The Frontier Road — Dies secundus: Pons Aelius to Vindobala

Via the temple and Vallum crossing at Condercum, being the Ides of May, 2763

Today is my birthday and I’m in need of a little extra treat before the walk, so I head back to the Hancock Museum after breakfast, pace up and down the model wall again and attend a ritual at the little virtual Mithraeum. After this I’m just in time for a show at the museum’s planetarium: ‘Dawn of the Space Age’, a film about the early history of space exploration. This is paradoxically apt: Hadrian’s Wall marked the northern limit of European civilization for three centuries, and in its shadow grew some of the world’s earliest railways and long-range ballistic missiles, whose name fittingly derives from the Latin ballista (‘catapult’). The Romans ruled the world with the help of their roads and their engines of war, and doubtless they would have followed these developments with interest.

After tea and cake, I finally get going, and a short metro ride takes me back to Central Station. I pass a surprisingly intact stretch of the mediaeval city wall — almost certainly built with stone ‘borrowed’ from the Romans. A tramp eyes me warily while I survey the masonry: I’ve often noticed how territorial they are around ancient monuments which, having long since passed into public ownership, they regard as their own.

Just around the corner is Westgate, an unremarkable city street until you realize Hadrian built its foundations and that you’ve been walking on it all day and haven’t changed course so much as a fraction of a degree. Immediately it begins to climb out of the town and soon reaches a ridge with occasional panoramas of the Tyne Valley below. Though the wall has disappeared altogether here, its ghost is almost palpable in the street itself, and no better vantage point to watch over the river to the South and the barbarian lands to the North can be imagined. With heavy walking boots on my feet and a large rucksack on my back, I get a few curious stares in this dilapidated commercial district. Some eastern gentlemen call out a friendly, ‘Hey, habibi!’ from their van as they drive by, perhaps descendents of the Tigris boatmen of Arbeia who never made it back to Mesopotamia.

At the highest point of this stretch lies Benwell, from Old English Bynnewalle, or ‘within the wall’. It is the site of the third of the wall’s forts, ‘Condercum’, of which nothing remains but a few curiosities hidden in the housing estate to the South. Tucked away almost in someone’s back garden are the foundations and replica altar stones of the Temple of Antenociticus. The head and limbs of this probably native British deity (due to the torc around his neck) were found here in 1862 and are now on display in the Hancock Museum. I offer a libation of wine (a tiny one, so as not to stink up the temple) in honour of this now rather lonely god, and to give thanks for my fortieth birthday. A local man and his young son arrive after me. They are quiet and respectful; the man recounts to his son how his own father brought him here when he was a boy. I am moved.

A short walk takes me to another suburban garden and the only surviving ‘Vallum crossing’ on the wall. A six-meter-wide and three-meter-deep ditch with two large banks on either side, the Vallum at its best is almost as impressive as the wall itself, and was probably built to protect the militarized zone in front of it and to deter the thieving Britons from stealing horses. There were many crossing points over this formidable barrier, one every mile originally, but these seem to have been reduced at some point to one for each of the sixteen major forts, such as here at Condercum.

The site is fenced off and a sign quaintly directs the visitor to an adjacent house for the key. The man and his son arrive soon after me, generously volunteering to do the honours and knock on the door indicated. The portly, bearded guardian presently answers the summons and hands over the key. He remains standing in his doorway, watching over us and answering a great many unasked questions while we look around. A cat is sunning himself on one of the massive stone blocks that remain of the gateway, but slinks down to ingratiate himself as we enter the enclosure.

“The road was resurfaced several times,” the Guardian of the Keys announces, repeating what it says on the information plaque next to us. “You can clearly see the different levels,” he adds, as though offering his own learned opinion. The man nods politely, interjecting the occasional ‘really?’, though he obviously already knows. I, however, ignore the guardian and play with the affable cat.

“Oh yes,” the gatekeeper goes on from his pedestal some ten feet above us. “It’s quite unique, you know. This is the only Vallum crossing left and the entrance to the fort ran right through my garden…”

The man and his well-behaved son continue to listen and nod, and so the gatekeeper continues to lecture. I hate being a captive audience and continue trying not to listen to the regurgitated factoids, statements of the obvious and uninvited bragging. The cat takes full advantage of my captivity and flirts shamelessly while I squat down to take pictures.

