Under Another Sky (18 page)

My laborious, my romantic, and even my Quixotic undertaking, the double tour of the Wall.

William Hutton, 1802

Still I hope that in our anticipated pilgrimage we shall not forsake the Wall a single yard in its course. Let us try to trace it over the whole of its length.

John Collingwood Bruce, 1885

A walk expresses space and freedom
and the knowledge of it can live
in the imagination of anyone, and that
is another space too.

Richard Long, 1980

From the summit of the wild and remote Sewingshields Crags, east of the Roman fort at Housesteads, you can stand next to Hadrian’s Wall and see it snake away from you in either direction for miles, following a long, sharp ridge. That ridge is part of the Whin Sill, a tide of volcanic rock that forced itself up to the earth’s surface 295 million years ago like (according to an unusually vivid local information board) the jam forcing its way through the bread in a sandwich. The landscape seems to stretch itself out impossibly luxuriously. There are no towns, no villages to be seen, just the occasional lough, hill farm and plantation, and (on this bright, blustery day) the clouds racing their shadows over the calm heights. Here, the wall might have been built on the crest of a wave frozen at the point of breaking.

It is hard to imagine this knobbly spine of stones as the implacable barrier it once was, a structure two metres thick and five metres tall, manned by infantry, its bulk blotting out the views that the steady stream of walkers now comes to admire. It was built in
AD
122 by order of the new emperor Hadrian. His policy was to set the empire, perilously overstretched by his predecessor Trajan, within defined, consolidated limits; this barrier would be the spine of its northernmost frontier zone. The wall extends eighty Roman miles (seventy-four of ours) from the Solway Firth in the west to the Tyne in the east, punctually marked by eighty-one milecastles, or fortified gatehouses, allowing (or rather controlling) access to the north or south. Between each milecastle came two turrets; and at times the line of the wall suddenly opens out into a large rectangular enclosure where a fort once stood.

Sometimes the wall rises and falls in graceful increments, working in discreet harmony with the landscape; but at others, particularly just a little further west from here, around the famous spot known as Sycamore Gap, it seems to compete directly with the terrain, making swooping dives and wild climbs, describing curly U’s and precipitous W’s. Sycamore Gap itself is a much-photographed spot: here the wall performs a perfect acrobatic parabola, and at its very bottom grows the lonely tree for which it is named. You can discern the Roman love of regularity and order here: even though the milecastle at Cawfields, for example, is built on a ludicrously steep slope, it still has a northern gate opening out on to thin air at the escarpment’s edge. (The line is drawn at Sewingshields Crags, where no northern gate seemed to be deemed necessary, since it would have opened straight on to a plunging cliff, like a trapdoor.)

The traditional idea of the wall – that it must have been built purely to keep the aggressive northern peoples out of Roman territory – should be set aside, according to current theories. It is now thought that it was much more porous and provisional than that. The very fact of its thickly spaced exit and entry points suggests plenty of traffic through the checkpoints. Just east of Housesteads, at Knag Burn, an extra gateway with a pair of guard chambers was built into the wall in the fourth century: perhaps this was a convenient point for traders and farmers taking sheep to their seasonal grazing.

What can have been the effect on the Britons of this astonishing structure? This wall in the wilds of northern Britannia divides nowhere
from nowhere. Visually, it makes about as much sense as René Magritte’s open door suspended in a cloudscape. The effect of all this insistence on uniformity and precision despite the terrain must have been impressive, if not cowing; part of its purpose, surely, was to intimidate. It is now thought that its value as a symbol of Roman might was at least as great as any practical, defensive purpose.

