Note: this essay was originally written in the summer of 1982 after a trip to Hadrian’s Wall earlier that June. It was never accepted for publication. In March 2018, I found a copy of it in old files I had kept from my graduate school days.
*
Hadrian’s Wall
“Hadrian was the first to build a wall, 80 miles long,
to separate the Romans from the barbarians.”
A Roman historian
*
Hadrian’s Wall has long fascinated me. This rampart, crossing the narrow neck of northern Britain, gently undulates over remote wolds and through fond memories of my childhood daydreams. It rests now taciturn, sporadically overrun by tourist armies, its battlements weather-beaten into a pasture wall. Since boyhood, I’ve always wanted to explore the Wall; while in England doing research for my dissertation, I finally did.
For miles, the Wall’s crumbling remains, preserved as a national treasure, furnish outcrop sidewalks across barren moors. Once it rose twenty feet; now it stands hardly four feet tall. In places, at a casual glance, it might appear as merely a cut-stone wall guarding cattle, not an empire. In other still-impressive sections, striding crag-to-crag and commanding a tenable position from horizon-to-horizon, this stonework instantly demonstrates its former dominance: nothing moved in front of it without Roman permission.
At Steel Riggs, a chain of sheer cliffs, I walked along a ledge where some centurion from the Second Legion once stood watch. Often, he stood guard over nothing. Mostly, he surveyed, as I did, the calm valley below. Periodically, however, on my “watch,” RAF and NATO jets hugged the valley floor in practice bombing runs that evaded radar. I’d seen other jets doing the same maneuvers skimming over Yorkshire moors, miles to the south, the week before. Some places seem made for mimicking war.
But that day at the Wall, it was difficult, even with the roar of jets in the distance, to imagine this peaceful place ever being fought over, although it was. The Wall was attacked, captured, and retaken several times during the Roman colonization of Britain. For a time, the Antonine Wall to the north in Scotland made Hadrian’s unnecessary; consequently, it suffered great neglect until needed in earnest again by retreating Romans.
The Wall was not so much the limit of Roman rule as the designated boundary from which the Empire was unwilling to retreat should the tenuously conquered northern British and southern Scottish provinces successfully revolt. In the end, economics as much as war forced the inevitable abandonment of the Wall sometime after AD 367. With the Empire interested mostly in the Continent, Britain—always expensive to garrison—was left to fend for herself. Rome left the isle to the Saxons, Picks, and in the north, the Scots.
Brought to ruins by eventual disrepair during the Anglo-Saxon period, the Wall still captivates; a horizonal engineering feat not duplicated in Europe until inspiring vertical cathedrals rose above medieval squalor and sprawling castles stretched out from fortified, moated manor houses.
*
Seventeen identical forts are incorporated into the Wall; even their latrines are all in the southeastern corner. Strung between these forts stand small guard castles precisely every Roman mile; between these “milecastles” are two less grand but precisely placed guard turrets. No guard point is out of sight of another. More forts (with their southeastern latrines), fortified towns, and villas flourished just north and south of the Wall as well. Rome came to stay, and before leaving, she cut her archeological heritage deeply into the British countryside.
Nearby, a supply road, the Stangate, is visible in strips here and there: straight, level, and true, unlike its modern, ambling, rolling descendants. A deep ditch, the Vallum, protected the legionnaires’ rear flank from the guile and pilfering of locals. What is now an intermittent grassy gully immediately north of the Wall was once a steep trench, perhaps twenty feet deep. It remains in places where the Wall has been carted away to become a manor’s barn or a “modern” moated tower, or a farmer’s wall. Where the Wall itself no longer stands, some scar or cutting shows its path. Even someone untrained in archeology, like me, can usually tell where the Wall ran, and tell which common walls in the vicinity began as debris from the Wall after it fell into disrepair. I thought, this is Hadrian’s wall, but up here, every wall in part is Hadrian’s Wall.
Begun in AD 122 by Hadrian’s imperial edict, as much to protect his northern frontier as to give his idle legions something to do, its Eastern two-thirds were made of cut stone. The final third, in the isolated Western reaches, was originally mounds of fortified turf. Years later, this turf section was entirely reworked in stone.
The wide pathway of the Wall contains more than just military evidence. The remains of temples, arch-bridges, water mills, Roman baths, even a quarry now become a lake, dot the countryside north and south. Bustling with trade, cities like Vindolanda, later Chesterholm, thrived. Villas, aqueducts, granaries—this frontier was intricately employed, commanding troops, ancillary services, camp followers. The Romans in the Wall’s swath lived better (heated homes, hot baths, sanitation) and ate better (a variety of meat and fish, abundant fresh produce, fine wines and oils) than most Europeans until well into the nineteenth century.
And except for the inconveniences of a periodic rebellion, throughout the 250 years the Romans manned the Wall, it was generally cushy garrison duty. Remote and tedious but hardly a strain.
