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.
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.
