The Frontier Road — Dies quintus: Vindolanda to Banna

Via the Stanegate and the forts at Aesica and Magnis, being the fourteenth day before the Calends of June, 2763

I wake in a state of nervous excitement. In some respects today’s walk will be the high-point of Hadrian’s Wall; from the pivotal frontier township of Vindolanda, whose corpus of mundane documents revolutionized our view of everyday life in the Roman Empire, to the dizzy heights of Winshields and the best preserved stretch of the Wall at Walltown Crags, this unlikely no-man’s-land has yielded inestimable knowledge of the Roman world. Another unexpected development was the sudden announcement, received by radio telegram yesterday, that I would be joined today by the elusive Miss T. We have arranged to meet this afternoon at the Roman Army Museum at Carvoran.

After a leisurely breakfast, I leave the hostel and head south until I reach the ‘Stanegate’, the Roman road from Corbridge to Carlisle. I turn east along it and shortly arrive at the stump of a Roman milestone, one of only two in Britain surviving in situ. The arrow-straight road, though unfortunately tarred, is a pleasure to walk on in the cool morning sunshine. The ridge surges up to the north like an enormous wave that never breaks, the Wall snaking along its crest. After about a mile I arrive at one of the forts that defended the original, pre-Hadrianic frontier — Vindolanda, or probably ‘Gwyn Llan’ (‘The White Fortress’) in Old Welsh. At the entrance I notice the timetable for the ‘AD 122’ bus by which Miss T. will come later. Walkers’ intuition tells me our paths will cross sooner than I originally anticipated, and so I send her a radio telegram with instructions to get off at the ‘Milecastle Inn’ at Cawfields instead.

Already in the modern reception building this site transports you to the past: a Roman-style courtyard with fountains and statues tempts you to linger, but the knowledge of how much there is to see and contemplate forces me to resist. A small temple to an unknown god lies on the left as you approach the fort. A little further are the remains of the vicus, the best preserved in Britain and more in evidence than the internal buildings of the fort themselves. There are two bath houses: the later and more substantial lies in the midst of the civilian settlement; the earlier lies to the south, but was already demolished in Roman times. One of Vindolanda’s many delights is the road leading through the vicus up to the West Gate, which still has its original flagstones. Beautiful statuary is often replicated so perfectly, as at Brocolitia, that you can’t always tell whether you’re looking at the original or a copy; a dilapidated old road, on the other hand, gives you the irrefutable sensation of following ancient footsteps. Stand on those broken flagstones and the houses of Vindolanda’s civilian settlement and its perimeter wall grow almost palpably around you. An archaeological dig on the internal buildings of the fort is underway as I pass.

Much of the perimeter wall on the eastern side stands tall and thick, well over head height, and features the remains of semicircular civilian houses built against the wall. Further on the path descends to a garden in a dell ornamented with statues and a beautiful reconstruction of a temple. The museum is also here, brimming with artifacts from this important site. Apart from samples of the Vindolanda tablets and an excellent display about their restoration and interpretation, there is also a collection of sandals and other leatherware, miraculously preserved in the anaerobic peat.

Time is pressing by midday and on my way out I see the great man himself who deciphered the tablets, Robin Birley, taking his lunch in the garden, but I’m too much in awe to approach him with the usual ‘I’ve got all your records…’ speech and must be content with paying my respects at a distance.

