The Spirit of Hadrian’s Wall – landscape photography

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The march of time has left many impressive imprints of man’s passing in this land of far horizons. None are more compelling than the Roman footprint and, in particular, the great Wall of Emperor Hadrian. Still surviving today to varying degrees across the country, after almost two millennia of border strife, the Wall gives us a unique link with antiquity. It helps us cast a long backward glance to those literate, cultured people, many identifiable through their inscriptions and writing tablets, living their lives in our familiar landscape. From coast to coast we can imagine the drama of that distant time when the power in the land was formidably foreign and the Celtic tribes were reluctant hosts to the first expression of a greater European union, the Commonwealth of Rome. This book sets out to reveal the magical beauty of this well-known and well-loved remnant frontier, and the tapestry of landscapes through which it runs, through the timeless visual drama of the elements.

WG Hoskins in his seminal work The Making of the English Landscape drew attention to a basic truth – that the landscape we see today, the human landscape, is far older than we imagine. Hoskins’ survey exposed the inter-generational palimpsest, written and overwritten over the generations, picking out the particular and the peculiar. His book was a melancholy lament to an ‘immemorial landscape’ as he put it, the inevitable by-product of his appreciation of, and emotional connection with, the people whose lives he revealed. For all of us – the field archaeologist, the academic historian and the likes of you and me – in experiencing historic places of the calibre of Hadrian’s Wall we are making outrageously long ancestral connections. The Mediterranean-wide cultural mix of people who made up the Wall’s garrison are part of the beginnings of our shared heritage.

This book aims to conjure up that sense of connection, a sense of a common spirit of a people and their land. Soak in the ethereal magic of the images – delight in the play of light. These mighty spellbinding skies must have been as vivid to Roman eyes as to our contemporary gaze. They are much older than the Wall that they so dramatically frame. Roger has used his astute photographer’s judgement to capture a distinctive radiance and atmosphere, always in the right place at right time, and often before the first lark has sung.

The Roman expedition to the land of the Britons must have been as daunting as David Livingstone’s up the Zambezi into darkest Africa. Apart from trading links with Cornish tin, contemporary Roman knowledge of Britain was unreliable and only gave rise to fear. From the time of Julius Caesar’s first visit to the nearest corner of these islands, 90 years were to elapse before the Romans arrived en masse in ad54 with conquest in mind. Gaul’s tentative trading links with south-east England were one thing, but the ambition to subsume the entire islands of Britain into the Empire quite another! Indeed, it was only Agricola’s expeditionary fleet another forty years later still that discovered that the size of the challenge was much smaller than they feared.

The Roman Empire was built on obedience and strict adherence to military rule. Its armies were rigidly-ordered fighting machines with absolute allegiance to the Emperor. That discipline kept the Empire on its toes and outwardly mobile, with a confidence that knew no limits when the Romans first arrived. The tribes of southern Britain took their bribes and quickly assimilated. Roman roads swept across the land, carving up each fertile plain, and towns were built and country estates established around handsome villas.

But, to the west and north lived a tougher breed of Celt. These kinsmen lived hard lives. Leaner and keener they survived through close-knit allegiances and were wary of strangers, and a line of resistance quickly became apparent. For some time the diagonal line of the Fosse Way was the effective frontier. Eventually settlement expanded, and with it the road system, and York became a major administrative capital for the north. Yet Agricola’s adventures came to an abrupt end after his comprehensive victory over the Caledonians at Mons Graupius in ad80. He was recalled from his governorship of Britannia in ad85, largely out of jealousy of his prowess, and any further thought of conquest kicked into the long grass.

The Roman enthusiasm to subjugate the whole Isles, including Ireland, dimmed and a slow realisation began to dawn that there might be a limit to the Roman Empire. For just three years under Emperor Trajan, Hadrian’s predecessor, the Empire had reached its greatest girth. Lying at the furthest north-west extremity of that amazing Empire, Britannia was too remote from the main affairs of state. The drawbacks of the climate aside, Roman chroniclers’ unflattering descriptions suggest that they were not attracted in the least to the unruly, uncouth Barbarians of the highlands – although whether this might simply have been a pretext not to complete the task of subjugation one can only speculate.

