Under Another Sky (19 page)

As we walked the wall, the days were filled with genial chat; each night, after we found our B&B, we gratefully removed our boots, ate a hearty pub supper and slept off the day’s hard walking. There was a comforting rhythm to it: a tremendous simplicity about doing nothing but walking east. The wall was like another companion. On
the penultimate day of our journey, we arrived at Heddon-on-the-Wall, nine miles west of Newcastle. The post-war housing estate we walked through had grandly classicising street names. ‘Marius Avenue, leading to Calvus Drive, Camilla Road, Valerian Avenue and Antonine Avenue’, read one sign. Here was the easternmost surviving stretch of the wall, running 100 metres or so, between a busy B road and a paddock fringed with ash trees. Behind it, the sunlight glinted off someone’s greenhouse and washing flapped on a line. An ice-cream van played a tune somewhere a few streets away; as melancholy a sound as you could imagine. We said farewell to the wall, and began to descend to Newcastle.

Walking the wall was not always such a gregarious activity. William Camden came in 1599, and wrote, ‘Verily I have seene the tract of it over the high pitches and steepe descents of hilles, wonderfully rising and falling.’ But the wall was then part of what Camden called the ‘batable ground’ – disputed, lawless territory between England and Scotland, inhabited by cattle-rustling reivers ‘infamous for theeving and robbing’. Describing his foray to the central section of the wall, near the notorious crime spot of Busy-Gap, Camden wrote that he ‘could not with safety take the full survey of it for the ranke robbers there about’. He was able, though, to study numerous sculptures, including an altar dedicated to the deity whom the Romans called
‘the Syrian goddess’, Atargatis – which was being used as a laundry stone by the local women.

It was many years later that visiting the wall was regarded as anything approaching a pleasure trip. The antiquary John Warburton published an account of it in 1753, noting that the country was ‘wild and baron’, and few ‘searchers after Roman ruins’ had ventured here. Warburton is today best remembered for having dimwittedly entrusted some fifty Elizabethan and Jacobean plays in manuscript, some of them the sole surviving copies, to his cook, who ‘unluckily burnd or put under pye bottoms’ all but three. His survey of the wall was dedicated to the Duke of Cumberland, the ‘Butcher’ Cumberland who had quashed the Jacobite rebellion in 1745. The work began with a pointed ‘I-told-you-so’, informing readers that as far back as 1715 Warburton had attempted to persuade the government of the necessity of renewing the Roman military road, running south of the wall, for modern use, making it ‘passable for troops and artillery’ between Carlisle and Newcastle. An Act of Parliament of 1751 had finally brought this about, and much of this military way, now the B6318, was built over the wall’s remains, which were ruthlessly flattened for miles.

Change was gradually on its way. In 1801, William Hutton, a native of Birmingham, walked from his home city to the wall. He tramped along it twice, there and back, and then took himself back to the Midlands. At the end of his account of the walk, published in 1802, he reported his ‘loss, by perspiration, of one stone of animal weight; an expenditure of forty guineas, a lapse of thirty-five days, and a walk of six hundred and one miles’. That was an average of seventeen miles a day. He was seventy-eight years old. ‘Perhaps,’ he wrote, ‘I am the first man that ever travelled the whole length of the Wall, and probably the last that ever will attempt it.’

Hutton’s
History of the Roman Wall
was not intended for antiquaries, but for the amusement and edification of an interested but less expert public, who would, he hoped, travel ‘with me, though by your own fire-side’. It began with a cheerful denunciation of antiquarian prose style. ‘[The antiquary] feeds upon withered husks, which none can relish but himself; nor does he seem to possess the art of dressing up his dried morsel to suit the palate of a reader.’ Accounts of ruins, he said, were ‘the dullest of all descriptions’. His approach would be different. He would ‘enliven truth with a smile; with the anecdote’. Needless to say,
he was not the last to walk the wall. Rather, perhaps, he was the first example of a new breed of visitor: the tourist.

For his walking tour, Hutton dressed entirely in black (‘a kind of religious travelling warrant’), and carried a bag, ‘much like a postman’s letter pouch’, filled with maps, including Warburton’s plan of the wall. To that was strapped ‘an umbrella in a green case, for I was not likely to have a six weeks tour without wet’. He clearly cut a remarkable figure as he strode through the villages of Staffordshire, Cheshire and Lancashire. ‘The crowds I met in my whole journey viewed me with an eye of wonder and inquiry, as if ready to cry out “In the name of the Father, &c, What ar’t!”’