Leaving the site on the eastern end and crossing the Stanegate I stumble across the second of the milestones, exactly one Roman mile on and much taller than the one I encountered earlier. From here the path climbs through pasture until I meet the modern Military Road again where it intersects the Vallum. The path climbs further to meet the course of the Wall along a pretty wooded escarpment high above Crag Lough. And the end of the lake the Wall reappears and falls steeply to ‘Sycamore Gap’, where the eponymous tree stands picturesquely at the foot of a gap in the structure. The path climbs again and at the top the well preserved Milecastle 39, ‘Castle Nick’ nestles comfortably in a dip, or ‘nick’ in the ridge. The roller coaster continues above Peel Crags, followed by another impossibly steep drop to which the Wall still tenaciously clings after nearly two millennia. At the bottom the Wall peters out again, but the Ditch is strongly in evidence as the long climb towards Windshields crags begins. The sun burns unimpeded on the wilds of Caledonia to the north as I climb past Milecastle 40. When I reach the trig point at over eleven hundred feet, the highest point of the Wall, I am as always awed by the thought of a twenty-foot-high, nine-foot-thick stone wall labouring up and over this wind-blasted peak — another fine spot for contemplation of this furthest reach of an ancient civilization. Or was it? For a short time there was another wall with paved roads and bath houses a hundred miles further north, and though Antoninus’s memorial isn’t as dramatic as Hadrian’s, I set a mental course for another fine walk along it in the future.

From here to the Irish Sea the road is ever downwards, though never easy. The roller-coaster continues and the Wall is in increasingly good condition. Several turrets are visible for the next two miles as it continues to snake over the gradually descending crests and troughs of the ridge, often at impossible gradients. Milecastle 42 is well preserved, with the massive masonry of its gates still visible. Sitting awkwardly on a steep slope, it is often cited as an example of inflexibly bureaucratic Roman thinking: milecastles were to be exactly one Roman mile apart, regardless of how inconvenient the situation or how close a better site.

From here I turn south, passing the outlines of a few temporary Roman camps that possibly accommodated soldiers while building the Wall, on my way to meet Miss T. at the Milecastle Inn. Perfectly synchronized, I see her getting off the bus a few hundred yards short. We meet at the crossroads and celebrate our reunion over cold cervisia at the inn, refreshing ourselves for the long hot march ahead.

We retrace my steps back to Milecastle 42, and after climbing a steep slope the Wall suddenly disappears over a cliff, the result of quarrying. The road continues around the quarry lake and through pastures uphill to Great Chesters. Here a farm straddles the north wall of the fort of Aesica. This site has been little excavated, but in the south-east corner stand the walls of a small shrine featuring an original altar stone, the only one still in situ along the frontier, though the only supplicants these days, apart from ourselves, are a couple of chickens. We stop for a snack in one of the offices by the Western wall of the fort before continuing through a wood and up Cockmount Hill. The Wall is mostly grass-covered rubble here, though Turret 44A stands tall and overgrown perched dramatically on the corner of a cliff. The Wall appears sporadically along these rugged heights, once again disappearing over an eroded cliff, but is nowhere grander than at Walltown Crags where the road winds between it and rocky outcrops, forming a natural walkway. Hutton notes that two Roman altar stones were used for washing dishes outside nearby Walltown Farm and that back in the sixteenth century Camden was afraid to approach this area for fear of bandits. We stop here for a late birthday supper Miss T. has prepared: a tantalizing Roman picnic of nuts and dates, anchovy paste (to approximate garum, the Roman fermented fish condiment), quails’ eggs with a spice dip.

Soon after we get going the Wall disappears again over another cliff and into another lake created by quarrying. At one point the whole of this stretch was in danger of destruction, but was saved just in the nick of time as awareness of the value of ancient monuments was growing. On the other side of the lake is the fort of Magnis (Carvoran in good Welsh), though now only a barely discernable raised platform in the fields behind the Roman Army Museum. Here on display are military artifacts and a fine film of the reconstructed Wall, but it is after seven and already closed when we pass. We continue downhill for half a mile beside the clearly defined Ditch towards the village of Greenhead and the melancholy Poe-esque ruins of Thirlwall Castle, built with instantly recognizable cubic masonry stolen from the Wall.

From here to Gilsland are two miles of pasture, paddocks and people’s back gardens, occasionally flirting with the Vallum and Ditch, but sadly the Wall, nowhere else more magnificent and dramatic on this stretch, has disappeared anticlimactically for today. Likewise, our inn in Gilsland, a mile short of Banna, is pleasant enough, but the fish the landlady is good enough to supply us with so late in the day is disappointingly bland after Miss T.’s lovingly reconstructed portable birthday cena.

