A RECENT trip to the UK saw my son and I walk Hadrian’s Wall. We walked more than 100 kilometres in a week. 

It was mostly walking in the English summer rain but was educational and historic, with some aspects of the preservation of the 2000-year-old Roman culture uplifting, others depressing. 

A number of the sites along the route are being well looked after by English Heritage, a charity that manages more than 400 historic sites. 

It relies on entry fees to monuments and museums and other revenue raising, such as the sale of specifically made traditional wines, with government subsidies set to be eliminated this year, albeit the charity transitioned from a government department. 

Some Hadrian’s Wall sites are well maintained and the Wall’s history taken seriously. Others are literally sheep pens, framed by the Wall’s ancient stones where hardy sheep can shelter from the winds that blow down from the Arctic or across from the Irish Sea. 

One of the places we visited was the historic Chesters Roman Fort and Museum. This was one of a series of forts built by the Romans during the construction of Hadrian’s Wall and was built in AD124. 

It housed 500 Roman cavalrymen and was known as Cilurnum. The remnants of the bath house in particular have been wonderfully restored and the museum has many well-preserved artefacts. The proximity of the River Tyne makes for a lovely bucolic outlook. It was worth the entry fee. 

At the Chesters gift shop were two English Heritage wines for sampling. The sale of these wines assists the charity. One was a blackberry wine, the other a ginger wine. I tried them both. 

They are made for the charity by the Lyme Bay Winery based in Devon. The winery claims to be the largest producer of mead in the UK, and the sole supplier of mead to English Heritage although none was on taste at Chesters. 

Lyme Bay is one of the many UK wineries taking advantage of better growing conditions (which many attribute to climate change) with the winery producing a pinot noir from British-grown grapes. Pinot doesn’t like to be overheated.

The blackberry wine reminded me of cough syrup, sweet and sticky and with a slightly unpleasant syrupy finish. It’s made from an unspecified red wine grape, blackcurrant syrup and granulated beet sugar. Its suggested accompaniment is berry desserts. This is one traditional wine that would not be a loss to the nation if production ceased.

On the other hand, the ginger wine was pleasant and had a clean finish. Real ginger is absent, with the ginger kick coming from ginger powder and “natural” ginger flavour. 

Again, granulated beet sugar is used to make this a sweet wine but the 14 per cent alcohol by volume gives it a bit of a kick. It would be good in warding off the cold and it’s understandable that the English would drink this even in summer for the purposes of warming their insides: on one day of our walking journey, the maximum July temperature was 14C. 

Tradition may well be left behind by the explosion in new British vineyards: “Daily Wine News” on June 26 reported that the British wine industry has increased grape plantings by 74 per cent over the past five years and that there are now 943 vineyards spread across Great Britain. Maybe soon the British will be growing wine that a Roman emperor would salute?