*
Alone, I walked atop foreboding, desolate stretches in a cold spring rain, which kept most other tourists away. Only a childhood dream could press me into roaming these abandoned fortified crags. At Vercovicium, the foundation of a fort has been unearthed, and several miles of existing wall, just four-feet high, runs to the west. Remoteness alone probably kept all its stone from being scavenged over the last fifteen hundred years. Then, as now, Vercovicium is peaceful; so much so, that the Romans built an additional gate without all the usual elaborate fortifications to allow for easy exchange of herds and goods in the town’s thriving marketplace. Any fortification can be breached successfully with eager trade.
At the quarry lake and milecastle at Cawford’s Crag, I dangled my feet from the low wall as I lunched on takeaway Chinese food bought at the local village. In the distance, the Wall straddled the edge of a sheer cliff. I climbed over the impressive ruins at Birdoswald, once Camboglanna. Visitors pay ten pence at a farmhouse backdoor and then wander among its unusual outbuildings: the preserved foundations of a large fort, a water mill, and a bridge. From here, even part of the original western turf wall is still visible in the lush valley below. From Birdoswald west to Bowness little exists of the Wall. Farmers and more recent engineers have reused its stone for new designs, though often for the same purpose.
Sixteen hundred years ago, this defensive line divided Roman civilization, Pax Romans, from the barbarian hinterland. Somewhere north of the Wall began “the land of Them.” From here south was Us. It defined the known world, the good and the evil. Cycles of security, bounty, and protection, disrupted now and again by loss and inevitable recapture until the final cycle broke. Then all went backsliding into disrepair and disuse: the ever-repeating saga of history. Gettysburg now a quiet park. Normandy reinvaded by tourists every June. Monte Cassino restored. Anzio a quaint fishing village once again. Today, places alive with history but without violence. Part of national heritages and international memory, yet once, signs of division, of tension, of conflict, often of occupation.
In my reverie as I walked the Wall, I kept wondering who would one day walk our Hadrian’s Walls. Tossing pebbles into the Cawford’s Crag quarry lake, I tried to imagine what of ours today will belong to history tomorrow. Who will hike our iron and concrete curtains, finding them deserted and ramshackled by time. For in trying to stop time, we’re only ensuring it will have its inevitable sway. Every beach house braced against restless tides surrenders to their inevitable conquering.
I also wondered what of ours would signify our divisions to posterity. What will Watts and Belfast and Beirut show should they ever earn a historical marker, since hate and violence never deceive history? Or are we making our racial and religious and national lines invisible but as lasting as cut-stone? I wondered if relentless time will make all our walls outdated. Will they survive because we changed and outgrew them or because we fell back and dug in yet again?
Tossing my pebbles, I wondered if anyone would ever toss some into the murky, watery bottom of an abandoned, hardened ICBM silo.
*
Hadrian’s Wall
“Hadrian was the first to build a wall, 80 miles long,
to separate the Romans from the barbarians.”
A Roman historian
*
Hadrian’s Wall has long fascinated me. This rampart, crossing the narrow neck of northern Britain, gently undulates over remote wolds and through fond memories of my childhood daydreams. It rests now taciturn, sporadically overrun by tourist armies, its battlements weather-beaten into a pasture wall. Since boyhood, I’ve always wanted to explore the Wall; while in England doing research for my dissertation, I finally did.
For miles, the Wall’s crumbling remains, preserved as a national treasure, furnish outcrop sidewalks across barren moors. Once it rose twenty feet; now it stands hardly four feet tall. In places, at a casual glance, it might appear as merely a cut-stone wall guarding cattle, not an empire. In other still-impressive sections, striding crag-to-crag and commanding a tenable position from horizon-to-horizon, this stonework instantly demonstrates its former dominance: nothing moved in front of it without Roman permission.
At Steel Riggs, a chain of sheer cliffs, I walked along a ledge where some centurion from the Second Legion once stood watch. Often, he stood guard over nothing. Mostly, he surveyed, as I did, the calm valley below. Periodically, however, on my “watch,” RAF and NATO jets hugged the valley floor in practice bombing runs that evaded radar. I’d seen other jets doing the same maneuvers skimming over Yorkshire moors, miles to the south, the week before. Some places seem made for mimicking war.
But that day at the Wall, it was difficult, even with the roar of jets in the distance, to imagine this peaceful place ever being fought over, although it was. The Wall was attacked, captured, and retaken several times during the Roman colonization of Britain. For a time, the Antonine Wall to the north in Scotland made Hadrian’s unnecessary; consequently, it suffered great neglect until needed in earnest again by retreating Romans.
The Wall was not so much the limit of Roman rule as the designated boundary from which the Empire was unwilling to retreat should the tenuously conquered northern British and southern Scottish provinces successfully revolt. In the end, economics as much as war forced the inevitable abandonment of the Wall sometime after AD 367. With the Empire interested mostly in the Continent, Britain—always expensive to garrison—was left to fend for herself. Rome left the isle to the Saxons, Picks, and in the north, the Scots.
Brought to ruins by eventual disrepair during the Anglo-Saxon period, the Wall still captivates; a horizonal engineering feat not duplicated in Europe until inspiring vertical cathedrals rose above medieval squalor and sprawling castles stretched out from fortified, moated manor houses.
