I'm currently at Hexham in Northumberland, where I've been busy touring some of the Hadrian's Wall sites: Chesters (yesterday), Vindolanda and Housesteads (today). All of which were utterly memorable, and a write-up will eventually be forthcoming; but it was only at Vindolanda that I was buzzed by a very low- and very fast-flying Tornado! It turns out that Vindolanda is within the RAF's Low Flying Area 13, so it's probably a common enough event around here; but it's not very common to me. Although I fumbled with the camera, I did manage to take one picture of it, before it screamed over the horizon:

Here's a close-up:


This was of course very cool, but it did tend to drag me 18 or 19 centuries forward in time, especially since for the rest of the day, every time I heard a jet -- which was frequently -- I'd scan the skies, hoping for another pass ...

I'm off to Edinburgh to-morrow, where presumably I'm less likely to be ducking ground-hugging aircraft -- though having said that, last week I also saw a very low-flying twin-engine monoplane skimming the rooftops near Russell Square (for which it's hard to come up with a good excuse). So, who knows!

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