“I’ve been meaning to excavate my garden for years, but I can’t seem to find the time…”

I’m about to yell at him to shut up, but something in my body language may have already conveyed this and he abruptly breaks off his monologue and slinks back inside. It’s a great relief to chat with the man afterwards, with someone who appreciates this monument with humility and for the right reasons, for the sense of the enormity of history under our feet. He wishes me well with my journey as we part and the cat returns to his sun bed on the gatehouse until the next visitors arrive.

Back on the line of the Wall, the busy road begins a long slow descent into a valley. At the bottom of Benwell Hill, the Wall suddenly appears: first a few stones poking through the pavement, then a short stretch of little more than foundations, and finally a good hundred feet of it in all its glory, only a few courses high, but at the full width of ten feet. Here too is the first of the surviving ‘turrets’ — square watchtowers positioned at equal distances, two per Roman mile, along the full length of the wall. This one has its ladder platform intact, a stepped base on which to place a ladder for access to the upper floor of the turret, and presumably also, though this is yet to be proved, to the wall’s walkway. Hutton mentions Denton as the first substantial stretch of the Wall to be seen, so evidently little has changed since 1801.

The wall, of course, continues on the high ground, but these are the last of the visible remains I’ll see until the end of today’s walk, so I turn south into the wooded dell of Denton Burn with the intention of rejoining the official route along the river Tyne. At some point the path beside the burn ends and I have some difficulty finding my way through the maze of typically identical English residential roads. Eventually though I emerge onto the official Hadrian’s Wall Path, which has kept low since Newcastle and continues along a non-descript disused railway with little in the way of views over the countryside opening out for the next few miles. I find this a rather cowardly decision of the route planners: while there’s so much to see up on the ridge, those sites are in a fairly run-down area of Newcastle and along a busy road. For my part I would rather risk being mugged and run over than traipse through a faux-rural, post-industrial cityscape, if the reward is to experience the topography and relics of one of the world’s ancient frontier systems.

However, the dreary part is over soon enough and the path emerges on the north bank of the Tyne. River rambles are always restful, and today’s is sorely needed, for although I haven’t walked far, there was much dawdling, and dawdling is tiring. The view opens out on the pleasant wooded banks and, as with yesterday’s walk, it’s hard to believe one of Britain’s largest conurbations is so close. I pass Newburn Ford, site of a battle between Scottish Covenanters and English Royalists in 1640 that some say precipitated the civil wars. The Covenanters, vexed at being forced to accept a new prayer book, marched here, beat the Cavaliers and occupied Newcastle. No doubt Cromwell got ideas into his head when he heard how this band of zealous commoners challenged the might of the crown and won.

The path continues by the riverside a few more miles and then enters a wood. I am now on the ‘Wylam Waggonway’, a railway line built in 1748 for engineless trains. The route eventually turns up the hillside towards Heddon, but I walk a little further to see the birthplace of George Stephenson, ‘the Father of Railways’. It fascinates me to think of him, born in this little cottage in 1781, watching the horses pull the wagons along the track right beside his front door. Thanks to his work, in his lifetime he would see that little track begin to stretch across continents. Another hundred and forty years and it would run under the English Channel, and lately there has been talk of a railway line across the Bering Straits. How glorious if one day you could get on a train in Wylam and travel around the world without ever leaving the track, arriving back at this cottage where the idea was first born.

Though there are twenty minutes until the small museum’s closing time, the National Trust employees have already fled. This dereliction of duty is becoming tediously predictable.

