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.