Rory Stewart walked the length of Hadrian’s Wall, staying at the homes of strangers on the way.  Here he mentions one descended from a Victorian who had apparently captured the king of Afghanistan, a landscape Stewart had also got to know on foot.

Something funny about the no-nonsense receipt, though you can’t imagine why he was taken prisoner and how he felt about it.

‘At Mirehouse that night I stayed with a man whose ancestor had captured the King of Afghanistan… On the wall was a signed receipt taken when delivering the prisoner into custody.  It said: ‘Received: One Afghan King, 1881′.’

Source: Rory Stewart, The Marches: Border Walks with my Father (London: Vintage, 2017), p. 154