I have an early supper by the river, the last of M.’s steak and mushrooms and the Spanish wine, before turning north across a golf course and up the steep hillside towards Heddon-on-the-Wall. My ‘official’ destination, the fort of Vindobala, is a mile further on, but offered no accommodation, so my lodgings for the night are the bunkhouse in Houghton North Farm. The light is fading by the time I’ve thrown my bag down and washed, so I head out to see the stretch of the monument that survives within the village. Here the wall is three hundred feet long and the full ten feet thick. It also seems to have grown since Newcastle — tapering downhill impressively in the dusk light. The first time I walked this way in 2760, I took the bus back to my lodgings one evening and overheard two Southern professional men complaining bitterly how little of the wall was actually visible and how they felt they’d been cheated by the brochures. ‘What fools these consumers of history are,’ I thought, ‘suckered by the marketing they probably helped to create.’ The chief delight of this remarkable monument is watching as, little by little, it rises out of the ground in Newcastle’s suburbs, grows to magnificence on the wild Northumbrian moors and then slowly fizzles out again in Cumbria. The Theodosian Wall in Istanbul is immeasurably grander and more imposing, but city walls tend to blend in with their surroundings; they don’t clash intriguingly with them, haunting wildernesses and back gardens alike, as Hadrian’s does.

The Frontier Road — Dies primus: Arbeia to Pons Aelius

Via the fort at Segedunum, still being the day before the Ides of May, 2763

Arbeia guarded the mouth of the River Tyne and seems to have acted as a supply base for Hadrian’s Wall and for military campaigns in the North in general. For an urban site it has survived remarkably well: still visible are the foundations of some of the perimeter wall, two gates, granaries and the commanding officer’s house, two of whose columns have been re-erected where they fell, offering a tantalizing gateway to the past. The small site museum has yet another wealth of Roman tools, trinkets and tombstones, but the most fascinating thing about Arbeia for picknicker and antiquarian alike are the reconstructions. The child in me is thrilled by these palpable manifestations of ancient history, where otherwise the imagination has such spinal-cord-breaking work. The fort’s West Gate and adjoining walls have been entirely rebuilt in situ, according to the model given by surviving gates elsewhere, the depictions on Trajan’s Column, etc. On the south side are the reconstructed barracks and commanding officer’s house, wonderfully contrasting the universal, timeless simplicity of the common soldiers’ quarters with the particular and fixed-in-time Mediterranean opulence of the praetor’s. Here is a sunny colonnaded courtyard, dining room, study and bedrooms, all beautifully painted according to known period styles. Fragments of painted plaster survive and are on display.

An idea which has been incubating in me for some time suddenly hatches. I imagine the commanding officer in his private bath house in conversation with his slave, a britunculus (‘miserable little Briton’), sometime in the late fourth century, in the fetid atmosphere of the End of Empire. It goes something like this:

Praetor: Scrape my back.

The slave obeys, but as he sets to work with the strigil, his master cannot see the resentment written on his face.

Praetor: You’re a Christian, aren’t you, slave?

Slave: Yes, master.

Praetor: Why?

The slave hesitates, afraid that he is being tested and risks punishment if he answers wrongly.

Praetor: You can speak freely. I won’t beat you.

Slave: (relieved) Because my god is good to slaves, master.

Praetor: So I hear. But why should he be good to slaves?

Slave: (pausing, never having thought about it) He loves us all, master.

Praetor: Even me? Does he love those who beat his worshippers?

Slave: (diplomatically) Even, them, master.

Praetor: I don’t believe you. Come now, tell the truth! I said I wouldn’t punish you.

Slave: (after a long pause) Only if they repent, master.

Praetor: Repent of what? Beating you?

Slave: Yes, master.

Praetor: So if I beat you to death, then repent of it, your slave-god will love me?

Slave: (compelled to agree to this uncomfortable truth) Er… yes, master.

Praetor: Then your god is a fool, and you are a fool for worshipping him.

Slave: Yes, master.

Praetor: Do you know, slave, which god I worship above all others?

He waits for an answer, but doesn’t see that the slave is holding the strigil over him as though it were a knife.

Praetor: No, of course you don’t. How could you? I worship the undefeated Mithras, who shed the blood of the bull in the cave to give life to the world. Unlike your fool-god that loves those who kill his servants, Mithras protects those who reciprocate his sacrifice. Do you think Mithras would love you for killing me?

The slave stares blankly at the strigil without responsing.

Praetor: (angry) Well? Answer me!

Slave: (absently) No, master.