Th Frontier Road — Dies quartus: Cilurnum to Vindolanda

Via the temples and forts at Brocolitia and Vercovicium, being the fifteenth day before the Calends of June, 2763

Exhausted from yesterday’s long walk, I sleep well, and at breakfast manage to procure some hot sauce for my eggs — a rare treat. A party of four Midlanders are walking the National Trail like me. They talk about every conceivable thing connected with their walk except the very thing that defines it: the Wall itself. History as a conversation topic is almost as taboo in England as religion and politics.

Landowners determine the fate of ancient monuments more than the solidity of their foundations. Hutton complained in 1801 that his walk along this stretch was ‘miserably soured’ by the recent destruction wrought on the monument by the local landowner, Henry Tulip Esquire, in order ‘to build a farmhouse’. Still, it must be admitted that at least some of the Wall survives here, while nothing remains where it fell victim to General Wade and his road. The State and its army, I suppose, is the biggest landowner of all.

Just north of the village, at Brunton, another stretch of the Wall is to be found, longer and taller than where I left it last night, about half a mile away at Planetrees. Here too is one of the best-preserved turrets, standing up to eleven courses high and with the deep grooves left by the door mechanism still visible at the entrance.

From here the fort of Cilurnum is only a quarter of a mile away on the other side of the river, but the official route takes a big detour to the north. Unaware of the path by the river when I came here in March, I stole across the fields to visit the ruins of the Roman bridge and found two decomposing crows hanging on a particularly vicious barbed wire fence I tore myself to shreds trying to get over. A macabre scarecrow, perhaps, or the landowner’s attempt to put the fear of God into antiquarian trespassers? Whatever the intention of this disturbing message, this time I decide on the extra mile to avoid confrontations with potentially sociopathic gentlemen farmers.

Anyway, half a mile to the modern bridge, and then another half back down the river path brings me to a short stretch of the Wall and the massive V-shaped abutment of the first of the three major river crossings. Also surviving are the deep foundations of the bridge’s easternmost tower. There is supposed to be a carving of a phallus here, a symbolic defense against the ‘evil eye’, but I’m unable to find it. Back in March, the abutment was almost submerged, but though the level has since fallen, there are still waterlogged parts. Poor old Hutton, being ‘obliged to wade’, didn’t get to see it either. Cilurnum’s bath house, one of the best preserved in Britain, rises up immediately on the other side of the river, an impressive sight. Visiting this particular relic feels like a ‘discovery’, being somewhat out of the way and less-than-obviously signposted, and this is just as well, as the frustration of the long detour (with Cilurnum looming tormentingly only a stone’s throw from here) would have been a bad start to the day. It is very spoilt of me, I know, but my Christmas list includes a fully reconstructed and functional Roman bridge across the Tyne, but if pressed I would accept a cheaper suspension bridge like the one at Willowford.

Retracing my steps and passing through the small village of Chollerford, I eventually reach Cilurnum (in English, the oddly generic ‘Chesters’, meaning ‘Roman fort’, as though the progenitor of all chesters) and all is well again. Though low-lying and subtle as usual, the ruins here whisper stories about their ancient inhabitants. Barrack blocks, complete with colonnaded verandas, Commanding Officer’s residence with private bath house and hypocaust (under-floor heating system), regimental strong room and perimeter wall (also showing where Hadrian’s Wall joined the fort) are all crystal clear and irrefutable. But the jewel of Cilurnum is the common bath house by the river. In parts the walls stand over my head, and in the whole province of Britannia the functions of the various treatment rooms are nowhere more obvious than here. You can still put your birrus britannicus (a native hooded cloak) in one of the arched alcoves in the changing room and sit on the bench to sweat in the calidarium (hot room). Freezing, naked in the frigidarium (cold room) requires almost no imagination at all, and neither does relieving yourself into the deep latrine channels. There is no one about, so I yield to the temptation to sit and rest in the calidarium, fully clothed of course, and the sun manages a little of what the hypocaust did a couple of thousand years ago.

