Under Another Sky

by Charlotte Higgins

  Once Brewed is within spitting distance of Housesteads and Vindolanda, two of the most important forts in the area. Housesteads was built on to the wall; Vindolanda pre-dates it. Around the military forts tended to spring up a ‘vicus’, or civilian settlement. The forts were built to a more or less uniform plan: a rectangular stone perimeter with rounded-off corners; a gate in the centre of each wall; an HQ building often with a basilica; a commanding officer’s quarters with a suite of baths; and barracks for the troops. You could walk into a fort anywhere in the empire from Egypt to Spain to Romania, and still find your way around. Seeing fort after fort along the wall, we soon began to grasp the grammar of them, to find their layouts familiar. At Housesteads, the troops were Tungrians from modern Belgium, who set up a temple with magnificent sculptures to Mithras. The god’s men-only mystery cult, beloved of the military, seems to have developed in the west of the empire (the earliest known Mithraeum is in the outskirts of Frankfurt), but it was marinated in the mysticism of the east, of Persia. Great Chesters, further west, was manned by Belgians, then Raetians from the German–Austrian border, then Astures from north-west Spain. At Carvoran fort, there was, in the second century ad, a cohort of soldiers from the modern Syrian city of Hama, who set up an altar to their goddess, Hammia. Eventually they were replaced by Dalmatians, from Croatia. At Arbeia, Iraqis from the Tigris plied the mouth of the Tyne. At Carlisle, there were Algerians. In the Great North Museum in Newcastle (where you can also see the sculptures from the Housesteads Mithraeum), there is a little azure-blue glass bottle, in the shape of a smiling African face, found at South Shields; it probably came from Egypt. And in the late second century, one Tineius Longus, a prefect in command of a cavalry regiment of the 20th Legion, dedicated an altar to an otherwise obscure local British god, Antenociticus. Tineius Longus was fulfilling his vow on his promotion to quaestor – a junior magistrate’s role that would have put him on the path to a senatorial career, high political office in Rome.

  As we walked the wall, the days were filled with genial chat; each night, after we found our B&B, we gratefully removed our boots, ate a hearty pub supper and slept off the day’s hard walking. There was a comforting rhythm to it: a tremendous simplicity about doing nothing but walking east. The wall was like another companion. On the penultimate day of our journey, we arrived at Heddon-on-the-Wall, nine miles west of Newcastle. The post-war housing estate we walked through had grandly classicising street names. ‘Marius Avenue, leading to Calvus Drive, Camilla Road, Valerian Avenue and Antonine Avenue’, read one sign. Here was the easternmost surviving stretch of the wall, running 100 metres or so, between a busy B road and a paddock fringed with ash trees. Behind it, the sunlight glinted off someone’s greenhouse and washing flapped on a line. An ice-cream van played a tune somewhere a few streets away; as melancholy a sound as you could imagine. We said farewell to the wall, and began to descend to Newcastle.

  Walking the wall was not always such a gregarious activity. William Camden came in 1599, and wrote, ‘Verily I have seene the tract of it over the high pitches and steepe descents of hilles, wonderfully rising and falling.’ But the wall was then part of what Camden called the ‘batable ground’ – disputed, lawless territory between England and Scotland, inhabited by cattle-rustling reivers ‘infamous for theeving and robbing’. Describing his foray to the central section of the wall, near the notorious crime spot of Busy-Gap, Camden wrote that he ‘could not with safety take the full survey of it for the ranke robbers there about’. He was able, though, to study numerous sculptures, including an altar dedicated to the deity whom the Romans called ‘the Syrian goddess’, Atargatis – which was being used as a laundry stone by the local women.

  It was many years later that visiting the wall was regarded as anything approaching a pleasure trip. The antiquary John Warburton published an account of it in 1753, noting that the country was ‘wild and baron’, and few ‘searchers after Roman ruins’ had ventured here. Warburton is today best remembered for having dimwittedly entrusted some fifty Elizabethan and Jacobean plays in manuscript, some of them the sole surviving copies, to his cook, who ‘unluckily burnd or put under pye bottoms’ all but three. His survey of the wall was dedicated to the Duke of Cumberland, the ‘Butcher’ Cumberland who had quashed the Jacobite rebellion in 1745. The work began with a pointed ‘I-told-you-so’, informing readers that as far back as 1715 Warburton had attempted to persuade the government of the necessity of renewing the Roman military road, running south of the wall, for modern use, making it ‘passable for troops and artillery’ between Carlisle and Newcastle. An Act of Parliament of 1751 had finally brought this about, and much of this military way, now the B6318, was built over the wall’s remains, which were ruthlessly flattened for miles.