Praetor: Quite right he wouldn’t. He would destroy you and torment your soul in the underworld.

The praetor’s anger turns suddenly to fear and he is perplexed by these rapidly changing emotions.

Praetor: Why have you stopped scraping my back? Damn your insolence! I think I’ll beat you after all, as soon as you’ve finished.

The slave continues scraping, free to express his hatred on his face, though his voice, through long experience and training, remains subservient, or inscrutable at least.

Slave: Yes, master.

***

Or something to that effect. Musing thus, I take my lunch, a delicious steak with mushrooms and a pepper sauce that M. made on the occasion of my birthday. A rich Spanish wine completes the picture (drunk in honour of Hadrian, who was from Italica, near Seville), and I’m so caught up in the meal and the reverie of my Praetor of Arbeia and his slave that I forget both the time and the bellowing, screeching party of schoolchildren visiting the fort. Municipal archaeologists are also at work nearby. I take my reluctant leave of this miraculous site, but can’t resist a detour to a green at the top of the hill to see the sea, the river mouth, its castle and ruined abbey and a huge warship sailing into the harbour. Something of the kind must have also happened eighteen centuries ago when Arbeia was built.

Back at South Shields metro station, I have a grim presentiment of doom at the sight of a large group of people waiting impatiently on the platform and staring anxiously at the departures board promising the next train in five minutes. A quarter of an hour passes before a voice announces that trains back to Newcastle have been suspended, due to ‘power failure’. Disaster! I haven’t enough time to walk to Jarrow and taxis seem scarce here. I run down to the street and up to a stationary taxi and ask the driver if he’s free. He shakes his round head in reply, too lazy to open his mouth, but in the same moment I catch sight of a bus labelled ‘Jarrow’. I decide to jump on, guessing it will only take fifteen or twenty minutes. It takes nearly an hour, turning maddeningly down every residential street, by the most circuitous route imaginable, during which I get overheated, dehydrated and car-sick trying to read my maps and work out where we are. When I finally get off at Jarrow metro station, I realize I’ll have no time to pay my respects to Bede. It would have fit the theme of the walk so well to see a little of the world of a man born in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall and who was perhaps precisely therefore to become England’s first great historian, but it’s not to be today, thanks to the sudden collapse of Tyneside’s infrastructure.

A taxi miraculously appears and I jump in, asking him to take me to the ‘Roman fort’ at Wallsend. After a pause he sheepishly asks me if I know the postcode. I’m fuming: how am I, obviously a tourist, to know what the postcode is? What I do know is how often I’ve been let down by British taxi drivers paid to operate gearsticks, read roadsigns and know their own back yards. I tell him it’s right beside Wallsend metro station and he babbles for a while in reply, probably expecting me to excuse his ignorance, but I will not oblige. I’m paying dearly enough already to worry about hurting his feelings as well.

The Friday rush hour is in full swing and the queue to get into the Tyne Tunnel frustratingly slow. The driver informs me that the council is currently building a second tunnel, which slows us even more. In true English style he apologizes for the traffic, which he has no power to change, but fails to apologize for his ignorance of his local geography, which he has every power to change. He even asks me to spell the name of the fort, which he proceeds to punch into his navigation system, although I’ve already given him an alternative destination that he knows. This land is ripe for conquest, I speculate.

I had intended to cross the river via the pedestrian tunnel and then take the metro a few stops to the magically named ‘Wallsend’, where the signs are bilingual in English and Latin, but fate had other plans for me today. There are another few miles in the taxi before we encounter an archway over a tarred path on which is written, absurdly, ‘Hadrian’s Cycleway’.

“Is this it?” the driver asks. “Shall I stop here?”

I acknowledge that he’s trying to be helpful and to extrapolate my goal based on something he recognizes as ‘Roman’, but it’s not helpful and I’m desperate to get out of the hated automobile, so I say, “This will do.”

I pay nearly sixteen pounds, including the toll for the tunnel, but withhold the tip and get out at last. I alighted here because I recognized the large cranes from my last visit, but the perspective has tricked me and it turns out I have another half a mile to walk. I curse myself for not listening to my better judgement and arrive at Segedunum, the fort guarding the beginning (or the end) of Hadrian’s Wall at twenty past four.