Yet again the small museum is stuffed with the treasures from this and the surrounding forts. Found here, life-size but headless Juno Dolichena, queen of the gods of both East and West, stands on a cow, and from Coventina’s shrine at Brocolitia, three water nymphs drink from their horns. This museum was dedicated to the great John Clayton, born in 1792 and former owner of this estate. Though a lawyer by trade, he took it upon himself to save Hadrian’s Wall from destruction by local landowners by buying up as much of it as he could manage, relocating the farmers and instigating an extensive programme of excavation and restoration. Without Clayton, Hadrian’s Wall might only exist today in history books, and so my respect and admiration for the man is boundless.

Leaving a site like this is always difficult, so I dawdle a little with coffee and cake before steeling myself for the stiff march up the other side of the Tyne Valley and through the village of Walwick. The path takes another wide detour north, so I risk a shortcut, first along the road and then through meadows, and soon arrive back at what seems to be the Ditch. A little behind and running straight and parallel with the Ditch is a flat grassy ramp. Is this a remnant of the Wall, or a length of Wade’s road that escaped asphalt? The Ordnance Survey map gives no indication.

The path continues beside the Ditch, rising steadily before passing through a small wood. A fine view greets me on the other side: at Black Carts the Wall climbs the hill ahead, dead straight and heading west, the tallest and longest manifestation yet. I must first head downhill, past the clear outline of Milecastle 29, then up again in the shadow of the Wall and another well-preserved turret, eyed by suspicious cows chewing the cud in the Ditch. After half a mile the monument peters out to become a grass-covered mound of rubble at the top of the hill. The view over the rugged moors and towards the Cheviot Hills is beautiful, so I take my lunch here: the last of my sandwiches and a bottle of good ale from the gift shop at Chesters. This is a fine spot to contemplate, being the most northerly point of the Wall, and by extension of the Roman Empire, for most of its life. Forwards, the black massif of the Cheviots, the wild land of the Selgovae and Votadini tribes, must have seemed bleak and uninviting to the soldiers stationed on the Wall. A backward glance is already friendlier, and must have grown only more so as their thoughts fled the barbarians, continuing eastwards for thousands of miles and not stopping until the perfumed gardens of the Levant.

A little further on, the line of the Wall turns fractionally southwards (and will continue so until Carlisle) and the Ditch breaks up into a confusion of massive boulders. This is ‘Limestone Corner’, one of the stretches where supplementary fortifications were abandoned and suggesting that the Wall was more a showpiece than a truly defensive structure. The path continues gently downhill for the next half a mile until Carraw. Here the ramparts and general outline of Brocolitia, the Wall’s fifth fort, are more clearly discernable than Vindobala or Onnum, but no actual buildings are visible. The interest in this site lies in the tiny religious complex a little to the west. No less than three temples have been discovered here: of the Nymphaeum, only a few scattered blocks of masonry remain, but the walls of the Mithraeum survive waist-high. Wooden posts, altar stones and statuary were discovered here in 1936, submerged in the bog, and subsequently replaced with replicas (I saw the originals in the Hancock Museum on my first day). Remains of wood and wicker-work from the seating had been preserved in the anaerobic peat, and walking down the central aisle towards the altar, even today one has the feeling of being in a small, intimate chapel. Mithraea were dark places, apparently, symbolizing the central allegory of the cave in which Mithras slaughtered the ‘primordial bull’ in order to give life to the world. The sniffy early Christians objected to such sacrificial rites and perhaps resented the competition it offered their own ‘supreme sacrifice’ myth. It is known that Christians destroyed Mithraea in the fourth century, and perhaps this one fell victim to the zealots too.