  Change was gradually on its way. In 1801, William Hutton, a native of Birmingham, walked from his home city to the wall. He tramped along it twice, there and back, and then took himself back to the Midlands. At the end of his account of the walk, published in 1802, he reported his ‘loss, by perspiration, of one stone of animal weight; an expenditure of forty guineas, a lapse of thirty-five days, and a walk of six hundred and one miles’. That was an average of seventeen miles a day. He was seventy-eight years old. ‘Perhaps,’ he wrote, ‘I am the first man that ever travelled the whole length of the Wall, and probably the last that ever will attempt it.’

  Hutton’s History of the Roman Wall was not intended for antiquaries, but for the amusement and edification of an interested but less expert public, who would, he hoped, travel ‘with me, though by your own fire-side’. It began with a cheerful denunciation of antiquarian prose style. ‘[The antiquary] feeds upon withered husks, which none can relish but himself; nor does he seem to possess the art of dressing up his dried morsel to suit the palate of a reader.’ Accounts of ruins, he said, were ‘the dullest of all descriptions’. His approach would be different. He would ‘enliven truth with a smile; with the anecdote’. Needless to say, he was not the last to walk the wall. Rather, perhaps, he was the first example of a new breed of visitor: the tourist.

  For his walking tour, Hutton dressed entirely in black (‘a kind of religious travelling warrant’), and carried a bag, ‘much like a postman’s letter pouch’, filled with maps, including Warburton’s plan of the wall. To that was strapped ‘an umbrella in a green case, for I was not likely to have a six weeks tour without wet’. He clearly cut a remarkable figure as he strode through the villages of Staffordshire, Cheshire and Lancashire. ‘The crowds I met in my whole journey viewed me with an eye of wonder and inquiry, as if ready to cry out “In the name of the Father, &c, What ar’t!”’

  The second edition of Hutton’s book, published in 1813, included a contribution from his daughter, who accompanied her father on horseback as far as the Lakes, already an established tourist destination. Catherine Hutton was a fascinating character: a novelist, she lived to be ninety, amassing a correspondence of more than 2,000 letters with figures such as Charles Dickens. She described the shape of their days as they journeyed north: ‘He rose at four o’clock, walked to the end of the next stage, breakfasted, and waited for me. I set out at seven; and, when I arrived at the same inn, breakfasted also. When my horse had fed properly, I followed; passed my Father on the road, arrived before him at the next inn, and bespoke dinner and beds.’ She added: ‘My Father was such an enthusiast with regard to the Wall, that he turned neither to the right or the left, except to gratify me with a sight of Liverpool.’ She recalled how he had ignored her pleas (‘with tears’) that he should do at least some of the journey by carriage; and noted that he insisted on walking entirely on his own so as ‘not to be put out of his regular pace’.

  Hutton was, indeed, an ardent admirer of the wall: ‘Men have been deified,’ he wrote, ‘for trifles compared to this admirable structure.’ During his walk, he grew as fond of it as we did in ours, nicknaming it ‘Severus’, after the emperor who was then thought to have built its stone central section (it was not a
ttributed to Hadrian until the mid nineteenth century). His horror at the wall’s rapid demolition, in this era of urban expansion, was in proportion to his admiration. ‘From the destruction of so large a part of these magnificent works, I fear, I shall be the last Author who shall describe them. Plunder is the order of the day.’ At Byker’s Hill (now part of Newcastle) he denounced the levelling of the Roman ditch and its conversion into potato beds, and at St Oswald’s he noted a recent calamity. ‘Had I been some months sooner, I should have been favoured with a noble treat; but now that treat was miserably soured. At the twentieth-mile stone, I should have seen a piece of Severus’s Wall seven feet and a half high, and two hundred and twenty-four yards long: a sight not to be found in the whole line. But the proprietor, Henry Tulip, Esq. is now taking it down, to erect a farm-house with the materials.’ He conveyed, via a servant, his remonstrations to Tulip for ‘putting an end to the most noble monument of Antiquity in the whole Island’.

