Hadrian's Wall

Hadrian’s Wall was a former defensive fortification of the Roman province of Britannia, begun in AD 122 in the reign of Emperor Hadrian. It ran from Wallsend on the River Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west of what is now northern England. In its final version it was a stone wall with large ditches in front and behind. Soldiers were garrisoned along the line in large forts, smaller milecastles, and intervening turrets, and its gates may have been customs posts.

The route ran west from Segedunum at Wallsend via Carlisle and Kirkandrews-on-Eden to the shore of the Solway Firth, ending a short and unknown distance west of Bowness-on-Solway; part of the central section follows natural cliffs on the Whin Sill escarpment. Although the curtain wall ends near Bowness-on-Solway, the system of milecastles and turrets continued along the Cumbria coast as far as Risehow, south of Maryport, and milecastles west of Bowness-on-Solway are called Milefortlets. Hadrian’s Wall lies entirely within England and has never formed the Anglo-Scottish border, though it is sometimes loosely or colloquially described as such.

The Roman army built the wall from AD 122 on Hadrian’s orders to mark and protect the north-west frontier of the Roman empire. It runs 73 miles, or 80 Roman miles, from Bowness-on-Solway in Cumbria to Wallsend in Newcastle upon Tyne. Hadrian’s biographer preserved the order to “build a wall, 80 miles long, to separate the Romans from the barbarians.” Hadrian wanted to bring order to the frontier and reduce raids by the Caledonian tribes who lived to the north; the wall allowed the Romans to control movement across the border and defend it with fewer soldiers.

The wall is 118 km long, built on the orders of Emperor Hadrian c. AD 122 at the northernmost limits of the Roman province of Britannia. It is an example of the organization of a military zone and of ancient Rome’s defensive techniques and geopolitical strategies. The wall was probably planned before Hadrian’s visit to Britain in 122.

Restored sandstone fragments found in Jarrow and dated 118 or 119 bear Hadrian’s wish to keep “intact the empire” by divine instruction.

On Hadrian’s accession in 117 there was unrest and rebellion in Roman Britain and among peoples of various conquered lands, and these troubles may have influenced his plan to construct the wall. Hadrian ended his predecessor Trajan’s policy of expanding the empire and instead focused on defending the current borders, namely Britain at the time. Britain did not have natural boundaries that could serve the purpose of dividing the province controlled by the Romans from the Celtic tribes in the north. The primary purpose was a physical barrier to slow raiders crossing for animals, treasure, or slaves and returning with loot, while the wall also kept people within the Roman province and channeled movement through gates where it could be monitored and taxed.

The wall may have had a psychological and symbolic impact as a statement of Roman imperial power. There is some evidence it was originally covered in plaster and whitewashed so its shining surface would reflect sunlight and be visible for miles. Construction started in 122 and most of the wall took six years to build, with work from three Roman legions—the Legio II Augusta, Legio VI Victrix, and Legio XX Valeria Victrix—totaling 15,000 soldiers, plus some members of the Roman fleet. Soldiers would have trained as surveyors, engineers, masons, and carpenters.

Not long after construction began the wall’s thickness was reduced from the originally planned 10 feet to about 8 feet, or even less depending on terrain, and some sections were originally turf and timber before being replaced by stone years or decades later. R. G. Collingwood found evidence for broad and narrow sections, with broad sections around 9.5 feet wide and narrow sections around 7.5 feet wide, and argued that plans changed during construction and the overall width was reduced.

Collingwood concluded that the wall was originally planned between present-day Newcastle and Bowness-on-Solway at a uniform width of 10 Roman feet in stone, but on completion only three-fifths was stone, the remaining western section was turf and later rebuilt in stone, and the eastern half’s width was reduced from 10 to 8 Roman feet with remaining stones used for around 5 miles of the turf wall in the west.

From Milecastle 49 to the western terminus at Bowness-on-Solway the wall was originally turf, possibly due to the absence of limestone, and was later demolished and replaced with stone in two phases. The first phase ran from the River Irthing to a point west of Milecastle 54 during Hadrian’s reign; the second followed the reoccupation of Hadrian’s Wall after the abandonment of the Antonine Wall, though a Severan date has also been suggested for the second phase. The wall included 16 forts, 80 milecastles, and 156 turrets, with a milecastle roughly every Roman mile, most guarding a gateway, and two turrets between each milecastle as lookout points. As the Romans built the wall they decided to add larger forts such as Birdoswald, Housesteads, and Chesters, which served as administrative bases and housed greater numbers of soldiers, with up to 800 men living at Housesteads Roman Fort.

The Vallum just south of the wall was a deep, ditch-like construction with two parallel mounds running north and south of it, running more or less in parallel for almost the entire length except between Newcastle and Wallsend. Collingwood in 1930 asserted the Vallum was built before the wall in its final form, while work in 1936 suggested it could not have been built before the wall because it avoided one of the wall’s milecastles, strengthening the idea of simultaneous construction. The turf-built Antonine Wall in what is now central Scotland briefly superseded Hadrian’s Wall before being abandoned and was declared a World Heritage Site in 2008; accounts differ on its start, giving AD 142 or around AD 143, and it was begun further north between the Firths of Forth and Clyde in what is now Scotland. Hadrian’s Wall was left unguarded for about 20 years, and the Antonine Wall was abandoned and Hadrian’s Wall reoccupied around AD 160.

For nearly three centuries, until the end of Roman rule in Britain in 410 AD, Hadrian’s Wall was the clearest statement of the might, resourcefulness, and determination of an individual emperor and of his empire. It had an over 270-year manned presence. The World Heritage property consists of three sections of the Roman frontier—Hadrian’s Wall, the Upper German-Raetian Limes, and the Antonine Wall—located in the northwestern part of the empire and constituting artificial boundaries of the former Roman provinces Britannia, Germania Superior, and Raetia. The frontier extended a further 36 km down the Solway coast as a series of intervisible military installations.