I still have enough wine in a plastic bottle to make a few more small libations, and I hope Mithras won’t be offended by this rather meager offering, but these days, like Antenociticus, he should probably be glad of what he can get. I think of the altar carving I saw in Newcastle while I pour, with Mithras looking fine in his Phrygian cap — bravely killing the bull while being attacked by a scorpion and a wild dog. A replica of one of the god’s helpers found here, either Cautes or Cautopates, I forget which, stands in the aisle beside me, watching over the ceremony. Strange indeed to imagine this dark, trippy Eastern mystery cult being nurtured here in wildest Northumbria seventeen centuries ago! No doubt the nearby springs had been sacred to the native Britons long before the Romans arrived and influenced the choice for the site. One is always tempted to ascribe a nebulous other-worldliness to such places and to throw words like ‘ley lines’ around to explain it. The scientist in me scoffs at such nonsense, but the fact remains that when I first came here three years ago, I sat down to rest, stretched myself out on the grass in front of the temple and immediately fell into a deep, dreamless sleep from which I woke remarkably refreshed half an hour later. Was it the healing life-force of the bull’s blood that replenished me? Or the half-bottle of strong Spanish wine I’d had with my lunch?

The Temple of Coventina, the probably native goddess of springs and wells, is now just a bog, but a drop of my ‘holy wine’ remains, so I pour a last libation into the peaty water. John Clayton excavated this site in 1876 and the carvings of the goddesses recovered are in the museum at Chesters I visited this morning.

I continue westwards, feeling invigorated and holy, and this is just as well, because the terrain feels more rugged with every step and I know that the rest of the day’s walk is an ever more exhilarating roller-coaster of escarpments that even today make you tremble with awe and muscle failure at the might of the Roman juggernaut.

The path continues for the next two miles beside the Ditch, past the best preserved remains of a milecastle yet seen (number 33, more later) and a similarly well-preserved Turret 33b before climbing the hill towards Sewingshields. I pass through a wood, with crags falling away to my right, and on the other side the Wall appears again, still climbing the hill and following the escarpment’s every exhausting contour. The views over Broomlee Lough and the Northumbrian moors are magnificent. A trig point at the top of the hill marks just over a thousand feet above sea level — not quite the highest point of the Wall, but perhaps the most beautiful. All but the strongest of frames will be flagging at this point, mine being no exception, and so I gather resources and exhort myself to forget the frailty of the body and enjoy these moments, for Hadrian’s Wall, indeed life itself, is rarely better than this.

The Wall peters out at the top, to be replaced by a rather disappointing dry-stone dyke, even if it is ‘recycled’ from the monument’s masonry. However, as long as the body isn’t suffering too terribly, the ups and downs of the path, each one presenting a new and surprising vista, are still a delight, especially knowing as I do what is at the end of this stretch. After a punishing mile, the Wall appears again on the other side of a wood, neatly and evenly restored to give a hint of what it looked like when new. Towering before me is the fort of Vercovicium (‘Housesteads’ in English), the eighth and finest on Hadrian’s Wall. There is a Roman well in the vicinity, apparently, but I lack the time to divine it today. At the bottom of the hill, at Knag Burn, a gap in the Wall witnesses an unusual ‘civilian gateway’, added, it seems, to ease the pressure of traffic through the fort. This was the immigration and customs control of the ancient world, and though no separate ‘nothing to declare’ gate was needed when entering the Roman Empire with a herd of cows, the principle is the same.

It’s a quarter to six by the time I’ve circumambulated the fort and arrived at the museum, and I’m worried that it’s already closed. Fortunately it isn’t, and the friendly attendant tells me I can stay on the site as long as I like, as long as I close the gate after me. This warms my heart after the frosty reception I received at Segedunum. Though tiny again, the museum has a lot on display, such as the carving of three men in birri britannici. When William Stukeley, antiquarian and friend of Isaac Newton, came here in 1725, the landscape was literally littered with altar stones and statuary. Who knows how much of Hadrian’s Wall’s stonework is still buried, lost to private collections or hidden in the walls of farmhouses?

