The Wall

by Alistair Moffat

  Hadrian was with Trajan on the Danube and he saw with his own eyes what could be done. With thousands of battle-hardened and highly skilled soldiers at his command, was there anything a determined emperor could not build?

  His bridge allowed Trajan to strike fast and deep into the Dacian heartlands. Their king, Decebalus, retreated in front of the legions, hoping, like Calgacus and the Caledonians, to lengthen their supply lines to breaking point at best, and slow and weaken Trajan’s advance at worst. By a remarkable quirk of archaeological survival, what happened next is understood, but through no written source. The spiralling panels of Trajan’s Column show a Roman cavalry trooper riding hard towards a Dacian who holds a curved dagger to his own throat. The scene is set in dense woodland and the trooper leans urgently forward, half dismounting, arm outstretched, in an attempt to prevent this man from taking his own life.

  This is the capture of the fugitive Dacian king, the great Decebalus. And the trooper is Tiberius Claudius Maximus. Buried in a field in northern Greece, his headstone was recently recovered and it lists his exploits in a long career with the VII Legion. Maximus’ troop had been tracking Decebalus and his band of loyal die-hards, but when the king realised that he would be caught, that there would be no escape, he took his life. Refusing to be captured, taken in chains to Rome, humiliated, whipped through the streets behind a triumphant Trajan, he slashed his carotid arteries and bled to death. Better to end by his own hand than be strangled in the black depths of the Mamertine Prison. Maximus cut off the king’s head, tied it by the hair to his saddle pommel and rode back to headquarters to give it to his conquering emperor.

  Dacia was a vast province, much of it mountainous, all of it difficult to hold down. But Trajan had bridged the mighty Danube, brought the lands to the north into the Empire and sent back to Rome many thousands of slaves and much booty. He used these immense prizes to build a new forum and market in the city, dedicated in 112. The Senate commissioned the great column to take a central place. Rome was marching once more down the roads to glory.

  In the east, since the age of Augustus and before, the emperors’ only substantial rivals were the Persians, known as the Parthians in the early second century. Based on the old dominions of the Babylonians, their empire was rich, powerful and very attractive. In 114 Trajan assembled the legions at Antioch in the province of Syria. Hadrian was at the muster, as a senior staff officer, perhaps second-in-command.

  The Emperor was sixty by AD 114 but his plans betrayed the vast ambition of a much younger man. Like Alexander the Great, he would stride with his soldiers across the east, and the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates would fall before his unstoppable advance. And that is how it began. Armenia, the mountain kingdom to the north of Mesopotamia, the Empire between the two rivers, was to be the first to be defeated, humbled and brought into the orbit of Rome. On the long march from Antioch, Trajan held what sounds like an imperial durbar from the days of the British Raj: the satraps and princes came to meet him with gifts, one of which was a horse that had been taught to do obeisance, kneeling on its forelegs and placing its head beneath the feet of whoever stood near.

  Armenia fell, then Mesopotamia, and by 116 the legions saw the sea once more. Incredibly, Trajan had led them from one stunning victory to another, and when he and Hadrian gazed on the waters of the Persian Gulf, Rome had reached right across the known world. From the seas of Arabia to the chill waters of the River Tyne, the legions had conquered. It was breathtaking – and impossible.

  Even Trajan knew it. In 117 a client Parthian king was installed in southern Mesopotamia, and Roman soldiers withdrew from the Gulf. The price of glory could not be paid. The old Emperor had hoped to consolidate and stabilise in Dacia, complete a wide-ranging subjection of the east and hold the line elsewhere. But it was very precarious. Imperial overstretch on this scale needed only two major wars to break out in different parts of the Empire to descend into imperial collapse. As Trajan lay dying in Antioch, and the Empress Plotina moved quickly to manoeuvre Hadrian into the line of succession, it was clear that policy had to change.

  Five years later, when Hadrian sailed up the Tyne to the Newcastle quays in 122, he had formally renounced almost all that the great Trajan had achieved. While he still ruled an empire larger than Augustus and all the emperors of the first century, Hadrian was forced to give up what could not be held. While the Parthians had been cowed, the east shrank back to its frontiers before 114. Dacia was retained but no more wars of conquest were planned. As he progressed around the boundaries of his empire, Hadrian set about the work of consolidation. The map began to settle.