The second edition of Hutton’s book, published in 1813, included a contribution from his daughter, who accompanied her father on horseback as far as the Lakes, already an established tourist destination. Catherine Hutton was a fascinating character: a novelist, she lived to be ninety, amassing a correspondence of more than 2,000 letters with figures such as Charles Dickens. She described the shape of their days as they journeyed north: ‘He rose at four o’clock, walked to the end of the next stage, breakfasted, and waited for me. I set out at seven; and, when I arrived at the same inn, breakfasted also. When my horse had fed properly, I followed; passed my Father on the road, arrived before him at the next inn, and bespoke dinner and beds.’ She added: ‘My Father was such an enthusiast with regard to the Wall, that he turned neither to the right or the left, except to gratify me with a sight of Liverpool.’ She recalled how he had ignored her pleas (‘with tears’) that he should do at least some of the journey by carriage; and noted that he insisted on walking entirely on his own so as ‘not to be put out of his regular pace’.

Hutton was, indeed, an ardent admirer of the wall: ‘Men have been deified,’ he wrote, ‘for trifles compared to this admirable structure.’ During his walk, he grew as fond of it as we did in ours, nicknaming it ‘Severus’, after the emperor who was then thought to have built its stone central section (it was not attributed to Hadrian until the mid nineteenth century). His horror at the wall’s rapid demolition, in this era of urban expansion, was in proportion to his admiration. ‘From the destruction of so large a part of these magnificent works, I fear, I shall be the last Author who shall describe them. Plunder is the order of the day.’ At Byker’s Hill (now part of Newcastle) he denounced
the levelling of the Roman ditch and its conversion into potato beds, and at St Oswald’s he noted a recent calamity. ‘Had I been some months sooner, I should have been favoured with a noble treat; but now that treat was miserably soured. At the twentieth-mile stone, I should have seen a piece of Severus’s Wall seven feet and a half high, and two hundred and twenty-four yards long: a sight not to be found in the whole line. But the proprietor, Henry Tulip, Esq. is now taking it down, to erect a farm-house with the materials.’ He conveyed, via a servant, his remonstrations to Tulip for ‘putting an end to the most noble monument of Antiquity in the whole Island’.

While the countryside around Hadrian’s Wall was no longer the lawless territory it had been when Camden visited, Hutton’s struggles to find a bed each night made our own intricate advance booking of B&Bs look easy. He was consistently, he wrote, regarded with bitter suspicion by the locals – at Birdoswald mistaken for a tax inspector; at Harlow Hill for a ‘spy employed by the Government’. At one pub he caused conversation to dry up entirely because the drinkers assumed he was a disapproving Methodist preacher. At the Twice Brewed Inn on the military road, which still serves pints to thirsty wall walkers, he dined magnificently on a ‘piece of beef out of the copper, perhaps equal to half a calf’, but was offered a room sharing with ‘a poor sick traveller who had fallen ill upon the road’. At Stanwix, he was reduced to knocking on doors to find a billet. One was opened by a woman, once clearly a beauty, who ‘yet shewed as much of that valuable commodity as could be expected from forty-five’. She refused to put him up on grounds of propriety, to his disbelief: ‘Did you ever hear of a woman losing her character by a man of seventy-eight!’ He eventually found a place to sleep, only to be plagued by fleas, ‘the dancing gentry of the night’.

What is striking about Hutton’s account, aside from his wit and charm, is the force of meaning he ascribes to the wall: its moral content. ‘This Wall,’ he wrote, ‘is also a clear proof, that every species of cruelty that one man can practise to another was here, and pronounces the human being as much a savage as the brute. This Place has been the scene of more plunder and murder, than any part of the Island, of equal extent.’ For him the wall provided a bleak commentary on human affairs. The world is not ‘advancing towards perfection’, he argued. Man may be ‘better informed’ than he was in previous centuries, but he is
‘not mended’. The Romans were as much barbarians as the Scots who marauded against the wall – worse, for they ‘surprised, murdered, plundered, and kept possession’. So did the Saxons, Danes and Normans. They were all barbarians. ‘Whoever deprives an unoffending man of his right, comes under this word,’ he wrote.

