The Spirit of Hadrian’s Wall – landscape photography

In this collection of photographs of Hadrian’s Wall, Roger Clegg has captured contrasting moods and landscapes – blazing skies at dawn and dusk, mist lifting from the crags and new-fallen snow banked against the familiar stonework. As the images progress along the Wall, Mark Richards sketches its context from the Roman era to the modern age.

No great landscape evokes times past more eloquently than that of the great Roman frontier of Hadrian’s Wall. And no photographer knows that landscape more intimately than Roger Clegg.

In this first collection of his iconic and breathtaking images, Roger has captured myriad contrasting moods and landscapes, often at times of day and seasons of the year that few visitors ever see – blazing skies at dawn and dusk, veils of mist lifting from the crags or new-fallen snow banked against the familiar stonework.

As the sequence of images moves from east to west, in the steps of the Roman wall-builders, author Mark Richards sketches the historical and social context. The Roman footprint is naturally writ large but there are also stories to be told from the age of Arthur, the early Christian missionaries and the Reiver years and of great industrial milestones closer to the modern age.