*
Seventeen identical forts are incorporated into the Wall; even their latrines are all in the southeastern corner. Strung between these forts stand small guard castles precisely every Roman mile; between these “milecastles” are two less grand but precisely placed guard turrets. No guard point is out of sight of another. More forts (with their southeastern latrines), fortified towns, and villas flourished just north and south of the Wall as well. Rome came to stay, and before leaving, she cut her archeological heritage deeply into the British countryside.
Nearby, a supply road, the Stangate, is visible in strips here and there: straight, level, and true, unlike its modern, ambling, rolling descendants. A deep ditch, the Vallum, protected the legionnaires’ rear flank from the guile and pilfering of locals. What is now an intermittent grassy gully immediately north of the Wall was once a steep trench, perhaps twenty feet deep. It remains in places where the Wall has been carted away to become a manor’s barn or a “modern” moated tower, or a farmer’s wall. Where the Wall itself no longer stands, some scar or cutting shows its path. Even someone untrained in archeology, like me, can usually tell where the Wall ran, and tell which common walls in the vicinity began as debris from the Wall after it fell into disrepair. I thought, this is Hadrian’s wall, but up here, every wall in part is Hadrian’s Wall.
Begun in AD 122 by Hadrian’s imperial edict, as much to protect his northern frontier as to give his idle legions something to do, its Eastern two-thirds were made of cut stone. The final third, in the isolated Western reaches, was originally mounds of fortified turf. Years later, this turf section was entirely reworked in stone.
The wide pathway of the Wall contains more than just military evidence. The remains of temples, arch-bridges, water mills, Roman baths, even a quarry now become a lake, dot the countryside north and south. Bustling with trade, cities like Vindolanda, later Chesterholm, thrived. Villas, aqueducts, granaries—this frontier was intricately employed, commanding troops, ancillary services, camp followers. The Romans in the Wall’s swath lived better (heated homes, hot baths, sanitation) and ate better (a variety of meat and fish, abundant fresh produce, fine wines and oils) than most Europeans until well into the nineteenth century.
And except for the inconveniences of a periodic rebellion, throughout the 250 years the Romans manned the Wall, it was generally cushy garrison duty. Remote and tedious but hardly a strain.
*
Alone, I walked atop foreboding, desolate stretches in a cold spring rain, which kept most other tourists away. Only a childhood dream could press me into roaming these abandoned fortified crags. At Vercovicium, the foundation of a fort has been unearthed, and several miles of existing wall, just four-feet high, runs to the west. Remoteness alone probably kept all its stone from being scavenged over the last fifteen hundred years. Then, as now, Vercovicium is peaceful; so much so, that the Romans built an additional gate without all the usual elaborate fortifications to allow for easy exchange of herds and goods in the town’s thriving marketplace. Any fortification can be breached successfully with eager trade.
At the quarry lake and milecastle at Cawford’s Crag, I dangled my feet from the low wall as I lunched on takeaway Chinese food bought at the local village. In the distance, the Wall straddled the edge of a sheer cliff. I climbed over the impressive ruins at Birdoswald, once Camboglanna. Visitors pay ten pence at a farmhouse backdoor and then wander among its unusual outbuildings: the preserved foundations of a large fort, a water mill, and a bridge. From here, even part of the original western turf wall is still visible in the lush valley below. From Birdoswald west to Bowness little exists of the Wall. Farmers and more recent engineers have reused its stone for new designs, though often for the same purpose.
Sixteen hundred years ago, this defensive line divided Roman civilization, Pax Romans, from the barbarian hinterland. Somewhere north of the Wall began “the land of Them.” From here south was Us. It defined the known world, the good and the evil. Cycles of security, bounty, and protection, disrupted now and again by loss and inevitable recapture until the final cycle broke. Then all went backsliding into disrepair and disuse: the ever-repeating saga of history. Gettysburg now a quiet park. Normandy reinvaded by tourists every June. Monte Cassino restored. Anzio a quaint fishing village once again. Today, places alive with history but without violence. Part of national heritages and international memory, yet once, signs of division, of tension, of conflict, often of occupation.
In my reverie as I walked the Wall, I kept wondering who would one day walk our Hadrian’s Walls. Tossing pebbles into the Cawford’s Crag quarry lake, I tried to imagine what of ours today will belong to history tomorrow. Who will hike our iron and concrete curtains, finding them deserted and ramshackled by time. For in trying to stop time, we’re only ensuring it will have its inevitable sway. Every beach house braced against restless tides surrenders to their inevitable conquering.
I also wondered what of ours would signify our divisions to posterity. What will Watts and Belfast and Beirut show should they ever earn a historical marker, since hate and violence never deceive history? Or are we making our racial and religious and national lines invisible but as lasting as cut-stone? I wondered if relentless time will make all our walls outdated. Will they survive because we changed and outgrew them or because we fell back and dug in yet again?
Tossing my pebbles, I wondered if anyone would ever toss some into the murky, watery bottom of an abandoned, hardened ICBM silo.
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