Tantallon House on Hadrian’s Wall

If you want to take a great walk to see some wonderful sections of the Roman Wall, there is no better place to stay than Tantallon House B&B and take the walk to Birdoswald and along the river to Gilsland Village. Of particular note on the walk is Willow Ford Roman Bridge. This is set on the banks of the River Irthing and, with a bit of imagination and the pictures set on the notice boards adjacent to the site, you can see just how good at engineering the Romans were.

The first bridge was built in AD 122 to AD 128 when Hadrian’s Wall was first set out. It comprised of a tower, which housed a flight of steps which accessed the top of the bridge. It is thought that this bridge may have collapsed in AD 160 to AD 180.

Second Bridge. This had a superstructure in timber and the old tower was demolished. A new larger tower was built to the east side. The end of the bridge incorporated a platform of masonry to the north of the Wall which acted as a retaining wall to protect the bridge from the fast river flows. There are sluices still visible on the site which are assumed to act as some kind of flood control.

Third Bridge. The tower was removed, the bridge widened and a ramp was constructed. There was also built, a new end to the bridge and pier. It was now known as the Military Way.What can you see today? There are some good descriptions on the boards to show you what the bridge was like, and you can work out from the pictures each section of the bridge built at the different times. You can still see the sluices, the wall, piers, ramps etc and also how the Romans connected the stones together, They cut slots in the stone and joined them with iron or lead cramps. (If you go to the Chesters Bridge at Chollerford you can see the circular holes in the stones for a kind of crane!)

What I find amazing about this today is not only the Roman construction but the way the River Irthing has moved about 200 metres westward and left the bridge behind. The Romans built the bridge not perpendicular to the river flow but almost parallel to the river, so as the river cut away at the rocks and soil on the bend, it gradually moved away from the bridge.It is a wonderful setting and the bridge is only one of 3 on the Wall. Well worth a visit, but only accessible by foot, about 10 minutes walk from Birdoswald.

I have been in charge of Tantallon House’s internet marketing, learning various techniques through intensive research, into this constantly changing field. It may be that you found our site through Google - perhaps the be all and end of all of searching. It seems that the majority of people use Google when searching instead of Yahoo, AOL, Ask, MSN… According to this article (and the evidence varies), Google has around 80% of the UK market. Achieving a high ranking in the search engines, contrary to popular belief is not based on the number of hits a site receives - as this could be easily manipulated by companies, but essentially on two factors - content and links.

‘Content is King‘ is often heard on SEO (search engine optimisation) blogs. Google scans sites and matches up people’s search terms with the keywords that most often appear in your site. For example this site is optimised to the keywords ‘bed and breakfast’ and ‘hadrian’s wall’. To illustrate the point we could have focused this website on ‘accommodation’ and ‘cumbria’ if we were to target a slightly different market. So what does this mean? Well for starters Tantallon House ranks highly for the search term ‘hadrian’s wall bed and breakfast‘ in Google. The higher up the rankings, the more hits the site will get and the hope is the more bookings we will receive.

Google uses another major criteria for ranking - links, and this is arguably the more time consuming side of search engine marketing (SEM). Google’s rankings are loosely democratic, in that sense that each website can ‘vote’ for another one by posting a link to it. This is seen as a sign that there is something of value on the website. However, these votes are weighted - a site that has more votes (and is generally regarded as the ‘authority’) has a greater influence with its links. For example a link from the national trail official website, is considered more valuable than say someone’s relatively unknown personal website.

Sounds relatively simple doesn’t it? Well to be honest it is, but the more you get involved with SEO the more you seen can be acheived and more importantly the bigger the impact that can be created on a business in terms of the number customers. If you would like to know more about this, or how SEO could help your website - then a new site is about to be launched, goodwebpractices where there will be useful and easy to understand articles that delve deeper into internet marketing.

A spectacular event, the Northumberland Lights Festival, was held in the old quarry of Walltown Crags a few days ago.  This is a beautiful area for walking and is on the line of Hadians Wall.  The Victorians extensively excavated the area and there is now a dramatic formation of crags which formed the backdrop for the show.

The show commenced with a walk from the entrance up.  We passed strange eerily lit  sculptures until we arrived in the central part of the quarry.  There we stood with many others listening to the intro music while we waited for the main show to commence. - The lighting, of all sorts of colours and shapes were projected onto the craggy rocks, Majestic fireworks ricoched around the quarry as they exploded in amazing lights over us, the fire works were to the front of us and behind us, seeming to respond to each display, ,at one stage, what appeared to be blazing braziers were swung around the heads of brave volunteers hugging the cliffs, electronic music accompanied the display and all the fireworks, music and lights were synchronised to good effect.

We would recommend going to next years show organised by Northumberland National Park, especially as its very close to our bed and breakfast - about 3 miles away.  You can walk or cycle but there are buses from local destinations serving the site and all timed to ensure the scheduled train and bus services can be caught by the show goers.