A Year Abroad: Day Thirteen. Hadrian's Wall.

Today was quite the busy day. It was an early morning for our pop over into Scotland. Gretna Green is a small village just over the border between England and Scotland, and is the first village on the road to Edinburgh. During the past, England upped its marriage laws, and forbid anyone under the age of 21 years to wed, and it had to occur in a church with a priest. As, back then, people usually married younger, 21 was seen by a lot of the English population as too old. So they would go just across the border and get married there. And the first port of call was the blacksmiths. Back then, anyone could legally wed you as well, including a fisherman, and the like. So the blacksmiths became an impromptu runaway wedding spot, performing over 5000 weddings a year. We had a fake wedding there between two random people from the group haha and then went back into England to head for Housestead's Fort, the most well preserved piece of Hadrian's wall.

Hadrian's wall was freezing and windy. I can't understand why the Romans would have built there. Sure it's on a hill and had a great view of all surrounding land, but they could have built in the next valley and lived there, and just had a lookout or something on top of the hill. The site isn't just a wall, it's ruins of the entire roman village, including soldiers quarters for 800, and their families quarters, stables, generals house, latrines, and everything else. The actual wall is a little way out, and is the original wall built by the Romans as the edge of their territory. Over the border were Scottish 'barbarian' tribes.

After looking around there, we stopped for lunch at Jedburgh, which is a small place just over the border of Scotland. Then continued onto Edinburgh.
When we arrived, the others were heading out for a Scottish dinner night, but I had booked my own tickets to the military tattoo! On their way, they dropped me in the centre of town so I could pick my ticket up and find my way to the castle, which wasn't so hard as it's in the centre of town on a hill. We had a quick bus tour before I was dropped off, driving the Royal Mile, between Holyrood Castle and Edinburgh castle, and passed all sorts of monuments.
When I was dropped off, as it's the Fringe festival in Edinburgh at the moment, there was heaps of stuff to see. Street performers were all over the city. I started the slow ascent up to the castle as there were heaps of old people there and the line wasn't moving very fast. When seated, I was in the section right on the edge, which proved to be a great spot as I was right next to the castle, and could see out over Edinburgh.
The show was amazing. I saw them before where they were in Australia, but seeing them play at their home was cool. There were bands from New Zealand, Korea, Mongolia, England and, of course, Scotland. It was awesome.
I then got my first black cab ever back to the hotel as buses had stopped by the time I got out. I had a great driver who gave me a comprehensive history of the city as we drove along.