The Empire was charted by its road system, the number of marching days from fort to fort being the crucial measure. A Roman mile was one thousand strides (double-steps), counted on the lead left foot-fall. This calculation, coupled with the movement of trading and supply ships, must have led to the decision as to where the outer limit of the Empire in Britannia should be drawn for best military effect. The geography came to their aid – the isthmus between the Tyne and Solway Firth providing a convenient neck to throttle, only a modest 80-mile coast-to-coast march. The geology also gave the boundary-makers the gift of the east-west Great Whin Sill fault, a steep north-facing cliff and natural statement of frontier right in the middle of this convenient constriction. So the Wall’s precursor – the Stanegate – which linked the two Roman roads running north at Corbridge and Carlisle, proved a solid military line of control.

So why the Wall? First and foremost, a Roman Emperor had to command respect from his armies. Down the ages, rulers have initiated wars in order to prevent rebellions and deflect their subjects’ attention from their other woes. In this case, Emperor Hadrian hit on the brilliant idea, not of warring, but walling! His grand design was to busy three legions in a spot of military engineering to make the Stanegate frontier absolutely people-tight. Historians now believe that he made only one visit to Britain and never saw a single stone of the famous Wall with which he will forever be associated. As the chief of such an enormous empire he had many other battles to fight and his latter years were taken up in the east, where he had another wall built, this time around Jerusalem (renamed Aelia Capitolina) from which he expelled the Jews... how history goes round in circles.

Yet, historical record aside, we can imagine Emperor Hadrian nodding with approbation when his friend and newly-appointed governor of Britannia, Platorius Nepos, first introduced him to the Great Whin Sill. One might construct a picture of Hadrian arriving from Gaul sailing up the Tyne to disembark, perhaps close to the site of Pons Aelius, where later a bridge and wall fort were built in his name and honour. He would then have set forth for Coria (Corbridge), by the Stanegate, to Vindolanda from where a short ride north via Milking Gap would have brought Hotbank Crags under hoof. Platorius Nepos may well have given him an extended ride west along the Stanegate to Carvoran, the glistening Solway confirming the link with the west coast.

Might the magnificence of the Great Whin Sill have triggered in Hadrian’s architecturally-creative mind the notion of replicating its form from coast to coast as a frontier wall? His governor will have told him about the characteristics of the local tribes and the need to hamper their activities better than could be achieved by patrolling along the road. He might have suggested a control system built with a no-go military zone to the south, where passage through could only be achieved under escort – a chance to monitor people’s movements and exact tolls – with each wall fort a base for cavalry and infantry to quell the first signs of unrest in the bleak hill country to the north.

However the decision was made, over the course of ten years from ad122 the three legions XX Valeria, VI Victrix and II Augusta were intensively engaged in the monumental task, first digging the back line Vallum (the large earthwork and ditch running in harmony with the Wall to the south) and then setting up each fort, milecastle and third-of-a-mile turret. Then, section by section, the Wall itself was built, complete with a wall ditch immediately to the north. It was possibly also rendered and white-washed, although the lack of limestone west of Lanercost is the likely reason that the Wall was originally built of turf (with stone turrets) over most of its Cumbrian course.

The map shows the Roman frontier stripped of its all-important roads and outpost forts and orientated from the perspective of the garrisons’ umbilical connection with Gaul and the Mediterranean – the supply ships coming into Arbeia (modern-day South Shields). Although Erboracum (York) was the administrative capital of northern Britannia, the fastest and most direct journeys were always by sea.

Although eventually abandoned by the Romans around ad410 the Wall remained a cultural division. Later it became the first border to an emergent Scottish nation, although the Celtic Strathclyde straddled the frontier deep into modern Cumbria and was still extant in the 12th century. The Dark Ages that followed the fall of the Wall were charactised by a re-invention of petty thiefdoms. By medieval times the area was effectively the lawless realm of family clans who paid allegiance, not to the crown, but their own whim – the infamous Border Reivers.

