 |
| Hadrian’s Wall |
When Julius Caesar set foot on British soil, he took a few looks around, pulled his scarf and coat on a little more tightly, and said, “Thanks, but no thanks; let’s go.” That Julius Caesar had no interest in Britain wouldn’t be so surprising except that it was the only case where he decided to leave a land to the natives and not assimilate it into the Roman Borg (a little Star Trek lingo for you).
But a generation or so later, tin was discovered in Britain, which made the cold, damp, distant islands a whole lot more interesting to the Roman empire (in case you’ve forgotten, tin + copper = bronze). So back came the legionnaires who took over just enough of the island to gain control of the precious tin mines, leaving the far northern frontiers to the barbarians, ruffians, and ne’er-do-wells (the indigenous Scots, basically) to their own vices. The problem is that barbarians, ruffians, and ne’er-do-wells (i.e. indigenous Scots) couldn’t be trusted to their own vices and not occasionally coming south, spears and clubs in hand, in search of bangers and mash.
So, Hadrian, Rome’s emperor from 117 to 138, decided to put up a wall to keep the bad guys up to the north. It seems like it could hardly be an effective deterrent, but the wall ran the entire width of the island, 73 miles from west coast to east coast, was ten feet thick, and up to 20 feet high. Lookout towers were built along the length so sentries could keep watch and, hopefully, spot barbarians mounting the wall with ladders.
While even the remnants of the wall that we saw are still impressive, it’s easy to conclude that it wouldn’t have held back a determined army led by Mel Gibson. Indeed, historians debate over the wall’s purpose. Personally, we favor the theory that it was more for border and customs control than for protecting the far northwestern reaches of the empire. So, you see, our joke about indigenous Scots coming in search of bangers and mash is actually, weirdly, closer to the truth: it’s just that the Romans wanted to properly tax the indigenous Scot’s bangers and mash as they took them back to the Highlands.
Stretches of the wall, greatly diminished but still a site to see, are easily accessible and worth seeing. We saw the Birdoswald area a few miles east of Carlisle. Standing and looking down a stretch of wall going on to the horizon makes you wonder what happened to all the stones the Romans originally put in the wall. Then you drive down all those country English roads and wonder where all the stones for those sheep walls came from.
Hmm…
