I’m writing this on a train, flying
along from Newcastle, England, to Portsmouth, England. Jane and I
just completed walking across the island from Bowness-on-Solway, on
the west coast, to Newcastle, on the east coast via Hadrian’s Wall. It is some 77, or
78, or 84 or 90 miles, depending on which literature one refers to.
This has been a consistent problem with travel information, it never
is accurate.

The guidebooks are notorious for this.
We’ve purchased two on this current trip, both published by a
reputable publisher, and both have bordered on useless. The maps have
legends icons that are not defined anywhere in the book, maps that
fail to show distances and extraneous information and landmarks.

The text in a guidebook, above
all else, should do just that: guide. There is an entire paragraph in
our Hadrians Wall guide that describes, in great detail, a pub/inn
and then comments at the end of the description that the
establishment is no longer in business! Really? Then why describe it?

Yesterday, we finished walking Hadrians
Wall, a delightful experience exploring the Roman ruin that stretches
all along the English/Scottish border. The wall was built by the
Romans to defend England from Pict raiding parties from Scotland. The
Romans were never able to “tame,” the Pict tribes and the wall
was a measure to defend the Roman occupied territory. Recent evidence
indicates that the wall may have been as much a tax collection
barrier for commerce as it was a military defense.

The wall itself was quite an impressive
structure; it varied in width from a few feet to up to 15 feet and in
height from a few feet to as much as 15 feet. Every mile there was a
Milecastle, a military post for troops, as well as turrets spaced in
between. With signal towers and a connecting road, it made a
formidable structure, only exceeded by the Great Wall, in China.

When we finished the walk yesterday, we
had planned on an eight mile walk, it became a sixteen mile jaunt.
Why? The guidebook map showed that the route “might” be eight
miles, but had the distance missing on one page, and even the page
that did have distances were not very exact. There was no one map
that clearly showed any distance so it was difficult to fully realize
how far we would walk.

Not all guidebooks are this poor. When
I walked the Appalachian Trail, in 2007, I used the ALDHA guidebook,
and it was almost flawless. There was no superfluous information. As
much as I enjoy walking in Europe, I must say they need to improve
the guidebooks.