It was still some time before visiting the wall was regarded as an excursion for pleasure-seekers rather than an eccentric escapade. In 1849, however, came another change, when the Newcastle antiquary and schoolteacher John Collingwood Bruce led the first ‘pilgrimage’ to the wall. It came about after he was compelled to abort his plan to visit Rome in the summer of 1848 because of the revolutionary upheavals in Europe. He went to the wall instead, and that winter gave a series of lectures on his trip at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society. He remembered, nearly forty years later, ‘I was impressed during the delivery of them with the idea that some of my hearers thought that I was describing the structure in too glowing terms, and that the Wall in reality was not as grand an object as I represented it.’ And so he offered to lead a party the following summer to travel along it ‘from end to end – forming a pilgrimage like that described by Chaucer, consisting of both ladies and gentlemen’. In due course he ‘issued a programme of the intended pilgrimage, prefacing it with some remarks upon the beauty of the country to be traversed and the attractive features which it presented to the botanist and geologist as well as the antiquary’. Hutton had been less enamoured of the surrounding landscape. ‘A more dreary country than this in which I now am, can scarcely be conceived,’ he complained, when walking just that section of the wall that is now regarded as the most picturesque.

Twenty ‘pilgrims’ set forth on foot, their luggage following on the road in a ‘wheeled conveyance’ that was roomy enough to accommodate the travellers when they felt footsore. On several occasions their numbers were substantially swelled by locals – enthusiasts from Hexham causing their cavalcade to extend ‘a mile upon the road’. At the temple at Brocolitia, they found men quarrying for Roman stone. ‘A general rush was made to the newly upturned earth, and beyond the expectations of most, one article of interest after another was produced, Samian ware and a few coins.’ Crowds formed at Housesteads. ‘Never probably since the departure of the Romans was the city so numerously tenanted. Many of the neighbouring gentry …
had there assembled in holiday attire.’ After Collingwood Bruce gave a lecture, the pilgrims ‘showed our loyalty. In my address I … stated that now in Windsor’s princely halls was seated a lady who ruled over “Regions Caesar never knew” and who wielded a sceptre which was lovingly obeyed by four times the number of subjects great Julius ever swayed. Mr Falconer, one of the pilgrims, proposed three cheers for Queen Victoria, which were given with thrilling effect.’ A crucial link between tourism and preservation was made: ‘I am impressed with the idea that such expeditions are valuable as a means of exciting, in the minds of the people inhabiting the district through which we pass, a sense of the importance of the remains … When they see that gentlemen of education, and especially cultivated ladies, regard it with something like veneration, they will learn to respect it too.’

Nearly a century later, tales of the pilgrimage, and of Hutton’s walk, were reworked into W. H. Auden’s radio play
Hadrian’s Wall
. Auden had antiquarianism in his blood: his uncle, the Revd John Auden, was one of those who gave financial support to the excavations at Wroxeter that the youthful Wilfred Owen had visited in 1913, and he was named Wystan for an Anglo-Saxon saint commemorated at the parish church of Repton in Derbyshire. As significant, though, was his abiding love of the landscape of northern England. In a letter of 17 January 1950, he was to write: ‘My great good place is the part of the Pennines bounded on the S by Swaledale, on the N by the Roman wall and on the W by the Eden Valley.’ When he lived in America, he had a map of this territory on his wall: it was for him an internal landscape, a trigger to the imagination. The script of the
Hadrian’s Wall
broadcast, which was aired live from Newcastle on 25 November 1937, survives. It is a delightfully and unashamedly educational play about the history of the wall, framed by the device of a family’s day trip to Housesteads, incorporating what would now be called ‘found texts’. Some of the words of Catherine Hutton were woven in, as well as those of her father. Auden invented voices, too, for the Romans who once manned the wall. Benjamin Britten wrote and conducted the incidental music, which included a setting of a poem written for the occasion, ‘Roman Wall Blues’. The broadcast went, reported Britten in his diary entry for the day, ‘fearfully badly’. But, he added: ‘There’s good stuff in it I know.’ The critic of the
Listener
agreed, admiring the ‘terrific vitality’ of the music. She also noted – the broadcast was of course live – ‘an uncomfortable pause
during which an actor was told in several very audible whispers to turn to page three’.