  HADRIAN’S TRAVELS

  Having visited virtually every province in the Empire, Hadrain was almost certainly seen in the flesh by more of his subjects than any of those who reigned before or after him. In 121 he began his first tour by riding from Rome to Lyon and then to Germany and Middle Europe to inspect the defences of the Rhine–Danube line. Perhaps his fleet called in at London before sailing on to the Tyne in 122. After the Wall was begun, the sprawling imperial retinue packed its bags to travel right across France to Tarragona in Spain. Then, in perhaps his most spectacular year, 123, Hadrian crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into Africa, the province of Mauretania. From there he sailed the length of the Mediterranean, following the Atlantic current, to Antioch in Syria, where he was first proclaimed Emperor, thence across eastern Turkey to the Black Sea coast and its Greek cities, where he met Antinous. Back in Rome by 125, Hadrian left for Africa in 128, Greece and southern Turkey in 129, Palestine and Egypt in 130, and finally back to Rome in 133–4. His backside was well used to the saddle and his stomach to the roll of the waves.

  Before his arrival in Britain, the new Emperor had ridden through the German forests inspecting his garrisons – and making a more emphatic frontier. In the 1st century a policy of defence in depth had been pursued. There had been frontier zones dotted with forts, depending on good communication, good roads and good intelligence. A limes or frontier path (giving the English word ‘limit’) was more likely to lead directly into enemy territory than lie transverse on a boundary between the Empire and the barbarians beyond. Control, not physical borders, was what mattered.

  Nevertheless, in Germany and Middle Europe, handy natural lines of demarcation flowed through the landscape. Until Dacia was taken, the Danube supplied a clear frontier in the east, and in the west the line of the Rhine defended the Empire. To connect what geography had already done for him, Hadrian caused a very long timber palisade to be built in 121–2 between the two great rivers. In some ways the original arrangements resembled the Gask Ridge in Scotland of forty years before. In Germany, Domitian had sanctioned a line of watchtowers half a kilometre apart and linked by a limes, a path. Turf and timber forts were raised along a line which stretched for an immense distance through the forests. It ran for more than 500 kilometres between the Upper Danube and the Rhine, through the Taunus, Wetterau and Odenwald regions. When Hadrian arrived, he made radical alterations, converting the open system of defence into a solid barrier.

  In 121–2 the legionaries embarked on building a vast fence. Ditches were dug, and on the upcast a timber palisade was driven in. Oak was the wood of choice and, once a huge number of trees had been felled, perhaps a quarter of a million, they were sawn into lengths. Laid on their sides, the trunks were rived lengthways with wedges and sledgehammers. The flatter, rived surface of white heartwood was turned outwards to present a more wall-like obstacle. Then it was stiffened and tied with rails nailed cross-ways. A later biography of Hadrian in the Historia Augusta recorded that at that time and frequently at other times he marked off the barbarians in many places, where they are separated not by rivers but by limites with great posts driven into the ground and joined together like a wall. Either side of the new barrier the forest was cleared and a military zone created. Clearly the palisade, made from perishable materials available close at hand, was not intended as a solid rampart designed to repel an assau
lt. Rather, it acted like the perimeter of a Roman camp or fort, able to slow down an attack but not stop it in its tracks.

  Less dramatically, the new German frontier was also a matter of clear definition, a marking off. South of it was Rome, the Empire, the lands of the citizens, cities and civil order. North lay the trackless forests of Germania Barbarica. The fence also controlled movement in and out of the Empire. Those who wished to pass between could do so peacefully at a crossing-point, and also pay the portaria, a version of customs dues. As at all places of international exit and entry, intelligence could be gathered from the hinterland and, if required, Roman legionaries and auxiliaries could act on it and travel quickly through the barrier if trouble flared.

  This was different. A tangible break with the forward policies of the immediate imperial past, the new frontier set an unambiguous limit on the ambitions of Rome. Virgil’s god-given destiny of conquest had been repudiated by Hadrian, and those aristocrats who craved the excitement, the honour and the wealth which came with an expanding empire will have been disquieted as the oak trees crashed to the ground in the German forests.

