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
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