Hadrian's Wall

• 1. Introduction

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  Hadrian's Wall runs 73 miles across the narrowest part of northern England, from Wallsend on the River Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west. Imagine a shining white surface reflecting sunlight across open moorland, visible for miles around. There is evidence that the wall was once plastered and whitewashed, making it a gleaming declaration of Roman power to anyone approaching from the north or south. Built beginning in AD 122, this structure outlasted the empire that built it, shaped the landscape around it for nearly two thousand years, and eventually inspired one of the most famous fictional walls in modern storytelling. How was it built, by whom, and for what purpose? What happened to the people on both sides of it? And why does so much of it no longer stand? Those questions run the length of the wall itself.

• 2. Why Hadrian Built It

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  Sandstone fragments found at Jarrow, dated to 118 or 119, suggest that Hadrian understood his wall as a means of keeping "intact the empire", a directive he described as coming from "divine instruction". He had inherited an empire in serious trouble. When he took the throne in 117, unrest was breaking out across Britain and in far-flung territories including Egypt, Judea, Libya, and Mauretania. His predecessor Trajan had spent his reign pushing outward; Hadrian deliberately changed course and focused on defending what Rome already held.

  Britain posed a specific problem. Unlike the Rhine, Danube, or Euphrates, which could serve as natural border markers, northern Britain offered no great river to divide Roman territory from the lands of the Celtic tribes. A wall would have to do. Scholars David Breeze and B. Dobson have floated the idea that Hadrian may have drawn inspiration from accounts of the Great Wall of China, which had been built roughly two hundred years earlier. Other scholars, including Duncan B. Campbell, have pushed back, arguing that a long tradition of wall-building in the ancient Mediterranean world gave Hadrian plenty of closer precedents.

  The wall was not purely defensive in the military sense. Its gates could monitor and tax movement. Beyond slowing raiders seeking slaves, animals, or treasure, it funneled civilian traffic through controllable checkpoints. As British archaeologist Neil Faulkner has observed, "the wall, like other great Roman frontier monuments was as much a propaganda statement as a functional facility". The pits dug along the flat berm in front of the wall, filled with sharpened branches, functioned as a Roman equivalent of barbed wire: not to stop an attack outright, but to slow it down long enough for reinforcements to arrive.

• 3. Engineering the Wall

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  Three Roman legions carried out the construction: the Legio II Augusta, the Legio VI Victrix, and the Legio XX Valeria Victrix. Together they contributed around 15,000 soldiers to the effort, along with some members of the Roman fleet. The soldiers were not simply labor. Some had trained as surveyors, engineers, masons, and carpenters. Most of the wall was completed in six years.

  The original plan called for a uniform width of ten Roman feet, built entirely of stone from the eastern terminus near Newcastle to Bowness-on-Solway in the west. That plan did not survive construction. Resources ran short. The eastern half was narrowed from ten Roman feet to eight, with leftover stone helping to extend the stone sections westward. The western portion, from Milecastle 49 to Bowness-on-Solway, was built initially from turf, probably because of the absence of limestone in that area. The turf wall was eventually demolished and replaced with stone in two phases: the first during Hadrian's own reign, the second after the later Antonine Wall was abandoned and troops returned.

  R. G. Collingwood, analyzing the physical evidence, identified what he called the Broad Wall and the Narrow Wall. Sections built on broad foundations were later topped with narrower stone, reflecting the mid-project change in plans. The monk Bede, who died in 735 and spent his whole life at Jarrow just across the Tyne from the eastern end of the wall, recorded its height as twelve feet, with some evidence pointing to it being a few feet taller when first built.

  Just south of the main wall ran a separate earthwork called the Vallum, a deep ditch flanked by two parallel mounds. Scholars in the 19th century puzzled over whether it came before or after the wall. Research in 1936 produced evidence that the Vallum could not predate the wall because it swerved around one of the wall's milecastles. The more likely picture, according to further evidence, is that the wall and Vallum were built more or less simultaneously, serving different functions in controlling movement through the zone.

• 4. Life Along the Wall

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  When fully manned, close to 10,000 soldiers were stationed along Hadrian's Wall. They were not the legions who had built it. Instead, regiments of auxiliary infantry and cavalry drawn from across the provinces filled the forts and milecastles. The forts housed around 600 men each; the milecastles were run by between 12 and 20 men, with watch-tower turrets at every third of a mile providing shelter and observation.

  Schotar Breeze describes two distinct roles: troops in the forts focused on defense, while those in the milecastles and turrets handled frontier control. Inscriptions from the milecastles record soldiers from units including the cohors I Batavorum, the cohors I Vardullorum, an un-numbered Pannonian cohort, and a duplicarius from Upper Germany. Legionary soldiers also appear in the record, which complicates the assumption that legions were kept well away from such frontline duties.