  But a fence? A wooden fence in the depths of the woods? Compared with the blaze of glory trailed by Trajan as he fought his way to the Persian Gulf, and the creation of a mighty bridge to reach into the heart of Dacia, the building of a fence certainly struck a minor key – which did not suit Hadrian’s nature.

  A year later, in 122, when the Emperor and his new Governor of Britannia, Platorius Nepos, watched their engineers drive iron-tipped wooden piles into the muddy bed of the Tyne at Newcastle, they must have talked and planned. There had been war in Britain in 117, and probably fighting close by, along the line of the Stanegate. But Hadrian would not lead a punitive expedition north; that was short-termism and in any event looked very like more conquest. Nor would he order the construction of a frontier like the Gask Ridge or the German forests. If Rome was to retrench, then let it be a triumphant retrenchment. Timbers rotted in the ground and collapsed, ditches caved in. Britannia would be different, the scene of a different version of glory. Let one stone stand upon another: let there be a mighty stone Wall.

  There was, in any case, no convenient forest to hand. When Hadrian, Nepos, the Praetorians and his surveyors and labourers set out westwards from Newcastle, they rode through a cleared landscape. But stone could be quarried from it, and once it had been established that there were in fact quarries accessible and sufficient to the task – surely the first issue to be dealt with by the military planners – then a stone Wall offered the opportunity not only to build but to build on a spectacular scale.

  As the imperial retinue progressed, they moved through the valley of the lower Tyne, a flattish stretch of farmland. The line of the Wall hugs the north bank of the river as the land rises gently towards Benwell. The Celtic name of the Roman fort, Condercum, meant something like Viewpoint Fort and from the crest of the rise it is possible to see some considerable distance both downriver and up as well as north across the Northumberland Plain and south to the high ground at Birtley, where the Angel of the North now spreads his wings.

  Decisions were probably made on the hoof. Based on research doubtless done by forward parties of surveyors and scouts, Hadrian and Nepos laid down the line of the Wall as they went. Not only did the Emperor fancy himself as an architect, he was, like most famous Roman generals, reputed to have an eye for good sites for forts and roads. And he had an irresistible urge to interfere, to become involved in detail. Following his directions, the mensores pegged out the line with stakes or marked it with small cairns. No one cared whether or not the Wall cut across good agricultural land. Native farmers were simply removed, lock, stock and barrel. Perhaps they were compensated.

  When the frontier had moved up to a new line in Germany in AD 83, the Emperor Domitian specifically ordered that farmers who lost land as a consequence were to be paid for the loss of that year’s harvest. The issue of ownership and any transfer which may have taken place is not clear, but Roman politicians were fussy about property rights (they generally owned a good deal of property themselves) and it is likely that along the line of Hadrian’s Wall some sort of transaction was worked out between the army and local farmers.

  At Throckley, a little way west of Benwell, archaeologists have found the marks of native ploughing under the Wall and it looks as though it was fresh. Farmers had probably ploughed in the spring of 122 and sown their fields before the Emperor and his army arrived to obliterate them. It must have been baffling as well as savage. Building a wall? Plough marks have also been found under the forts at Wallsend and Carrawburgh as well as at Wallhouses, 8 kilometres west of Throckley. No doubt many other sites were built over farm fields.

  After Rudchester the landscape begins to change, climbing from the coastal plain up to 120 metres above sea level. Further west, at Haltonchesters, there is little trace of the fort but the modern road runs arrow-straight, following the line of the Roman road. Hadrian will have noted Dere Street as the old north road disappeared over the horizon and given thought to how it might penetrate the new Wall. Only a short way to the south lies Corbridge, the Roman fort and settlement at Coria, on the banks of the Tyne. Having clattered down the paved road, it is likely that the Emperor, his Governor and their entourage stayed there, perhaps using it as a base for their reconnaissance of the eastern sector.