More disappointment waits when I get to the site. The attendant is reluctant to let me in, even though there are forty minutes left until it closes, and recommends that I go up the observation tower. I ignore her, hand over the money and make for the reconstructed bath house. I get confused by the signs and the hand of fate sends me up the space-age viewing platform after all. Here I dawdle for a few minutes, transfixed by the classic ‘playing card’ outline of the fort, the obvious bend in the Tyne that it guarded, the huge cranes by the river and the five-minute time-lapse video reconstruction of the history of Segedunum. During the display, from the corner of my eye, I see people leaving the bath house watched by a vulturous attendant who closes the door behind each one. I realize that I’ve missed my chance. The attendant who took my money cheated me out of the delight of walking through a lovingly archaeologically correct reconstruction of a Roman military balneum because all she cares about is clearing out the punters and closing up at five on the dot. I storm downstairs and tell her how little it would have cost her to let me quickly see the bath house.

“It used to be open later, but it’s run by a big corporation now,” she whines. “I’m just a wage slave…”

“Aren’t we all,” I reply, as the scene I had imagined at Arbeia echoes across my mind.

I console myself with pacing the site itself, of which precious little remains, having been buried under a slum for decades. As usual, the foundations of the granaries and the strong room beneath the regimental shrine are visible, but barely. I had also been looking forward to seeing the stretch of wall foundations, the very first on my journey, and a little reconstruction of the wall itself, but in their infinite miserliness, the managers of Segedunum have locked that up too and I’m forced to view it through chicken wire.

Hutton was still able to trace the line of the Wall the four miles from here into Newcastle. When the rubble of the wall disappeared, he could at least follow the Vallum (the deep, ramparted trench to the south of the wall) which, he observes, the local householders were given incentives to fill in and plant with vegetables. Nothing survives today. The destruction of historic monuments has often been excused in the past on economic grounds, but I’m not convinced: the area around the eastern third of the Wall was hardly short of cultivable land in 1801, and the acreage gained from filling in the Vallum must have been negligible, especially given the enormous effort it must have cost to effect this.

After today’s disappointments, I don’t feel like trudging beside an invisible wall through housing estates, so I take the National Trail instead on a disused railway line that meanders alongside the Tyne into Newcastle. The river comes into view after a mile or so of the quiet wooded lane and soon drops down to it. So close to Newcastle, this former epicentre of the Industrial Revolution, the river is now a rural Arcadia with gentlemen anglers fishing in silence with their sons. The sight of this takes me back to the mid seventies, standing with my father on a pitch-dark, freezing cold pebble beach on the Suffolk coast, swaddled in oilskins, holding a rod too big for me and with no idea what I was doing. Given the choice, I would have been inside the mysterious old Martello tower nearby, but I was glad to be there all the same, participating in a bonding ritual probably a hundred thousand years old. I remember asking him anxiously if fish could feel pain. “No,” he replied, probably deluding himself as much as me, “they don’t have nerves.” I think such moments, however much nonsense they represent in the analysis, are vital threads of communication between father and son — the continuity of an ancient culture.

The route winds pleasantly along with the river, then cuts briefly through the town before returning to the Tyne, just as Gateshead’s futuristic opera house comes into view. A gleaming palace of mirrors towering over the Tyne bridges, the monument to culture contrasts oddly with the street life below. I pass a score of women, over-dressed or under-dressed, according to your point of view, as though for a wedding, but the bride never appears. Of course there is no wedding; this is just Newcastle on a Friday night. Gel-headed dandies saunter towards them, clearly impressed by the ‘talent’, but at the moment they pass, they look away disdainfully, suddenly unimpressed. Such is the Anglo-Saxon, such the britunculus. The Roman soldiers garrisoned at Pons Aelius (Hadrian’s Bridge) would doubtlessly have expressed their approval of the local ladies unequivocally and without hypocrisy.

