Hadrian's Wall Tickets

The first thing to settle: you do not pay to see Hadrian’s Wall. It runs 73 miles across open country, the National Trail beside it is a public right of way, and nobody takes money at the crags. Park at Steel Rigg for a pound or two an hour and walk out along the Whin Sill for nothing.

What you pay for are the forts, and that is where the Roman story is kept. Three of them are English Heritage sites at about $14 each. Vindolanda and the Roman Army Museum belong to a separate trust and are ticketed separately. Each answers a different question, and $14 goes further at one of them than the others depending on what you want.

Housesteads — the fort as a fort

This is the one to book if you are booking one. The most complete Roman fort in Britain, laid out on an escarpment with the Wall running away east and west along the crags and nothing but open Northumberland in every direction.

The ground plan is legible enough to walk: barrack blocks, the hospital, the commanding officer’s house, granaries raised on stone pillars to keep the damp out, and the communal latrines, which are the best-preserved Roman toilets in the country and the thing every single visitor photographs. Around eight hundred soldiers lived here. The museum holds altars, jewellery, tools and weapons excavated on site, plus a winged statue of Victory recovered from the surrounding fields, and a small cinema reconstructs the buildings as they stood.

One caveat worth planning for: the fort sits about 750 metres uphill from the car park, much of it steep, and the platform itself is uneven. If that is a problem, phone the site before you travel — staff will discuss the best access route, and on a private tour closer parking can sometimes be arranged.

Chesters — the bathhouse, and the easy one

Chesters is the cavalry fort, on level wooded ground beside the North Tyne, and it is by a distance the gentlest of the three to visit. No climb, short walk, tearooms on site.

The draw is the bathhouse, running down toward the river in a complex of rooms for hot, cold and steam bathing. It is the best-preserved military bathhouse in Britain and, unlike most Roman ruins, it still reads as a building — you can follow the sequence of rooms a soldier moved through. Above it stand the headquarters building with its courtyard and regimental shrine, and the barracks that cavalrymen shared with their horses.

The Clayton Museum opened in 1896 and still uses many of its original Edwardian cabinets. It is named for John Clayton, the Victorian town clerk of Newcastle who bought up estates along the frontier specifically to stop the Wall being quarried away, and without whom considerably less of it would survive.

If anyone in your party has limited mobility, or it is raining hard, Chesters is the right choice.

Birdoswald — the longest stretch of Wall

Birdoswald has the one thing the others cannot offer: the longest continuous stretch of Hadrian’s Wall still standing, running away from the fort as far as you can see. If you want a photograph of the Wall as a wall rather than a line of footings, this is where to take it.

It sits on a ridge above the River Irthing gorge, and it is the only place where all of the monument’s defining features survive together in one landscape — the Wall, a turret, a milecastle and the fort’s three main gates. A periscope in the visitor centre shows the view from the Wall’s original height, which is the fastest way to grasp how much of it is gone.

It is on the western, Cumbrian end, so it sees far fewer visitors than the central sector even in August. Parking is about £4 a day.

Vindolanda — the one to add

Not English Heritage, not on the Wall, and the most important site on the frontier. Vindolanda lies about a mile south on the older Stanegate road and was occupied before, during and after the Wall was built. Its waterlogged, anaerobic soil preserved leather shoes, textiles, timber and — above all — hundreds of wooden writing tablets carrying ordinary Roman correspondence. A birthday invitation. A request for more beer. A complaint about the state of the roads.

Excavation has run for decades and still turns up new material each season, so between spring and early autumn there is usually a live dig to watch. It closes each January and part of February.

Several guided tours bundle Vindolanda entry, and the Hexham full day includes two museums of your choice — which, at $129, is frequently better arithmetic than buying admissions separately.

The timing mistake everyone makes

Last entry is 16:00 from 1 April to 29 October, and 15:00 from 30 October to 31 March. That is earlier than the daylight for most of the year, and it is the reason full-day tours start at 08:00. Allow about two hours per fort, and build the day backward from the closing time rather than forward from breakfast.

Bring coins for parking — it is charged separately everywhere and mobile signal on the crags is not reliable. Family tickets cover two adults and up to three children aged 5 to 17.

Check availability above for Housesteads, or see the best part of the Wall to visit for how these sites sit relative to each other on the map.