It felt almost like a fortnight

We learned a lot today. It was a long day. We drove an hour plus west to meet up with a guide for a visit to Hadrian's wall and some other sites relating to the Roman occupation of Britain.

Our guide's name was Gary. He was a very talkative and knowledgeable former (British) Marine who's been doing these kinds of tours for a while. We saw so many things and places that it's a little hard to keep track at this point. We started by driving even further west and then working our way back toward our meeting point, at an active archaeological site called Vindolanda.

We've traveled here and there in Europe and are always interested to find Roman ruins. We've seen some big ones, like, well, Rome. And Pompeii. This one is unusual though, because the Emperor Hadrian decided that the best was to protect the northern frontier of the Empire was to build a wall across the entire country, sea to sea, 80 miles total. And like most things Roman it was impeccably engineered and planned, and it worked efficiently and effectively for nearly 400 years.

It would take too long to describe the whole thing. The wall was about 20 feet high with a 10-foot deep pit in front of it, making it almost impossible to breach. There were sentries patrolling the top and gates called mile forts every, wait for it, mile. Roman mile anyway, which was 1000 (mille) paces, approximately 400 feet shorter than an English mile. Spaced evenly between each mile forts were two turrets, where the sentries worked and slept.

The placement of the wall was strategic. It was not only a short distance from sea to sea, but it had superb sight lines to the north (outside the Empire). Much of the wall has been exposed over the past 50 years or so, and you can walk the entire length on a national trail.

Enough on the facts and figures though. The Romans brought order where there had been chaos before and would be chaos again after they left. If you're interested, there's plenty to learn about it, more than I can tell you. I'll just tell you what made an impression on me.

First of all, the thing is an incredible feat of engineering. It took only 5 years to construct (in the first century) and from an design standpoint it's perfect. Completely straight where they wanted it to be, curving evenly over landscape as necessary, always hold the best possible vista and defensive position. These people really knew their shit. And they took this whole thing very seriously, which was good for everyone involved. Out guide went into some detail about whether getting sent to this place was a good gig or not. It certainly wasn't very dangerous, as army outposts go, but it was probably really boring. So the sentries on the wall were only stationed in the turrets for 2 weeks at a time, aka a fortnight.

We learned a lot about the difference between legions and auxiliary troops, and how the Romans used the best resources from the Empire to staff up. There was a lot about Syrian archers, the best in the world at the time. We saw a cow skull they used as target practice. It was pretty much destroyed right between the eyes.

And the whole wall would probably still be standing now if people hadn't decided to recycle the stones after the Romans left. Why cut your own stones to build your house (or Abbey) when you have miles of these perfectly cut Roman stones. So that's where most of it has gone, but the bottom few feet remain for a lot of it and a lot of it is exposed. You can see the foundations of the mile forts and the turrets. You can also see ruins of a couple of forts, one, called Birdoswald, which is adjacent to the wall, and another called Vindolanda, which was built prior to the wall's completion and was an important part of their supply chain.

Along the way, we saw various bits of the wall and forts and roads. We stopped at the Roman Army museum, which give you an overview of what life was like on the frontier. The final stop was at Vindolanda, where they are still in the process of excavating the fort and the adjacent vicus, or village. The vicus had a symbiotic relationship with the fort. It provided a bit of regular life for the soldiers when they had time off. The Roman soldiers had money and time, so everyone made out well.

We saw some of the archaeological goings on while we were there. They were digging through what seems to have been a kind of dump. As it happens, the fort changed sizes and shapes over the years, depending on who was stationed there. Each time the would knock things down, lay down a layer of clay, and rebuild on top. The clay preserved all kinds of organic type things that usually decay pretty quickly. Recently, they've been finding lots of shoes, everything from boots to sandals to women's and kids' shoes. Normally, leather doesn't last, but those buried in this clay did. Once of the archaeologists showed us a shoe and talked about why it was there and such. They have all kinds of artifacts in the adjacent museum.

It was fun to watch those people work. People dig, others go through the earth that's been dug up and separate out anything that might be interesting, then they log and bag it, other people clean it and then it's analyzed. Pretty damned cool.

After all that, back to Durham for some proper fish and chips (that's what the window said, and it was good). And soon to bed. Off to Edinburgh tomorrow.