Winding back up the hillside to the ridge (which of course the Wall never left), I approach the castle keep, where a little hunting reveals the scant remains of the Roman fort under the railway bridge. The great metropolis of the Tyne was probably just a tiny garrison town nineteen centuries ago, no bigger than Vindobala ten miles away, where now only a farmstead stands; such are the unpredictable twists and turns of fate. The Normans built the mediaeval castle squarely on top of the fort, reusing its masonry, as they invariably did, in the knowledge that Roman foundations were the strongest and their building materials the cheapest.

From here I take the metro train back to the hostel in Jesmond, in the vicinity of which the helpful warden tells me there’s a ‘cheap and cheerful’ Italian restaurant. This I can’t resist. It’s the perfect way to end my first day along the Roman frontier road, so I quickly wash and change into my gym shoes and ‘evening shirt’ before heading out.

I am welcomed into the impossibly loud, gaudy and full restaurant by a friendly Italian reluctant to speak English. There’s already a queue of people waiting and not a free table in sight, but the waiter, in typically chaotic, yet oddly efficient Latin style, runs around reassuring everyone they will soon be seated. Within fifteen minutes, by what sorcery I know not, we all are.

Ideally, I would have liked some ancient Mediterranean dish, but I have a hankering for pizza and red wine, which turn out to be excellent and cheap as promised. In asking if I want dessert and coffee, and in bringing the bill, the waiter gives up speaking English altogether, even though I’ve given no indication of being able to speak Italian. As I’ve seen so often before, the merest hint that you understand what they’re saying is enough. A few foundation stones and some rubble are all that’s left of the Empire’s northern frontier between Arbeia and Pons Aelius, but the Romans themselves, it transpires, never really left.

The Frontier Road ― Dies nullus: To Arbeia

Being the day before the Ides of May, in the 2,763rd year after the founding of Rome, during the consulship of Silvio Berlusconi (Friday, 14th May, 2010)

My dread of oversleeping the five o’ clock train to London, and thereby the six fifteen to Newcastle, and thereby the whole expedition, proves unfounded, and I arrive at the grand Central Station at half past nine, bleary-eyed, but happy. Unlike Hutton, who for his six-week journey carried only Camden’s ‘Britannia’, maps, paper, ink and an umbrella, I am overburdened with clothes, medicine, toiletries, food, wine and the old boy’s book, which, being out of print, was only available as a heavy, bound facsimile.

I take the metro train to the hostel in Jesmond, drop off my rucksack, put map and lunch into a shoulder bag and set out for the nearby Hancock Museum. I find it quickly enough, a fact which I read as an ill omen. In my experience, long journeys never begin this easily, but for the time being at least all is well. The museum, having recently consolidated Newcastle’s major collections, is a delight. A special treat for me is the fifty-foot-long model of Hadrian’s Wall, with every fort, milecastle, turret, bridge, hill and river represented in miniature. I pace along it fascinated, imagining a tiny model of myself struggling up hill and down dale at six inches an hour.

The permanent exhibition contains many of the most important finds from the Wall and the northern forts. The tombstones and altars, the treasured memorials of provincial soldiers and officials, are touching in their simplicity, but also dramatic and striking. No pretensions of urban sophistication here: their devotions to wives, daughters and gods come from the heart. The large altar of Mithras from Housesteads bursts with action and energy, the head of the god Antenociticus glares mysteriously and an official’s wife still stands proudly on her gravestone in her humble provincial dress after eighteen centuries. The loss of their brightly coloured paint, in my opinion, only increases their dignity.

A short walk takes me to the metro station in Haymarket and the train to South Shields. Over the River Tyne and along its south bank, the modern urban transport glides, a synthesized voice announcing ‘doors closing’ at each station. We pass through Jarrow and a station called ‘Bede’, named to honour the venerable old monk who was born ‘ad murum’ (in no village in particular, but ‘by the wall’) in around 673 and who kept the embers of civilization glowing in the Dark Ages, while the rest of the island thought about nothing but its next meal. He gave us in his histories our second native (the first being from another monk, Gildas), but first reasonably objective account of Hadrian’s Wall. I’ve planned a brief stop later at the nearby monastery, St. Paul’s, where he lived and worked and where the church’s dedication slab from the year 685 still bears its inscription in Latin. Interesting how quick the English immigrants to these parts were to adopt those aspects of the language and culture of their predecessors which suited their purposes.

