There is plenty of interest for the keen visitor to the town especially when the excavations are in progress and as a team of students is on hand to guide visitors around the excavations. The finds from the 1890-1909 excavations are in the museum at Reading where they form a major display.

Vindolanda, otherwise known as Chesterholm, is one of the forts that is not on Hadrian’s Wall itself, but which lies in the valley behind it where the main Roman road known as the Stanegate runs. It is today best known for the remarkable wooden writing tablets that have been discovered there.

Vindolanda is not owned or run by English Heritage but by the Vindolanda Trust and the remarkable Birley family. In the 1930s, Chesterholm and the adjacent fort was owned by Eric Birley who subsequently became Professor of Archaeology at Durham and one of the leading archaeologists on the Wall. Ownership then passed to a Trust but work was continued by his two sons Robin and Tony. It was Robin who made the remarkable discovery of wooden writing tablets, preserved deep down in waterlogged deposits in abandoned early forts, dating to the early years of the second century AD, before Hadrian’s Wall itself was built. These were subsequently sold to the British Museum in order to pay for the excavations, but replicas can be seen in the site museum.

Vindolanda is remarkable in that not only can the fort itself be seen but also the very extensive vicus, or civilian settlement - the most extensive vicus building to be seen in this country. The site today is approached through the new car park which leads in to the vicus. The vicus itself is laid out at an angle to the main stone fort, but this is because it was aligned on an earlier timber fort that has now vanished. Note that most of the buildings are strip buildings, long narrow buildings, end onto the road, where the front part facing the road would have been a shop, and the rear part workrooms and living accommodation. To one side of the vicus a short modern replica of Hadrian’s Wall has been constructed.
In the fort itself most of the walls have been uncovered and also the headquarters building at the centre. To one (eastern) side the commanding officer’s house has now been uncovered with a small possible Christian church constructed in the courtyard in the sub-Roman period. On the western side, adjacent to the vicus, current (2009) excavations are revealing the granaries.

Two bath houses are known, the original one in the vicus and a recently discovered one outside the southern gate.

Beyond the fort (on the opposite side to the vicus) a steep path leads down to Chesterholm, the original house, now a museum and work rooms, a good shop and luscious tea rooms. In the gardens of the house are some reconstructed buildings including a temple and a sculpture gallery. The original car park, still available for the disabled, lies beyond the house.

Housesteads is one of the most popular forts on Hadrian’s Wall as it is more-or-less right in the middle of the Wall, in one of the wildest parts of the scenery and it has therefore been comparatively well preserved and it has also been extensively excavated.

It is a little difficult to get to. There is a big car park along the Military Way but from there it is a long walk up first to the rather small museum, and then to the fort itself, which was one of the first forts to be completely excavated in the 1890s. There are a number of features laid out to be inspected: there is the headquarters building with the main cross hall marked by column bases; on the southward side there is the praetorium, or commanding officer’s house, laid out on a steeply sloping site, which must have been a nightmare to build and remains a nightmare to understand.

There are a couple of well preserved granaries and also a famous pair of barrack blocks facing each other. They are famous because it is here that the archaeologists first elucidated the development of barrack blocks in the 4th century, when they were divided up into little individual chalets.

However, the best known feature is the well equipped latrine in the south east corner: two deep channels which would have been covered by presumably wooden seats, with channels running down the centre in which the sponges, which Romans used in place of paper, would have been moistened. Note the water tanks adjacent.

Archaeologically, however, the most important feature at Housesteads is known as Turret 36B, which is to be found near the North Gate. This is terribly important because it proves that the forts were a later addition to the Wall. The Wall was originally laid out with milecastles every mile and two turrets between each Milecastle. Subsequently, however, - probably only five or ten years later — it was decided to move the forts up onto the wall, and so the half-built Turret 36B was demolished and the foundations buried. The actual fort was built slightly projecting in front of the original line of the wall.

Note too the steepness of the fall-off outside the North Gateway which would not really have been very practical. An additional gateway was therefore built on the lower ground at Knag Burn, a couple of hundred yards east of the fort, which is clearly where the main traffic passed through the wall.

Housesteads lies in the middle of one of the finest stretches of Hadrian’s Wall, which was extensively exposed and rebuilt in the 19th century by John Clayton, who owned Housesteads and the adjacent forts, and who rebuilt the wall so that people could walk along it: it didn’t matter if it suffered from the walkers, because it could then be rebuilt every winter. The modern management however, does not like this and makes you walk behind the wall. But Housesteads makes a good starting point if you want to walk a stretch of the Wall.

Wallsend, today a suburb of Newcastle, is, as its name suggests, the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall. It has recently been totally excavated and is now laid out as a visitor attraction.

Until the 18th century Wallsend was open countryside but then the Industrial Revolution industry sprang up and it became the headquarters of the Swan Hunter shipyard where the Mauritania and many famous battleships were built and launched. Today the Swan Hunter shipyard is defunct and the terraced houses that cover the forgotten Roman fort have been demolished, the fort has been excavated, and the archaeologists have persuaded the local authorities to lay it out as a visitor attraction as part of a major regeneration drive, to regenerate one of the towns that has suffered the most from the decline in ship building.

There is much to see, starting at the Tyne and Wear Metro station where the signs are all in Latin. Entrance is via the museum (the former Swan Hunter Community Centre) where a glass and concrete tower provides a fine viewing platform, from which the whole of the fort can be seen. The fort was manned by a cavalry regiment and the most popular features are the specially designed barracks where each cavalryman slept in one room with his horse in the room adjacent. There is also the headquarters building and a building interpreted, perhaps rashly, as a hospital.