I was walking the wall with my friends Joshua and Damian, as a few days’ respite from work and London. West of Knag Burn, at the visitors’ centre at the delightfully named Once Brewed, we paused to eat a picnic, safely out of the high wind that was buffeting the tops. Nearby was an improvised pavilion supported on fake Roman standards. Under it, a woman deep in a book of sudoku puzzles sat on a folding chair next to a table laden with reproduction swords, strigils (the curved metal instruments Romans used to scrape oil from their limbs in the baths), and some sponges on sticks, the reputed Roman equivalent of lavatory paper. A little apart, as still as a statue as we approached, his red cloak flapping in the breeze and his breastplate glinting, stood a tall, thickset man, his height made more formidable by his crested helmet. Occasionally a family came up, hesitated shyly for a moment before starting to chat, and then a boy would put on a spare helmet and have his photograph taken with this imposing figure.

He introduced himself as Marcus Aufidius Maximus, of the 6th Legion. He had borrowed the name of a real Roman, who had dedicated altars at Bath. When in civvies he was Steve Richardson, from Newcastle; he was, he said, ‘a full-time Roman centurion’. The souvenir stall was just for the summer; usually, he said, his work was school visits and events at archaeological sites and museums. At primary schools, he and his wife Lesley kitted out the children in uniforms and then ‘I take them out on drills.’ He had the six- to eight-year-olds doing the ‘
testudo
’, the famous ‘tortoise’ infantry formation in which the soldiers locked their rectangular shields together to form a carapace against arrow showers.

How did he come to be a Roman centurion? ‘I got fed up with selling kitchens and bathrooms,’ he said. An interest in archaeology led to his getting a job working front-of-house at the Roman fort and museum of Segedunum, in Newcastle. One day a bakery wanted to photograph someone dressed as a Roman soldier for an advert. Richardson
volunteered, and on his way back from the shoot to the fort he was, he said, ‘mobbed by excited kids’. The museum management realised it could do something with a Roman soldier, so he started appearing at events at the fort and eventually went freelance as a centurion. After meeting him, I began to spot his good-natured face in all kinds of places: on a poster for a museum in Newcastle; even advertising the ‘Roman Britain’ ice cream produced by Doddington’s, a local dairy. (The flavour is honey, cherry, apple and cinnamon.) ‘I get paid for playing soldiers,’ he said. ‘What more could I want?’

Each night of our walk, Joshua, Damian and I put up in B&Bs. At Greencarts Farm, through which the wall runs, Sandra Maughan was struggling with her faulty Victorian pipes, fielding complaints, she said, from city folk expecting urban levels of water pressure, though she was not on the mains supply. Framed in her hallway were some humorous verses about the ‘types’ who walk the wall, with their unsuitable footwear, short shorts and dangly earrings. When we came down for our hearty walkers’ breakfast, Maughan – an energetic redhead in late middle age, with a rich north-eastern accent – dropped us a conspiratorial wink as we shot a glance at the other guests, who were discussing Roman military matters with single-minded commitment over bacon and eggs. When the journalist Hunter Davies came here in the 1970s to write his book
A Walk on the Wall
, the farmers he spoke to didn’t want tourists coming, leaving gates open, damaging fences. ‘The most important thing in this area is farming. The wall comes second. It must never be allowed to take over,’ he quoted one as saying. This now sounds like the dead rhetoric of a bygone age. Hill farms are less and less economically viable. In 2001, the last really serious British outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease started a few miles east of here at Heddon-on-the-Wall, with terrible consequences for the local economy. ‘We were one of the last farms to lose all our animals,’ Maughan told me. ‘Foot and mouth came straight down the wall. Your farm got wiped out.’ A neighbouring farm had one suspect animal – and then that was that. The slaughter began. ‘It was spring; there were little lambs jumping around. And then your whole life was wiped out in two days,’ she said. When the Hadrian’s Wall path opened as an official tourist attraction in 2003, the farms were still in a bad state; the natural thing to do was to branch out into offering accommodation, and there was certainly the demand. Maughan started
putting people up in a couple of spare bedrooms; these days, at peak times, she has had as many as 600 staying, what with the campsite and the bunk house. The farm now makes 50 per cent of its income from accommodation. Some of her friends, she said, ‘don’t like people looking in your windows, knocking on your door’. The path has certainly ‘changed life dramatically’. But on the whole, Maughan seemed to have found the experience enriching – a far cry from the lonely farming existence of previous generations. ‘You get English people, foreign people. You get used to different cultures and expectations. You get politicians, actors, famous people stopping. There’s only the odd one you’d like to strangle.’