Surviving in the fort are the waist-high remains of the praetorium (headquarters), hospital, barracks, granaries (the best, alongside Coria’s) and latrines (the best along the Wall). Perched on the hillside, there is also a fine view to the East of the soaring and plunging escarpment I have just travelled. The perimeter wall, though not as high as it once was, is unbroken, and so the impression of actually being in a Roman fortress or castle in nowhere stronger along the frontier. Adjoining the fort to the south are the partially excavated remains of the vicus, or civilian settlement. It’s not hard to imagine what the thousand or more Tungrians (a Germanic or Gaulish tribe) stationed here would have needed to help them forget they were perched on the edge of the world, and it’s not surprising how quickly the Britons gathered around the fort to meet those needs. Hadrian disapproved of the vices rife in the civilian settlements, but he was wise enough not to prohibit them. Soldiers weren’t allowed to marry officially until the third century, but a blind eye was turned to unofficial marriages in the vici. When Septimius Severus lifted the ban, families of soldiers began to move into the forts themselves. The Roman Army was going native, but the vicus and its vices continued to boom. In the foundations of one building, since nicknamed ‘the murder house’, two skeletons were found apparently concealed under a newly laid floor.

Hadrian’s Wall, here doubling as the fort’s northern wall, now continues through another wood, and when it emerges, a curious sight greets me: a tiny fort, like Vercovicium’s baby brother, annexes the Wall. This is one of the ‘milecastles’ (number 37) that I’ve been mentioning intermittently. Playing card shaped, they typically contained two small barracks with a road running between them, a staircase up to the wall walk and two entrances. Here the north entrance still has part of its arch, but intriguingly falls away over the cliff into empty space — a gateway to nowhere. Scholars still argue about the purpose of the milecastles, but most agree that they were the walls original ‘forts’ and ‘checkpoints’, and that their importance probably diminished after the building of the larger forts.

The Wall is bigger and bolder now, winding along the ridge and dipping fearlessly into every gulley. There is another long, gradual ascent, again reaching about a thousand feet above sea level. The Wall peters out at the top, then drops steeply, but the views over Crag Lough and the wooded cliffs behind it are breathtaking. At the bottom the path continues up again and along the wooded cliffs I saw from the top of Hotbank Crags, but I’m saving this part of the walk until tomorrow. Instead I continue along the military road that runs just behind the Wall, built some decades after it. The flagstones and kerb have all been worn away or stolen of course, but what the Romans built, they built to last. Nearly two thousand years later, the solidity of the foundations makes this road a delight to walk on as it winds over the difficult, rocky moorland just below the ridge. After a mile or so, at Peel Crags, the green road drops to a black one. I continue downhill in the peculiar pre-dusk light until I meet the Vallum, which has wisely refused to climb the ridge since I last saw it at Sewingshields.

My lodgings are at the youth hostel, where, for a small bribe, I managed to procure a private room, and take supper at the adjacent ‘Twice Brewed Inn’. Neither wishing to sully my newly purified body after the visit to the temple complex at Brocilitia, nor to offend Mithras by consuming the sacred bull merely for carnal pleasure, I disdain the beef, and indeed the flesh of any hornèd beast, and order instead the humble cod, encrusted with bitter herbs.

The Frontier Road — Dies tertius: Vindobala to Cilurnum

Via the City of Coria and the fort at Onnum, being the sixteenth day before the Calends of June, 2763

Breakfast in the bunkhouse is rustic: a mountain of bread and a giant tray of eggs, from which I choose a huge, double-yolked one, the biggest I’ve ever seen. Afterwards we are invited to feed the lambs, which I immediately succeed in letting escape. Our host, the farmer’s wife, is quite the comedienne, telling me not to feel bad about this ‘desperate bid for freedom’. When the lambs are recovered, I feed one its milk formula. It gulps down nearly a pint inside a minute, as greedy as I was with my double egg. Our host tells us that the Wool Marketing Board sets the price of a fleece at fourteen pence, but that the seasonal labour to shear it costs a pound fifty. You don’t need a degree from the London School of Economics to perceive the absurdity of an agricultural economy dependent on subsidies and tourism. The Romans weren’t averse to planning and controlling the economy, but I wonder what they would have made of this.