There are also two remarkable reconstructions. In one corner of the fort enclosure is a reconstructed Roman bath house. This in fact does not have anything to do with the fort, for the actual fort bath house lies several hundred yards away. Instead it is a full scale reconstruction of the baths from Chesters. Entrance is into a fine large dressing room, but note that the baths are of the rather posh ‘ring’ where the bather progressed from cold room, to hot room, to sweating room in a ring, rather than the more usual ‘row’ type.

The other reconstruction is in fact outside the main visitor enclosure. There is a small gateway in the far corner, then across the busy road and on the far side there is the reconstructed stretch of Hadrian’s Wall, adjacent to which there are the fallen remains of the wall itself, in a place where it had subsided, and had to be rebuilt.

Note too adjacent the remains of an 18th century mine, one of the original coal mines on which the later prosperity of Wallsend was based. There is also the base of a very early steam pumping engine.

Wallsend is easily accessible from Newcastle by the Metro and makes a fine excursion from Newcastle, especially if combined with the Roman supply base at South Shields on the other side of the river Tyne, and the Museum at Bede’s World, and more importantly Bede’s actual monasteries at Jarrow and Monkwearmouth. There is talk of making a Swan Hunter museum of shipbuilding to combine with the Roman museum at Wallsend

Maryport is the main Roman fort on the Cumberland coast. Although Hadrian’s Wall itself ended at Bowness-on-Solway, a line of forts and milecastles extended down the Cumberland coast, and Maryport itself lies some 20 miles south of the official end of Hadrian’s Wall.

Over the past couple of centuries, a number of altars and other carved stones have been ploughed up, both from the fort itself and from the extensive settlement that surrounded it, and the local landowners, the Senhouse family, collected these and kept them in an outhouse. Recently however, these needed to be put into a proper museum and so Brian Ashmore established a Trust which took over a disused Victorian battery and coastguard station on the cliffs and turned into a splendid small museum, which contains a very fine collection of Roman carved stones. Note in particular a large phallic symbol with a snake carved down the front of it which is always very popular with visitors.

The fort itself is still farmland and cannot at present be visited, but an observation tower has been built in a corner of the museum compound from which a fine view of the fort can be obtained. Note in particular the southwest (right hand) corner of the fort which appears to have been extended to form a bastion, or possibly a base for an artillery machine.

Recently however, the fort has been purchased by Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd, the quango charged with looking after Hadrian’s Wall with the support of the Lottery Fund. They hope to open up the fort to the general public, at least for guided tours, and there is talk of launching excavations, both in the fort itself and in the surrounding settlement.

Corbridge is a major Roman fort of the Hadrian's Wall complex. It was not on Hadrian's Wall itself but several miles back and acted as the supply base and headquarters for the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall. It lies behind the Wall, at the point where the Dere Street, the main Roman road running north into Scotland, crosses the Stanegate , the main Roman road running east/west from Newcastle to Carlisle behind Hadrian’s Wall. It began life as a fort but then became a supply base for the eastern half of Hadrian’s Wall.

There is an extensive Roman remains park, but it is a little difficult to find as it lies rather over a mile outside the modern town of Corbridge
The archaeological area covers in fact only a small part of the Roman site and a visit may be divided into four things to see. The first, on the left as you go in, are a pair of granaries, long narrow buildings with a raised floor, where corn and other supplies were stored. Next, adjacent to them, is the fountain house, essentially a stone cistern with the sides worn down where lazy soldiers in the post-Roman period used the cistern to sharpen their swords. But note behind it the aqueduct that brought in the water that fed what was clearly the main source of water in the town.

Beyond it is the mysterious ‘site XI’, a large open courtyard area with buildings on all four sides. It began life as the headquarters building of the fort, but then in the 180s it was decided to turn the whole of north England over to civilian control and make Corbridge the capital of the new region and this was to be the forum and basilica. However, in the 190s they changed their mind, cancelled their plans and the only part of the new structure that was completed was the row of shops on the south side.

These three items all lie on one side of the main road. On the other side of the road is a chaotic jumble of buildings which in fact formed two compounds, manned by detachments from two different legions from which the supplies to Hadrian’s Wall were organised. It is difficult to make out the details, partly because the buildings have slumped dramatically into the varied ditches of an earlier fort.

But seek out the strong room in one of the compounds where you can still go down the steps which led to the room where the money to pay the soldiers was stored together with the standards and other military regalia. There are also several temples with apsidal ends.

Keats House, situated in Keats Grove not far from Hampstead Heath overground station and the terminus of the 24 bus route, has just (2009) reopened after a two-year restoration. It is a charming example of a small, early 18th century dwelling house. It was built in 1814 – 16 and was occupied from 1818-20 by the poet John Keats and it was here in the garden that he wrote his famous ‘Ode to the Nightingale’.

The main impression of the house is how small it all is. The only decent size room is the dining room, but this was a later addition in the 1840s by an actress Miss Eliza Cheshire, who lived and entertained there (see her portrait). In fact Keats only had half the house, the other half being occupied by the Brawne family whose daughter, Fanny Brawne, became Keats’ fiancée, but before the affair got very far, Keats caught tuberculosis and went out to Rome where he died the following year.

It is perhaps a little unfortunate that in the 1930s, when the property was in a bad way, half the property was taken over by Hampstead Borough Council who built the local library on it which rather spoils the proportions, though the recent restoration seeks to minimise the effect of the library. But it is a charming little house well worth a visit.

In the summer, actors sometimes act out the love affair of Keats and Fanny Brawne in the gardens.