  While the countryside around Hadrian’s Wall was no longer the lawless territory it had been when Camden visited, Hutton’s struggles to find a bed each night made our own intricate advance booking of B&Bs look easy. He was consistently, he wrote, regarded with bitter suspicion by the locals – at Birdoswald mistaken for a tax inspector; at Harlow Hill for a ‘spy employed by the Government’. At one pub he caused conversation to dry up entirely because the drinkers assumed he was a disapproving Methodist preacher. At the Twice Brewed Inn on the military road, which still serves pints to thirsty wall walkers, he dined magnificently on a ‘piece of beef out of the copper, perhaps equal to half a calf’, but was offered a room sharing with ‘a poor sick traveller who had fallen ill upon the road’. At Stanwix, he was reduced to knocking on doors to find a billet. One was opened by a woman, once clearly a beauty, who ‘yet shewed as much of that valuable commodity as could be expected from forty-five’. She refused to put him up on grounds of propriety, to his disbelief: ‘Did you ever hear of a woman losing her character by a man of seventy-eight!’ He eventually found a place to sleep, only to be plagued by fleas, ‘the dancing gentry of the night’.

  What is striking about Hutton’s account, aside from his wit and charm, is the force of meaning he ascribes to the wall: its moral content. ‘This Wall,’ he wrote, ‘is also a clear proof, that every species of cruelty that one man can practise to another was here, and pronounces the human being as much a savage as the brute. This Place has been the scene of more plunder and murder, than any part of the Island, of equal extent.’ For him the wall provided a bleak commentary on human affairs. The world is not ‘advancing towards perfection’, he argued. Man may be ‘better informed’ than he was in previous centuries, but he is ‘not mended’. The Romans were as much barbarians as the Scots who marauded against the wall – worse, for they ‘surprised, murdered, plundered, and kept possession’. So did the Saxons, Danes and Normans. They were all barbarians. ‘Whoever deprives an unoffending man of his right, comes under this word,’ he wrote.

  It was still some time before visiting the wall was regarded as an excursion for pleasure-seekers rather than an eccentric escapade. In 1849, however, came another change, when the Newcastle antiquary and schoolteacher John Collingwood Bruce led the first ‘pilgrimage’ to the wall. It came about after he was compelled to abort his plan to visit Rome in the summer of 1848 because of the revolutionary upheavals in Europe. He went to the wall instead, and that winter gave a series of lectures on his trip at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society. He remembered, nearly forty years later, ‘I was impressed during the delivery of them with the idea that some of my hearers thought that I was describing the structure in too glowing terms, and that the Wall in reality was not as grand an object as I represented it.’ And so he offered to lead a party the following summer to travel along it ‘from end to end – forming a pilgrimage like that described by Chaucer, consisting of both ladies and gentlemen’. In due course he ‘issued a programme of the intended pilgrimage, prefacing it with some remarks upon the beauty of the country to be traversed and the attractive features which it presented to the botanist and geologist as well as the antiquary’. Hutton had been less enamoured of the surrounding landscape. ‘A more dreary country than this in which I now am, can scarcely be conceived,’ he complained, when walking just that section of the wall that is now regarded as the most picturesque.

  Twenty ‘pilgrims’ set forth on foot, their luggage following on the road in a ‘wheeled conveyance’ that was roomy enough to accommodate the travellers when they felt footsore. On several occasions their numbers were substantially swelled by locals – enthusiasts from Hexham causing their cavalcade to extend ‘a mile upon the road’. At the temple at Brocolitia, they found men quarrying for Roman stone. ‘A general rush was made to the newly upturned earth, and beyond the expectations of most, one article of interest after another was produced, Samian ware and a few coins.’ Crowds formed at Housesteads. ‘Never probably since the departure of the Romans was the city so numerously tenanted. Many of the neighbouring gentry … had there assembled in holiday attire.’ After Collingwood Bruce gave a lecture, the pilgrims ‘showed our loyalty. In my address I … stated that now in Windsor’s princely halls was seated a lady who ruled over “Regions Caesar never knew” and who wielded a sceptre which was lovingly obeyed by four times the number of subjects great Julius ever swayed. Mr Falconer, one of the pilgrims, proposed three cheers for Queen Victoria, which were given with thrilling effect.’ A crucial link between tourism and preservation was made: ‘I am impressed with the idea that such expeditions are valuable as a means of exciting, in the minds of the people inhabiting the district through which we pass, a sense of the importance of the remains … When they see that gentlemen of education, and especially cultivated ladies, regard it with something like veneration, they will learn to respect it too.’

