Around AD 122, the Emperor Hadrian visited the damp northern edge of his empire and gave an order that still scars the landscape of northern England: build a wall, coast to coast. The result ran about 73 miles — 80 Roman miles — from Wallsend on the River Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway on the Solway Firth in the west. It was the most heavily fortified frontier in the Roman world, and nearly nineteen centuries later long stretches of it still stride across the crags of Northumberland. Yet almost everything the modern visitor assumes about it is slightly wrong.
Start with the most common error. Hadrian's Wall is not, and never was, the border between England and Scotland. That border lies well to the north for much of its length, and neither country existed when the wall was built. Nor was the wall simply a barrier to stop marauding tribes. Its scale suggests something more bureaucratic: a means of controlling and taxing movement, funnelling people and trade through guarded gateways, and projecting imperial power over the tribes on both sides. A wall is as much a statement as a stockade.
How it was built
The structure was systematic. A milecastle — a small fortified gateway — was placed at every Roman mile, and between each pair stood two turrets, giving a regular rhythm of observation points along the whole line. Larger forts were spaced along it, and a great earthwork called the vallum ran behind, marking off the military zone. The garrison was drawn not from Italy but from auxiliary units recruited across the empire, from Gaul, Spain, the Low Countries and beyond — soldiers who were not Roman citizens but could earn citizenship through service. Confusingly, a second barrier, the Antonine Wall, was built of turf further north in the AD 140s under Hadrian's successor, only to be abandoned within a generation as the frontier fell back to Hadrian's line.
For a long time the wall was known mostly from its stones. Then came Vindolanda. At this fort just south of the wall, waterlogged, oxygen-starved soil preserved something extraordinary: hundreds of thin wooden writing tablets, inked by hand, that had survived nearly two thousand years in the mud. Discovered from the 1970s onwards, the Vindolanda tablets are among the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain, and they turned a line of masonry into a living community.
Life on the frontier
The tablets are wonderful precisely because they are so ordinary. Soldiers write about supplies of grain and beer; officers file duty rosters; someone complains about the state of the roads. One famous letter records a shipment that included socks and underpants — proof, if any were needed, that the northern winters were as miserable then as now. Another, addressed to the commander's wife Sulpicia Lepidina, is an invitation from a friend, Claudia Severa, to a birthday party. Written around AD 100, that cheerful note is often described as the earliest known example of writing in Latin by a woman anywhere in the Roman world. The frontier, it turns out, had women, children, birthdays and cold feet.
The wall did not fall in a dramatic siege. As Roman power in Britain waned in the fourth and early fifth centuries, the garrisons were gradually withdrawn or simply went unpaid, and the frontier faded rather than fell. Local people quarried the abandoned stone for churches, farms and field walls for centuries afterwards. Much of what survives today owes a debt to the Victorian antiquarian John Clayton, who bought up long stretches of land in the nineteenth century specifically to protect the wall from being carted away.
Hadrian's Wall is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, part of the wider Frontiers of the Roman Empire designation, and it is followed each year by thousands of walkers along the national trail that traces its route. Stand on it in a Northumberland gale, and it is easy to feel the loneliness of men posted here from the sunlit provinces of the south. But the tablets whisper a different story — of a place where an ordinary soldier's family ordered warm clothes, planned a party, and made a home at the very edge of the known world.
Quiz nuggets
- Hadrian's Wall was begun around AD 122 under the Emperor Hadrian and ran roughly 73 miles from Wallsend on the Tyne to Bowness-on-Solway.
- The wall is not the border between England and Scotland, which lies further north for most of its length.
- The turf-built Antonine Wall was constructed further north under Hadrian's successor Antoninus Pius in the AD 140s and soon abandoned.
- The Vindolanda tablets, wooden writing tablets preserved in waterlogged soil, are among Britain's oldest surviving handwritten documents and mention a shipment of socks and underpants.
- A birthday invitation to Sulpicia Lepidina from Claudia Severa, found at Vindolanda, is often cited as the earliest known writing in Latin by a woman.