Afterwards, a sprint north along a green lane and then a short cut down another, overgrown and blocked with a mountain of tires (according to the country habit), gives me my first glimpse of the unexcavated Vallum, visible as a deep depression in the field to my left. A dash across the ferocious A69 and I’m back on the official route for a short while before arriving at Rudchester Farm, where Hutton rummaged in the barns for Roman walls in 1801. Here the fort of Vindobala is visible only as a grassy platform, but the real treat for me lies in the adjacent woods. A little foraging and fence-hopping reveals a large stone basin hidden in the undergrowth — a Roman cistern that once supplied the fort with water. For me, such banal little domestic relics of life eighteen centuries ago are just as interesting as the big monumental ones, especially when you have to hunt for them in the woods.

The next couple of miles are a long, slow ascent beside the ‘Military Road’ to Harlow Hill. The walk through undulating farmland is pleasant enough, but somewhat soured by the knowledge of the destruction of the Wall done by General Wade. In the wake of the Jacobite uprisings in the eighteenth century, he commissioned the building of roads throughout Northern Britain to facilitate the movement of troops. The road from Carlisle to Newcastle made infamous use of the convenient foundations and building materials offered by Hadrian’s Wall. I’ve always suspected there was something more to Wade’s demolition than military expediency alone. There were roads enough in the area affording quicker and easier improvement. Consider, though, the part that Hadrian’s Wall must have played in the development of Scotland’s nationhood: well into Anglo-Saxon times, there was a cultural and linguistic continuum, with no abrupt geographical boundaries, from the English Channel to the Highland Line. The Romans’ arbitrary placement of the empire’s boundary between the Tyne and the Solway changed that forever: thenceforward a person was born either north or south of it, and conflict between Northerner and Southerner was continuous for seven centuries. The Irishman Wade was one of the midwives at the United Kingdom’s painful birth between 1707 and 1746. Was his destruction of Hadrian’s Wall a symbolic destruction of the divide between the two kingdoms? The removal of a mental as well as a physical barrier? A case of ‘Mr. Hadrian, tear down this wall!’?

There’s a fine panorama at the top of Harlow Hill, but the sky is darkening. I descend to a group of reservoirs and it starts to rain. For the next few miles the path climbs slowly again towards Carr Hill and the rain gets heavier. The Vallum is more in evidence now, but only as more frequent dips in the fields. At the top of Down Hill the sun peeps out, though it’s still chilly. A snack wagon miraculously appears, and my gratitude knows no bounds at receipt of a mug of tea and a bacon roll. The proprietress tells me a sorry tale, all too familiar, of local council bullying. She has provided this inestimable service to walkers for years, but for almost as long, the authorities have demanded that she apply for ‘planning permission’, as, absurdly, they judge the wagon to be a ‘permanent structure’. The application is, as usual, costly and almost certain to fail. The good lady is seventeen centuries late with her small business venture: the frozen soldiers stationed on the wall, though surely taking a cut of her takings for ‘protection’, would have been as glad as me for a cup of hot wine and water and some cured pork on a day like this.

I cross the road into the field and suddenly the Vallum plunges almost to its original depth. Sheep intermittently disappear without trace into the deep ditch, and the mounds on either side are clearly defined. Considering the food, wine, horses, cattle, carts, tools and wages of thousands of soldiers that must have accumulated along the frontier, it’s hardly surprising the Romans saw the need for an extra fortification as deep as the wall was tall. The Vallum must have been a bitch for making off with stolen goods, but generations of Brigantes, the local tribe, no doubt died trying.

Here I make a detour back down to the Tyne Valley and the pre-Hadrianic frontier. After a mile and a half I arrive at Aydon Castle, a mediaeval fortified manor house perched romantically above a ravine. It’s past two o’ clock and time is pressing, but I can’t resist a look around. The castle is solid, grey and gaunt — typical for this ‘Border Reiver’ country. With the gradual establishment of the national border beginning in the tenth century, these parts were rife with bandits and feuding clans fleeing the law on both sides. Walls had to be thick and windows small.

