Meggie Macdonald

Over this past weekend, the once mighty northern border of the Roman Empire – a stone wall stretching from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne to the Solway Firth built by the Emperor Hadrian in AD 122 – was lit up with burning beacons to honour the men who once guarded the ramparts.  It is also a bid by Tourism UK to jumpstart the 2010 spring tourist season and, by all accounts, this is one powerful publicity stunt.

The wall once ran right across northern England for 117km and cut off the Caledonian ‘barbarians’ from the romanized civilians to the south.  Hadrian built it as part of his campaign of peace and stabilitythroughout the empire (he also had another border built along the farthest reaches of Roman Africa.   Following the massive expansion efforts under Trajan (including the conquest of Dacia in AD 106 and the campaigns against the Parthians beginning in AD 107), Hadrian was faced with a formidable task when he came to power following Trajan’s death in AD 117:  how to consolidate power and stabilize the Roman empire when it had been overstretched for far too long.  Among his various solutions – some successful, some not – were the construction of the wall in Britain and the huge pallisade across North Africa.

Among the benefits of such an undertaking, the construction of Hadrian’s Wall in Britain kept some potentially rebellious soldiers occupied with other tasks.  The wall took years to build as legionaries dug the foundation from the cold, wet clay-mud of northern England and built the forts and milecastles to maintain security at the Empire’s northern border.

The Wall is a rather surprising thing to see, particularly when you only realise after the fact that you have indeed seen it.  During one train trip to Edinburgh, the train I was on passed by a rural neighbourhood near the east coast and there, nestled in a little valley between the train tracks and a farm house, was a small pile of cut stone.  Nothing so spectacular as some of the taller sections and certainly less impressive than the restored section of the wall, this little bit of Hadrian’s political power was enough to catch in my throat all the history that it stood for, and still does stand for.

Also from The Guardian, here is a cute little video of the lighting of the wall this weekend.  THe music may be a bit schmalzy, but it’s a lovely event none-the-less.