I spoke to one of the local MPs, who was trying to find ways to dramatically increase the number of visitors. At the moment, a million a year come to visit museums and sites on the wall; 200,000 walk part of the trail; and around 11,000 walk it end to end. He’d like there to be more than that. ‘We need people to come away from the Lake District and visit here instead,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing here that can make the farmers any money. Except the landscape.’ There was debate, he said, about how to make the wall more attractive, more vivid. He thought that rebuilding a section, so that tourists could get a sense of how colossal and imposing it had once been, might help. Linda Tuttiett, who runs the organisation that oversees what is known as ‘the Hadrian’s Wall corridor’, told me that the wall brings in about £880m a year to Cumbria and Northumberland – but she’d like to see that go up by £300m over the next twenty years. She too wanted tourists to the Lake District to come to the wall: ‘We can have two international brands working really hard for Cumbria,’ she told me. ‘Hadrian’s Wall is one of the most iconic World Heritage Sites. The opportunity for it to underpin the economy of the north is vast.’ It is not just a matter of the farming economy. When Hunter Davies stopped at Segedunum fort in Newcastle, he tried to visit Swan Hunter, the shipyard not far from there along the A187 (or Hadrian Road, as it is named locally), but found the workers on strike: ‘The boilermakers were wanting an increase of £4 a week on their average wage of £34,’ he wrote. At the time, the yard was building the
Ark Royal
. Today Swan Hunter is stilled: the cranes and floating dock have been sold to India. The company still operates, but with a staff of 200, concentrating on engineering and design services.

Once Brewed is within spitting distance of Housesteads and Vindolanda, two of the most important forts in the area. Housesteads was built on to the wall; Vindolanda pre-dates it. Around the military forts tended to spring up a ‘
vicus
’, or civilian settlement. The forts were built to a more or less uniform plan: a rectangular stone perimeter with rounded-off corners; a gate in the centre of each wall; an HQ building often with a basilica; a commanding officer’s quarters with a suite of baths; and barracks for the troops. You could walk into a fort anywhere in the empire from Egypt to Spain to Romania, and still find your way around. Seeing fort after fort along the wall, we soon began to grasp the grammar of them, to find their layouts familiar. At Housesteads, the troops were Tungrians from modern Belgium, who set up a temple with magnificent sculptures to Mithras. The god’s men-only mystery cult, beloved of the military, seems to have developed in the west of the empire (the earliest known Mithraeum is in the outskirts of Frankfurt), but it was marinated in the mysticism of the east, of Persia. Great Chesters, further west, was manned by Belgians, then Raetians from the German–Austrian border, then Astures from north-west Spain. At Carvoran fort, there was, in the second century ad, a cohort of soldiers from the modern Syrian city of Hama, who set up an altar to their goddess, Hammia. Eventually they were replaced by Dalmatians, from Croatia. At Arbeia, Iraqis from the Tigris plied the mouth of the Tyne. At Carlisle, there were Algerians. In the Great North Museum in Newcastle (where you can also see the sculptures from the Housesteads Mithraeum), there is a little azure-blue glass bottle, in the shape of a smiling African face, found at South Shields; it probably came from Egypt. And in the late second century, one Tineius Longus, a prefect in command of a cavalry regiment of the 20th Legion, dedicated an altar to an otherwise obscure local British god, Antenociticus. Tineius Longus was fulfilling his vow on his promotion to
quaestor
– a junior magistrate’s role that would have put him on the path to a senatorial career, high political office in Rome.