Much as the Vikings did in their sagas, the Roman times spawned heroic figures whose achievements were passed on from generation to generation in tales of derring-do. One in particular stands out above all others – that of the prototype Arthur, carried through the Dark Ages and into romantic myth to the present day. Lucius Artorius Castus was the commander of Sarmatian cavalry (hailing from present-day Georgia) who were garrisoned on the Wall at Camboglanna (Castlesteads, near Brampton) and later, after a period of duty at Naples, came together at Bremetenacum (Ribchester in the Ribble Valley in Lancashire). The annals record that in ad183 the Wall was overrun by highland tribesmen who swept south to ransack Eboracum, killing the governor and then heading west. Lucius reinforced his reputation as a brilliant military tactician over a series of battles which pushed the Caledonians back to the highland line and allowed the Romans to reclaim the Wall. The Sarmatians’ fighting symbol was their sword Excalibur and on his tomb Lucius is depicted with a dragon’s-head helmet. Every charismatic leader thereafter bore the title Artorius, corrupted in the vernacular to Arthur. Possibly the first to be so styled died in a Battle at Ardderyd (Longtown, at the head of the Solway Firth) in ad573, the first recorded date in Scottish history, at which Merlin is reputed to have been enraged. To take the speculation further, perhaps Avalon – the Arthurian Isle of the Blessed – might also be corrupted from the Roman Aballava (Burgh-by-Sands)?

Down the centuries the remnants of the Wall have always remained at some level in the regional, if not national consciousness. It has variously been described at the Pict’s Wall, the Wall of Severus or just the Roman Wall. Medieval Mediterranean-based portulan charts showed the Solway-Tyne line marked either as a continuous channel or as castle-crowned mountains, perhaps showing a distorted memory of the Wall.

Being able to see this epic frontier in the contemporary landscape may seem a casual matter. After all, English Heritage, the National Trust, the Vindolanda Trust and others have established a fine exhibition in situ, despite the scarcity of original tooled stone at their disposal. But 1600 years have now elapsed since Roman jurisdiction fell away and it is minor miracle that anything has survived to be displayed at all. Anyone who really gets the Roman frontier bug will sooner or later discover, and then extol, the energy and far-sighted wisdom of John Clayton of Chesters House. His impact on the survival of the Wall, particularly of the most awe-inspiring section along the Great Whin Sill, was almost exclusively due to his personal fascination in the mid-Victorian age. When I created The Roman Ring in 2006 – an all-season walking route to complement the Hadrian’s Wall National Trail, take some of the intense pedestrian pressure off the monument itself and open visitors’ eyes to the wider heritage of the immediate area – I identified Clayton as the first modern-age hero of Wall conservation, and so he is.

Much work has naturally followed since and all the agents for its survival must be praised and congratulated. In 1987 UNESCO formally designated the whole length of the site of Hadrian’s Wall from South Shields to the Solway Firth and down the Cumbrian coast to Ravenglass as a World Heritage Site. More recently the concept has been extended to recognise that the British Wall should not be seen in isolation. The German Limes (550km of ancient border from the Rhine in the north-west to the Danube in the south-east) has now been included as another key outer boundary of the Roman Empire. And as this is being written claims for the inclusion of the Antonine Wall (63km from the Firth of Clyde to the Firth of Forth in Scotland) are also being considered. The whole project is now known as Frontiers of the Roman Empire and Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site is only its first expression.

The establishment of a National Trail alongside Hadrian’s Wall in 2003 aroused fresh interest in the Wall, giving even greater importance of the World Heritage Site Management Plan, which is regularly reviewed to determine the appropriate development and management for its medium and long-term wellbeing. Fundamental are the activities of Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd, set up in 2006 to co-ordinate protection, development and promotion of the Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site as a model of sustainable tourism and conservation. This includes the management of walking and cycling trails and sustainable transport initiatives. As a cultural destination, the broader area now known as Hadrian’s Wall Country is of international importance. While the Great Whin Sill will always seduce the crowds, and as I hope this book will demonstrate, the story of this historic landscape is far wider, deeper and richer than this single, iconic instance of the Roman footprint.