produced the first UK, European and global digital geological maps and made them web accessible, for which he received the Outstanding Achievement awards from the Geological Societies of America and Britain. Ian retired from the position of BGS Operations Director in 2011 and lives halfway along the Wall, in the middle of a Roman camp. He hikes somewhere in the north of England every week and is a volunteer National Trust guide at Housesteads Fort. In addition to many scientific maps, articles and reports, he is the author of three recent popular books about the rocks of Northumberland, Cumbria and Durham.