I drop down into the ravine that the castle overlooks, then emerge to go over a hill for the descent into Corbridge (Coria or Corstopitum). This was a frontier town before the Wall, and the road which ran from here to Carlisle, the Stanegate, was the original border, considerably less fortified. Coria also lay on the course of Dere Street, the road from York, which in time would pass through the Wall on its way to Edinburgh and further to the smaller and shorter-lived northern frontier, the Antonine Wall. Dere Street crossed the River Tyne to get to Coria and the massive stones of the bridge’s ramp can still be seen on the south bank, but unfortunately I haven’t time to make that excursion today.

A dash across the murderous A69 (again) and a trot through Corbridge’s northern suburbs brings me to the ancient site — small and quaint now, but what a swinging city it must have seemed, back in 200, to the soldiers on leave from the Wall and in need of a little action! As usual in Britannia, the ruins are at most chest-high, but seem well preserved and integrated here. The Stanegate runs very obviously through the centre of the town, and beside it are the intriguing remains of a colonnade, which today sit well below street level, due to repeated resurfacing of the road. Also in clear view are the massive foundations and complex ventilation system of the granaries, a municipal fountain and a network of dubious alleys between the buildings. The museum, though small, is crammed with statuary, tombstones, plaques and domestic objects.

As I leave Coria, I notice an overgrown green lane heading north, back towards the Wall, and which in a few hundred yards merges with a busy dual carriageway. This is a fragment of Dere Street, and it would have been fine to walk on this needless-to-say straight road back up the hill, but the automobile has robbed me of this pleasure. Instead I have to wind along Anglo-Saxon lanes, past some enormous, conical eighteenth century pottery kilns, over a ford and up the hill to the small castle at Halton. The fort of Onnum (or Hunnum), the Wall’s fourth, lies in the grounds of the castle, but is only visible as a raised platform, though even this is confused by centuries of ploughing. Here and there are suspiciously square blocks of cut stone, and it would be surprising if they were not Roman, given the systematic robbing that has gone on for the last thousand years.

A little further along there is a grassy platform in the field that bears witness to one of the Wall’s seventy-nine ‘milecastles’, but I’ll leave the account of these until the ruins become more substantial further on. The Vallum, though subtle, is also visible here, but the local cows object to my inspecting it. Shortly afterwards I arrive at the crossing of Hadrian’s Wall and Dere Street, the ‘Portgate’, the point at which I would gave emerged had I continued along the green lane and risked my life on the dual carriageway, and where probably a monumental arch in the wall stood. Now there’s just a roundabout and a pub, and the black tarred road shooting southwards as straight as an arrow is all that remains of Rome’s glory.

The Vallum becomes more obvious as the path continues uphill, through a forestry plantation and past the likewise more pronounced outline of Milecastle 24. After this the path crosses the road, and another feature of the frontier system appears unmistakably. As if the Vallum and the Wall weren’t already enough, a ten-foot-deep, V-shaped ditch was dug immediately to the north of the Wall along most of its length, only disappearing where an escarpment renders it superfluous or solid rock makes it too difficult.

The path continues alongside the Ditch for the next few miles and gradually the terrain becomes more rugged. I pass the site of another battle, ‘Heavenfield’, this time between rival Anglian and Welsh kings in the seventh century. The Wall at that time must have loomed large over the armies and probably constrained their strategies too.

The path now drops again towards the Tyne Valley. Over the road is the first visible stretch of the Wall since Heddon. Here, the massive foundation stones are the full ten feet wide, but the wall itself is a couple of feet narrower. The Romans planned big, but were quick to scale back their enterprises when they realized they had overstretched themselves. Here at Planetrees, for the first time, the Vallum, Wall and Ditch are all visible together, and the magnitude of the monument in total suggests there was no shame in this ‘scaling back’.

The path continues through woodland and then turns left down a lane towards the concretely named village of ‘Wall’ and my lodgings for the night: ‘The Hadrian Hotel’, naturally enough. Back in March, when I came to see the Wall illuminated by torches at dusk, I sat by a roaring fire at this old inn to eat my rabbit stew and drink my ‘Centurion Ale’, but God only knows what I’ll get tonight; dusty wayfarers must ever roll the dice. I only hope it’s not lamb.