Walking the Wall: An MA Adventure--- Episode II: Attack of the Sheep!

Before I start this entry, I figured it might be useful to give everyone an idea about where all these places before I keep throwing new place names at you. I've modified a few maps off of Google to help orient my readers.

First off, here's a map of where Hadrian's Wall is located in Britain. It runs along the narrowest part of England, from the Solway Firth (inlet) in the west to the mouth of the River Tyne in the east. Although it is close to Scotland, it is actually entirely in England. The eastern side is very close to the Scottish border, but the border starts a little north of the wall, but then angles up toward Edinburgh as you move west, while the wall just cuts straight across.

You can see how far the wall was from Leicester: a 4 hour drive!

Here is a map of the forts and sites along Hadrian's Wall. I've marked the sites we visited with yellow/red squares, and listed their current and Roman names below. The Hostel is marked with a blue circle.

Saturday was a very full day for the MA crew. Therefore, we all decided to start the day with a proper English breakfast. The Youth Hostel we were staying at offered a full breakfast in the morning. Having never before experienced the legendary English breakfast, I was curious as to what it consisted of.

Protein. That is the key to English breakfast. Lots and lots of protein. You start out with eggs, then sausage and bacon (which is really more like canadian bacon), and baked beans. Yogurt, toast, and fruit was also available. Probably a good meal for people who are planning to hike all over steep crags and across the chilly British landscape.

We started our day with a long drive out to Birdoswald. When we arrived at the fort, we discovered the front was covered by a series of old brick farm buildings. They felt pretty historic, too!

The photo to the left should give you an idea of the standard state of preservation at the fort. There wasn't much above the level of foundations, but there was still a lot to see. The site has been well excavated (although there's still more to discover!)

The granaries were really impressive. They were huge, with large stone buttresses along the side to support the weight of the grain pressing out. In an uncertain landscape, you wanted to make sure the people inside the fort had enough food to hold out for quite a while if they had to. The flat stones you see in the foreground on the left are the loading dock for wagons to pull up and transfer their cargo of grain into the granary. Pretty clever!

We went to explore the walls around the fort next. This is one of the gateways that led into the fort. You can see where the two main arches would have sprung up, although there's little left of them now. All forts had four of these gates. That seems like a lot for a place you have to defend from angry Scots, and there is indeed evidence that many of the gateways were built to plan and then blocked up. Our theory is that the emperor demanded all forts be built to a standard plan, and then once he was gone, people adjusted things to make more sense.

Photo by Ian M.

 The East Gate was a little more impressive than the other one, with the first stone of the arch left. Apparently, this source of nicely cut stone was just too tempting for local inhabitants after the Roman period. Sometimes, whole arches were stolen for use in churches and other medieval buildings!













This is the view out the back gate of the fort. Yes, the back gate opened onto a steep drop-off. Why they really needed a gate here is beyond me. None of us could picture an army of angry barbarians desperate enough to mount a large scale attack by scaling this really steep bank. Maybe they just had a gate there to go out and enjoy the really nice view of the river valley below....

Photo by Ian M.

As we wandered around the walls, we soon noticed that we had company. Most of the site was also in a giant field, and we found out very quickly that this field was inhabited by a very large herd of sheep. As they moved the sheep into the fort's pasture, we suddenly found ourselves facing a veritable ovid army. After that, we decided it was probably best to explore the inner parts of the fort, and yielded ground to the sheep. Run away!!!




 Our last exploration inside the fort was a strange arrangement of timber posts inside one of the granaries. During excavation, large postholes were discovered along the stone footings. These were not from a Roman building, but a later Anglo-Saxon hall built over the foundations. After the Romans abandoned the fort, a new group of people came along and decided to use these perfectly nice foundations for a building of their own. Although the wood and thatch buildings would have looked quite different from the imposing stone structures, it's cool to see such continuity in British sites.

Photo by Ian M.

Photo by Dave W.

We briefly explored the museum, which featured artefacts discovered during the excavations, and a few recreations of what fort life would have been like. We found the wax figures of a soldier yelling down at a British guy patching the wall odd, but entertaining.