  The soldiers brought families and attracted immigrants. Together, the military community may have made up somewhere between 22 and 30 percent of the region's total population. Local farms could not have supplied all these people, so surpluses were taxed or requisitioned. Mortaria, a type of heavy ceramic bowl, stamped with the maker's name were produced at Faverdale in Darlington, about 80 kilometres south of the wall, and most of the ones found came from the fort of Coria. One discharge certificate, dated to 150 and found near the fort of Longovicium, was issued to a man named Velvotigernus, son of Maglotigernus, after 26 years of service in the classis Germanica. He chose to settle near Lanchester rather than return home, a detail that hints at how firmly military life had taken root in this landscape.

• 5. The Land on Both Sides

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  South of the wall, Roman-style settlements appeared in the early 2nd century, very shortly after construction. This timing was earlier than Roman villas appearing further south in Yorkshire, suggesting that the wall's presence accelerated cultural change in the immediately surrounding region. The upper classes on both sides of the cultural boundary adopted elements of Roman life, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes through the pressure of military occupation.

  North of the wall, the picture was sharply different. Across a large stretch of what is now southern Scotland, the monumental tradition of substantial timber roundhouses and earthwork enclosures disappeared. Very little late Roman pottery has been found there. The Romans may have deliberately cleared a zone of population north of the wall, a practice documented on the Rhine and for ten Roman miles beyond the Danube frontier. The fort of Burnswark Hill in Scotland, previously in ruins, was re-occupied around the time the wall was built, possibly as a Roman attempt to establish a cooperative authority on the main route north to Caledonia. Within a few years, the fort was surrounded by Roman camps and bombarded. It was abandoned by around 140.

  Trade across the wall was limited. Roman coins and pottery did not flow freely northward. A few elite centres continued to import Roman goods; samian ware found at Traprain Law dates to after 160. Coins found near Great Whittington, about 2 kilometres north of the wall along a Roman road from the Portgate, were mostly silver rather than bronze, suggesting high-value exchanges at what may have been a traditional crossing point. Pollen evidence indicates that the landscape immediately north of the wall stayed open and largely deforested until the end of Roman rule, consistent with active livestock management rather than abandonment.

• 6. After Rome

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  Hadrian died in 138. His successor Antoninus Pius pushed the frontier roughly 160 kilometres north and built the Antonine Wall, a turf structure running 40 Roman miles across the Scottish isthmus with more forts than Hadrian's Wall. That wall was abandoned when Marcus Aurelius became emperor and Hadrian's Wall was reoccupied as the main barrier in 164. Emperor Septimius Severus made another attempt to conquer Caledonia in 208-211, temporarily reoccupying the Antonine Wall before the campaign ended without resolution and the Romans withdrew south again.

  By the late 4th century, barbarian invasions and economic decline were loosening Rome's grip on Britain. By 410, the estimated end of Roman rule, the administration and its legions were gone. Archaeologists have found evidence that parts of the wall remained occupied well into the 5th century, possibly garrisoned by local Britons under the authority of a figure like Coel Hen, a former military commander.

  The wall's stone was too useful to leave alone. Long sections were stripped in the 18th century to build a military road, most of which now lies under the present B6318. General Wade used the material to move troops during the Jacobite rising of 1745. Much of what survived that period owes its existence to one man. John Clayton trained as a lawyer and became town clerk of Newcastle in the 1830s. After inheriting the estate at Chesters from his father, he began buying farmland along the wall to stop farmers taking its stones. His first purchase near Steel Rigg was in 1834. Eventually he controlled land from Brunton to Cawfields, encompassing the sites of Chesters, Carrawburgh, Housesteads, and Vindolanda. Workmen he employed restored sections of the wall generally to a height of seven courses. After his death, his estate passed to relatives and was lost to gambling; the National Trust eventually took over.

• 7. The Wall in Memory and Culture

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  Hadrian's Wall has shaped imaginations for centuries. In 1937, the poet W. H. Auden wrote a script for a BBC radio documentary about the wall, broadcast on the BBC's north-eastern Regional Programme. From that script he drew a poem called "Roman Wall Blues", later published in his book Another Time. The poem speaks in the voice of a lonely Roman soldier stationed at the wall.

  Rudyard Kipling contributed to the wall's romantic image in his 1906 anthology Puck of Pook's Hill, which includes short stories about a Roman legionary named Parnesius defending the wall against the Picts. American author George R. R. Martin has openly acknowledged that Hadrian's Wall inspired the Wall in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, dramatized in Game of Thrones, noting that his fictional wall also sits in the north of its country and stretches coast to coast. Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 children's novel The Eagle of the Ninth sends a young Roman officer beyond the wall in search of the lost Ninth Legion's Eagle standard; the novel itself was inspired by the bronze Silchester eagle found in 1866, and the 2011 film The Eagle drew on it in turn.

  The wall was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, and in 2005 it became part of the transnational Frontiers of the Roman Empire designation, which extends to sites in Germany. In 2003, a National Trail footpath was opened following the wall's route from Wallsend to Bowness-on-Solway. In 2018, the organizations that manage the Great Wall of China and Hadrian's Wall signed a formal agreement to collaborate on tourism and historical understanding. Then in 2021, workers repairing a water main in central Newcastle came across a previously unknown 3-metre section of the wall. The company announced the pipe would be rerouted to preserve the find, a reminder that nearly nineteen centuries after its construction, the wall still has the power to interrupt the plans of engineers.