  Nearly a century later, tales of the pilgrimage, and of Hutton’s walk, were reworked into W. H. Auden’s radio play Hadrian’s Wall. Auden had antiquarianism in his blood: his uncle, the Revd John Auden, was one of those who gave financial support to the excavations at Wroxeter that the youthful Wilfred Owen had visited in 1913, and he was named Wystan for an Anglo-Saxon saint commemorated at the parish church of Repton in Derbyshire. As significant, though, was his abiding love of the landscape of northern England. In a letter of 17 January 1950, he was to write: ‘My great good place is the part of the Pennines bounded on the S by Swaledale, on the N by the Roman wall and on the W by the Eden Valley.’ When he lived in America, he had a map of this territory on his wall: it was for him an internal landscape, a trigger to the imagination. The script of the Hadrian’s Wall broadcast, which was aired live from Newcastle on 25 November 1937, survives. It is a delightfully and unashamedly educational play about the history of the wall, framed by the device of a family’s day trip to Housesteads, incorporating what would now be called ‘found texts’. Some of the words of Catherine Hutton were woven in, as well as those of her father. Auden invented voices, too, for the Romans who once manned the wall. Benjamin Britten wrote and conducted the incidental music, which included a setting of a poem written for the occasion, ‘Roman Wall Blues’. The broadcast went, reported Britten in his diary entry for the day, ‘fearfully badly’. But, he added: ‘There’s good stuff in it I know.’ The critic of the Listener agreed, admiring the ‘terrific vitality’ of the music. She also noted – the broadcast was of course live – ‘an uncomfortable pause during which an actor was told in several very audible whispers to turn to page three’.

  Britten’s music for ‘Roman Wall Blues’ was thought lost, until 2005, when a hand-written copy of the vocal line turned up in the possession of a ninety-nine-year-old former employee of the Bank of England, who had been part of the local choir brought in to sing it. In the end, the choir wasn’t used – at the last minute, a crooner from a Newcastle dance hall, whose voice was felt to be more appropriate to the material, was roped in. The music is very bluesy indeed: mournful,
bittersweet, with shades of Gershwin’s ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ (Porgy and Bess hadn’t yet had its British premiere, but Britten may have heard some of the songs on a 1935 RCA Victor recording). After I told composer Colin Matthews, who was Britten’s assistant in the 1970s, of my interest in ‘Roman Wall Blues’, he kindly offered to write a piano accompaniment to complete the song:

  Roman Wall Blues

  Over the heather the wet wind blows

  I’ve lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.

  The rain comes pattering out of the sky

  I’m a Wall soldier; I don’t know why.

  The mist sweeps over the hard grey stone

  My girl’s in Tungria; I sleep alone.

  Aulus goes hanging around her place

  I don’t like his manners; I don’t like his face.

  Piso’s a Christian; he worships a fish;

  There’d be no kissing if he had his wish.

  She gave me a ring but I diced it away;

  I want my girl and I want my pay.

  When I’m a veteran with only one eye

  I shall do nothing but gaze at the sky.

  The words shiver with the chill of loneliness and isolation. The music vibrates not with the triumphal chords of the conqueror, but with the Southern cadences of the dispossessed: a black American musical form given to the imperial master. Auden’s drama feels very much like a pre-war creation, bristling with the threat of violence. ‘No war can be justified but that of defence,’ Hutton had written, but Auden edited the line from his play text. Perhaps the sentiment felt out of tune with the times.

  ‘Roman Wall Blues’ brought into poetic form the life of a wall soldier as many still imagine it: a hardship posting on a cold, desperate, lonely edge of the empire. (Though can it have been any worse than a posting on the violent fringes of Parthia? Can its climate have been more uncomfortable than the chill of a German winter, or the relentless heat of an African summer?) If the poem has become less popular than it once was, that may be because since its composition we have gained something extraordinary: the Vindolanda writing tablets. These are a vast cache of real words written in the first century AD by Romans living and working a few miles south of where the wall would, some decades later, be built. Had Auden been writing his radio drama today, it is surely the Vindolanda tablets that he would have harvested.