After Birdoswald, we set off in the Land Rover once more. After stopping for a quick lunch (during which I learned that British corned beef is a strange mushy stuff that smells a bit like cat food), we headed out toward Chesters, one of the best-preserved forts along the wall. Before we got to the proper fort, we stopped along the road and got out to explore a peculiar structure across the river. To get to it, we tromped across a busy road and then down a narrow aisle between fields (again, full of grazing sheep). Some of us brought the remains of our lunch along to finish by the river.



The river bank was much different in Roman times, and would have come right up to the edge of this stone structure. Professor Mattingly, whom you can see in the distance in this picture, asked us what we though this might be. Eventually, we stumbled onto the right answer: it was the footings of a very wide bridge across the river toward the fort at Chesters. You can barely make out the dim outline of the fort's baths in the distance.




The very clever Romans even used part of the bridge footings to power a mill, with a large channel for water to rush in and grind flour. I can only imagine how grand this all must have looked when it was fully operational!

After viewing this side of the river, we crossed back through the various gates and corridors in the fencing. Lots of the wall monuments stand in farmland, so there are a lot of sheep-proof gates you can only go through one at a time, and ladders over walls. Adventure!

Our next stop was the fort of Chesters, a cavalry fort situated along the wall and the river. The ruins here were the most impressive we'd yet seen. There were more than just foundations! We got to see all the basic buildings of a proper Roman fort: the barracks, the stables, the granaries, the praetoria (commander's house), the principium (main headquarters and offices)...

Photo by Ian M.

Here, you can see the way the granaries were built, on stone pillars to hold up the floor and let air flow under it to keep out vermin and damp. We'd seen foundations for these pillars previously, but never the whole floor.

This is one of the only still-roofed Roman buildings in Britain. It is the strong room of the principia, one of the innermost rooms in the headquarters building. The legionary standards and sacred images of the emperor would have been stored in the room upstairs, as well. Guarding this room was a sacred duty, and rather important, since the strong room
would have contained the legionaries' pay...

Photo by Ian M.

Photo by Ian M.

After visiting the fort proper, we walked down to the baths, located outside the walls of the fort down by the river. When you imagine Roman baths without any previous knowledge of them, it's very easy to let your imagination run away with you and paint a picture of huge chambers with statues and fine stone and fountains. Then, when you see the real thing, you're at the same time amazed that it could be so massive and so complex, and yet at the same time, nothing like your imagination. You can see a few people over on the left for scale.


Baths actually had several different rooms, all with different heat settings. You had the tepidarium, which was fairly warm, the caldarium (pictured on the right), which was steaming hot, and the frigidarium, which was cold. Progressing through the baths at these highly variant temperatures must have been quite the experience, like jumping into a pool after sitting in a hot tub.

The caldarium here shows the main pool area, as well as the beginnings of a window well up top. It was closest to the hypocausts, where the water in massive tanks (probably lined with lead) would have been heated. After going to the caldarium, the water would have gone to the tepidarium after cooling a bit.

Photo by Ian M.

All this required some pretty good drainage systems. These met up with drainage systems from the fort, and flowed into the river. Maybe not the most sanitary by today's standards, but the drains certainly were efficient at carrying waste and water away from the fort. Plus, they were fun to climb over.

We did a lot of climbing and exploring on this trip. I was very thankful for my sturdy pair of Wellies. Through wind and rain and fields of sheep dung, they made the trip far more pleasant.

Above three photos by Ian M.

Next, we saw some indoor sights. A 19th century barrister (or lawyer, for my American audience) and town official from Newcastle was an avid Classics enthusiast. When he realized how much of the wall and forts were being destroyed, he started buying up land. He owned at least three forts and a good portion of wall, which he worked to restore. On Mondays, he would excavate on his properties, uncovering various artefacts and some very fine works of art. He assembled the best of these as a prestigious collection, which his heirs set up in a museum on the site of Chesters. This museum seriously hasn't changed much since Victorian times, which makes it almost a museum of a museum. Still, it was fascinating to see old-fashioned displays and some really cool pieces. Many were altars to various deities, especially marine goddesses.

Although this educational and scenic day was not yet over, I will have to save the grand conclusion of that October Saturday for another entry. After Chesters, we packed up and headed to Housesteads for our final fort of the day and our scenic walk back to the Youth Hostel. It proved to be quite an athletic adventure, and really deserves its own entry.