Yes, that’s right. My husband and I just got back from camping in Northumberland.
This fact alone raised eyebrows. Who chooses to camp in the dead hinge of winter, when the year is barely holding itself together and the ground feels inhospitable by design?
As it turns out, plenty of people do.
And why not? What else is there to do with the weird days between Christmas and New Year?
We stayed near Hadrian’s Wall, close enough that the landscape seemed shaped by it even when it wasn’t visible. A robin watched as we set up camp. Folks say they carry the spirits of the lost. The weather was still, dry and cold. The kind of cold that doesn’t bite so much as linger, settling bone-deep.
The absence of wind changed everything. Without it, sound behaved differently. The land felt paused, as if holding its breath. It became disturbingly easy to imagine what it might have been like when the Romans built the wall almost 2000 years ago. Not the grandeur, but the daily reality. Cold, stiff fingers. Repetitive labour. The sense of being stationed at the edge of something vast and uncertain.
Walls are never just about defence. They’re about belief, about drawing lines and insisting they matter. And standing there wrapped in winter layers at our camp, the wall, unseen beyond hazy fields and skeletal tree branches clawing at the sky, felt close.
At around 10:30pm, already hours and hours into darkness, as my husband and I sat by our campfire with mugs of mulled wine warming our hands, an owl called out. Clear. Uninterrupted. The kind of sound that feels deliberate even when you know it isn’t.
Owls carry a heavy folkloric reputation. They’re messengers. Watchers. Harbingers. I don’t subscribe neatly to any of that, and yet in that moment, the call felt like an acknowledgement. As though the land had noticed us noticing it.
The village of Haltwhistle was also close by. We visited during the day and found out that it sits at the centre of Britain. Geographically speaking, the middle. An unassuming fact that nevertheless shifted something in me.
Centres are strange places, after all. They rarely look important. Nor do they announce themselves. But they carry a gravitational pull, a sense that lines converge there unseen. Add Roman history and the quiet authority of an ancient wall, and the place began to feel subtly charged.
Not dramatically so, just alert.
Camping beside an ancient boundary during this liminal stretch in December felt less like a holiday and more like an alignment. An adventure, nonetheless, but a recalibration. Winter stripped our experience right back to something raw. Stone. Cold air. And the uncomfortable awareness that people once lived entire lives in this landscape under far harsher conditions. It was a reminder that some lines, once drawn, never truly fade. No matter how much time passes.
And in the stillness of the night, when I stirred to a soft murmuring, I’m sure I heard the land speaking.
R. H. DIXON 