I sit at the back of the train, looking straight down the tracks as we trundle into South Shields on the coast. There’s another half a mile or so on foot through the little Geordie holiday paradise and over a hill looking out across the harbour and what Hutton called the ‘German Ocean’. All journeys begin and end with the sea, so let mine begin here at Arbeia, the ‘fort of the Arabs’, probably named after the ‘Tigris boatmen’ stationed here on the edge of the vast Roman world, two thousand miles from home, seventeen centuries ago.

The Frontier Road — Introduction: On Romans and Frontiers

A 200-mile journey along Ancient Rome’s North-West frontier, in no sense parodying William Hutton’s endearing ‘History of the Roman Wall Which Crosses the Island of Britain from the German Ocean to the Irish Sea’.


The Romans were a hard-headed, brutal, pragmatic but oddly humble people. They conquered the Greeks, but stood in awe of their achievements and their wisdom. They persecuted the Christians, perceiving the threat they posed to their authority, then adopted their beliefs. In Britain, they destroyed the druidic cult, fearing the same threat as from the Christians, yet left their monuments standing and the people free to worship the same old gods, even raising golden statues to them. There were only two conditions to this humility: pay them tax and acknowledge them as masters.

With their superior technology and iron discipline, they were also fearless soldiers who found attack the best form of defence. For this reason they saw no reason to fortify their boundaries: if threatened, they would march out to meet the enemy, rather than crouch behind walls. The Latin for ‘frontier’ was limes, from which the English word ‘limit’ comes, and it meant something like ‘frontier road’, because that was what their frontiers were for the most part: just roads. The original border of Roman territory in Britain was the Stanegate, the road running east from Corbridge to Carlisle. These roads, plus a few forts and rivers, were adequate deterrants in most provinces, but in Britannia, the Romans found in the natives a determined reluctance to be civilized that in my view characterizes more than anything else the island folk.

Already during Agricola’s campaign in 79, it seems that a turf wall went up in Scotland, the Gask Ridge, but it was the emperor Hadrian who saw the need for something more permanent. Under Trajan he had seen the Empire stretched to breaking point in modern Romania and Iraq and he probably thought the time had come to start consolidating what had been won. With his flamboyance and passion for architecture, a great wall was begun, sixteen feet high, ten feet thick and seventy-three miles long ‘to separate the Romans from the barbarians’. The massive structure snaked over every hill it could find, heedless of cliffs and rivers, punctuated by four major bridges, sixteen large forts, seventy-nine small ones and over 150 turrets. And if this weren’t enough, deep ditches were dug enclosing the wall to the north and south and a road built to facilitate communication along its entire length. When the wall ended on the Solway Firth, Hadrian was still dissatisfied: another string of forts and fortlets, one Roman mile apart, was built along the Cumbrian coast to watch for attacks from the Irish and Scots. A network of roads criss-crossed the mountains in the interior, with yet more forts to guard them, supplying the whole militarized zone with goods shipped in to the safer ports further south. The scale of the enterprise beggars belief, but perhaps more surprising is that, with interruptions, the structure was occupied until the Western Empire began to crumble nearly three hundred years later. Remembering that the Berlin Wall was in use for about thirty years puts this into perspective.

In 1801, at the age of seventy-eight, an amiable old gentleman called William Hutton walked from Birmingham to Carlisle, along the length of the wall and back again, a journey of six hundred miles. His hugely entertaining account accompanied me on my own by comparison brief stroll, often refreshing, goading and humbling me. Striding along the ridge at Walltown Crags in the footsteps of the tough old antiquarian and looking northwards to the ‘barbarian lands’, it is awe-inspiring to imagine yourself at one extremity of a unified state that once stretched to the Persian Gulf, Morocco, Egypt and the Ukraine. How the Romans held those thousand peoples, languages, cultures and religions together will always be something of a mystery, and therein lies the appeal of this extraordinary frontier: from South Shields to Ravenglass, this is a road worth walking and contemplating again and again.