Almost all the standing masonry of the wall was removed in early modern times and used for local roads and farmhouses; none of it stands to its original height, but modern work has exposed much of the footings and some segments display a few courses of modern masonry reconstruction. Many of the excavated forts on or near the wall are open to the public and various nearby museums present its history. The wall is the largest Roman archaeological feature in Britain, running 73 miles, and is a British cultural icon and major ancient tourist attraction. Hadrian’s Wall was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, and the Hadrian’s Wall Path generally runs close along the wall.

Most of Hadrian’s Wall is still in private ownership; although charities like English Heritage and the National Trust look after several well-known sections, the majority is owned and cared for by several hundred private owners. English Heritage manages Birdoswald Roman Fort, Housesteads Roman Fort, Chesters Roman Fort and Museum, and Corbridge Roman Town, and also looks after twenty sections of the wall including several milecastles and turrets as well as two bridges. The wall marches 73 miles from coast to coast; visitors can discover remains of forts and towns, see rare Roman artefacts, and take in views of the rugged landscape. Housesteads is Britain’s most complete Roman fort, Corbridge Roman Town holds the Corbridge Hoard, Chesters has a well-preserved Bath House, and Birdoswald has the longest remaining stretch of the wall.

Hadrian’s Wall is operated by English Heritage and has held World Heritage Site designation since 1987. Certain elements of the Roman Limes line have been excavated, some reconstructed, and a few destroyed. The remains of the Limes today consist of vestiges of built walls, ditches, forts, fortresses, watchtowers, and civilian settlements.

The political background to the wall belongs to a reign that had turned away from conquest. Hadrian, emperor from 117 to 138, abandoned his predecessor Trajan’s expansionist policies and the territorial gains in Mesopotamia, Assyria, Armenia and parts of Dacia, preferring to invest in stable, defensible borders and in the unification of the empire’s disparate peoples. Soon after his accession he had four leading senators put to death, most likely because they seemed to threaten the security of his reign, and this earned him the senate’s lifelong enmity. His last years were marred by chronic illness, and his marriage to Vibia Sabina was both unhappy and childless.

In 138 he adopted Antoninus Pius and nominated him as successor on condition that Antoninus adopt Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus as his heirs; Hadrian died the same year at Baiae, and Antoninus had him deified despite opposition from the Senate. The wall was one expression of an energetic programme of direct intervention in imperial and provincial affairs, especially building projects, pursued by an emperor who visited almost every province and who is particularly known for this work. In Rome he rebuilt the Pantheon and constructed the vast Temple of Venus and Roma, as well as the Villa Adriana at Tivoli, and in Egypt he may have rebuilt the Serapeum of Alexandria. An ardent admirer of Greek culture who believed himself to be a Greek, he promoted Athens as the cultural capital of the empire.

His intense relationship with the Greek youth Antinous and the latter’s untimely death led him to establish a widespread, popular cult, and late in the reign he suppressed the Bar Kokhba Revolt, which he saw as a failure of his universal project and philhellenic ideal. The wall’s purpose has been debated in ways that go beyond a simple barrier. The novelty of the work as a departure from traditional Roman military architecture has been seen as noteworthy and has led to exceptional suggestions of outside influence; one proposal holds that Hadrian may have been influenced by travellers’ accounts of the Great Wall of China, built some two hundred years before, though this has been challenged on the ground that, although the scale and design were novel for Roman military construction, there was a long tradition of wall-building in the ancient Mediterranean world from which inspiration could be drawn. In recent years some scholars have disagreed with the established narrative over how much of a threat the inhabitants of northern Britain presented to the Romans, and whether there was any economic advantage in defending and garrisoning a fixed line of defences rather than conquering and annexing what has become Northumberland and the Scottish Lowlands and then defending the territory with a looser arrangement of forts.

Hadrian and his advisers, however, produced a solution to their problems that remained relevant for centuries. The defensive characteristics of the line support the interpretation of it as a barrier. Pits known as cippi are frequently found on the berm, the flat area in front of the wall, and held branches or small tree trunks entangled with sharpened branches, making an attack on the wall even more difficult; the arrangement might be thought of as the Roman equivalent of barbed wire, a measure to delay an enemy attack and hold the attackers within range of the missiles of the defenders. The curtain wall was not mainly a continuously embattled defensive line; rather it would deter casual crossing and serve as an observation point that could alert the Romans to an incoming attack and slow enemy forces so that additional troops could arrive in support.

Movement was channelled through the gates, where it could be monitored. The standing remains have attracted generations of scholars and communicators. Anthony Birley, born in 1937 and the son of the archaeologists Eric and Margaret Birley, began excavating at Vindolanda as a boy, took part in many of the excavations there, and was one of the leaders of work at the Roman fortress; he was a founder trustee of the Vindolanda Trust from 1970 and chaired its trustees from 1996 to 2016, and he published an illustrated guide to Hadrian’s Wall in 1963 as well as studies of Hadrian and of Roman Britain. Alistair Moffat, born in 1950 at Kelso in the Scottish Borders and a graduate in medieval history, wrote The Wall: Rome’s Greatest Frontier, published in 2008 and later remade as a television series.

Charlotte Higgins, born in 1972, wrote Under Another Sky, a book about journeys in Roman Britain published in 2013. Adam Hart-Davis, born in 1943, presented the BBC series What the Romans Did for Us, which spawned several spin-off series.