  At Chesters Fort near Chollerford, the line of the Wall dips down into the beautiful valley of the North Tyne. Clearly a second bridge would be needed and the sites of its abutments were duly fixed on. Once the imperial party had moved on from there, the landscape began to change again. On the long hill up to Walwick, the contour lines crowd together, and upland pasture takes over from arable farmland. At Black Carts a substantial run of surviving wall shows how steep the incline is and, at Limestone Corner, it reaches its most northerly point. This is the beginning of the central section and its geography may have been one of the most persuasive factors in following the line Hadrian chose.

  The vantage from Limestone Corner in all directions is breathtaking, especially to the north as the ground falls away to the valley of the North Tyne. And if the view from the Wall was good, then the view of it must have been equally impressive. That was important in choosing sites. As triumphant retrenchment reached across the waist of Britain, it had to make an obvious statement, be something seen by allcomers. Gaze upon my works, ye mighty, and despair. This was to be no fence in a wood.

  From Limestone Corner moorland flattens and stretches away to the east but, after less than half an hour in the saddle, Hadrian will have caught his first glimpse of what his surveyors had been talking about, the feature which had drawn them to propose this line: the Whin Sill. It was perfect for what the Romans intended. Sheer cliffs to the north and a fairly gentle slope up over grassland to the south. Geology had been particularly helpful to Hadrian.

  The Whin Sill is the result of an ancient collision. An unimaginably long time ago, around 420 million years BC, the crust of the Earth was moving, forming and reforming enormous continents, filling and draining vast oceans. What became southern Scotland lay on the edge of a huge landmass and, separated by a prehistoric sea, northern England lay on the rim of another. When these two continents collided, Scotland’s harder rocks ground and scraped over England’s leading edges, the crust of the Earth corrugated and buckled, the floor of the ancient sea was squeezed upwards, and the foundations of the landscape of Northumberland and Cumbria were laid down.

  Like the wavelets of an indrawn tide, the folded ridges of the landscape north of the Hexham Gap supplied the raw materials for Hadrian’s dramatic plans. Not only did the cliffs of the Whin Sill act as the foundation, one of the other results of that ancient collision was a profusion of outcrops, and they too were helpful. Quarries were found near the surface and often in vertical faces, and coal seams also peeped through in various places. These coal-heughs were to prove extremely useful sources of fuel in a treeless landscape.r />
  The Whin Sill is broken by several steep-sided nicks. One of the most famous is at Sycamore Gap, and like the track of a fairground rollercoaster the Wall swoops down from the clifftops, sweeps through the Gap and up the other side. As much as anything these sections of Wall are examples of imperial single-mindedness and unflinching obedience. The legionaries no doubt cursed loudly and shook their heads as they built a stone wall up these near-vertical inclines – but they did it.

  The cliffs end abruptly above Greenhead, and the Wall descends to the flatter ground of the Irthing Valley and the Solway Plain beyond it. From the crossing of the river at Willowford to its terminal at Bowness-on-Solway, turf was at first used instead of stone as a basic building material. The Wall must have run over grassland on this stretch. The change was not dictated by a lack of quarries and good stone. Later in the second century the turf was eventually set aside and replaced by stone. The initial difficulty had been a shortage of the limestone needed to make lime mortar.

  Hadrian extended the run of the Wall to Bowness in order to cover all of the Solway fords then in regular use. But genuine sea traffic was also seen as requiring close control. Beyond the end of the land-wall, a sea-wall hugged the Cumbrian coastline, possibly reaching as far south as Ravenglass. Five major forts were built at regular intervals and forty-nine turrets and milefortlets have so far been plotted. There was no Wall as such, no need for one, but there was almost certainly a connecting road and possibly some ditching. This appears to have been slight, little more than 1.5 metres wide and 1 metre deep, and perhaps it was the boundary of a military zone. Elsewhere there are the faint shadows of parallel ditches.

  Hadrian’s Sea-Wall is often ignored or written off in a footnote, but it was clearly part of the original intention, and the fort at Maryport not only dates earlier, possibly built in AD 72, when Petilius Cerialis was at Carlisle, it was also put under the command of Maenius Agrippa, a friend of the Emperor and presumably a trusted senior officer. In all, from Wallsend to Ravenglass, the Wall ran more than 180 kilometres, an immense, complex and fascinating monument to the power and reach of Rome.