An ideal Wall-day is a day of mingled cloud and sunshine, with a bit of a breeze, and yet not enough to make it "windy;" a day when heavy cumulus {111} clouds marshal themselves along the horizon, and then spread, and scatter, and form again, always threatening to do something great, but always thinking better of it; a day when it is perhaps raining heavily over Barcombe, or over Tindale Fell, and rainbows are chasing each other across the rolling fells to the south; but when "the top of the world," where we follow the Wall, is peaceful and calm in the sunshine, sweet with the smell of the wild thyme as we tread it under our feet, and musical with the notes of the curlews. I have known many such days. On such a day one is inclined to feel that the lot of a Roman sentry on the Wall was to be envied, until one remembers the other side of the picture--the drenching rain, the bitter wind, the snowdrifts, to say nothing of the constant sense of the need for vigilance, and the actual encounters with an unscrupulous enemy. Here at Sewingshields we are farther from shops and civilization than at any other point on the Wall. It is 5 miles to Haydon Bridge, the nearest post-office. The name "Shield" or "Shields" occurs so often along the line of the Wall that it is interesting to see how Camden uses the word in 1599. He says: "Here every way round about in the Wasts, as they tearme them, as also in Gillesland, you may see as it were the ancient Nomades, a martiall {112} kind of men, who from the moneth of Aprill into August, lye out scattering and summering (as they tearme it) with their cattell, in little cottages here and there, which they call Sheales and Shealings." Sewingshields is said to mean "wellings by the seugh (or ditch);" but Camden calls it "Seaven-shale," so it may have merely meant "Seven cottages." All the 10 miles from Sewingshields to Carvoran the Wall runs along the tops of "basaltic columns," huge pillars of volcanic rock crystallized in hexagonal formation, and making a great natural barrier. The course of the Wall is mainly in a westerly direction, but it also has a general tendency towards the south. Carvoran is just 3 miles farther south than Sewingshields. [Illustration: THE BASALT CLIFFS ABOVE CRAG LOUGH, ALONG THE TOP OF WHICH THE WALL RUNS. HOT BANK CRAGS ARE SEEN IN THE DISTANCE]