The Steel Bonnets. George Fraser MacDonald

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       I

       Hadrian draws the line

      In the beginning was the Wall. It runs across the neck of England from Solway to Tyne, a grey stone ghost to remind tourists of the mighty empire that once ruled the world from the Caspian to where Carlisle Cricket Club’s pavilion now stands. It is, by any standards, a tremendous monument, to the brilliant, witty Roman emperor who conceived it, to Aulus Platorius Nepos, legate, who supervised its building, and to the three legions who actually dug the complex of ditches and mounds, and raised the parapet and intervening fortresses. They were assisted by Roman sailors and auxiliary troops, and no doubt they received local help, if they called it that, in the fetching and carrying. In five years or thereabouts from 122 A.D. the great rampart, dotted with castles and garrisons, was stretched across the countryside, over meadow and moor, down into steep gullies and up over rocky outcrops, along cliff summits and fell sides, a living symbol of military strength and civil power.

      “Verily I have seene the tract of it over the high pitches and steepe descents of hilles, wonderfully rising and falling”, wrote the great Elizabethan antiquarian Camden. While the Wall existed, no one in the region could forget Rome, or what Rome stood for.

      The natives have never forgotten. In their time they fought and died over the Wall, gaped at it, played on it, reviled it, admired it, and removed its stones to make houses, dry-stane dykes, and sheep folds. Lately the Ministry of Public Building and Works have been working splendidly to restore it and have filled the mortar spaces with a curious green cement. But in spite of what Sir Walter Scott called “the ravages continually made upon it for fourteen centuries”, the Wall endures, and no doubt always will.

      It is much more than a mere fortification; it is a dividing line between so many things. Between civilisation and barbarism, between safety and danger, between the tamed and the wild, between the settled country and the outland which was too hot to handle and not worth fighting over anyway, between “us” and “them”; we have seen, in our own time, how a wall across Berlin is a barrier of the spirit as much as of bricks and mortar. Hadrian’s Wall has lasted immeasurably longer than the Berlin wall ever will, and in its way it lives in the minds of people who have never even heard of it or seen it, or if they have, think of it only as an interesting relic which stands at an inconvenient distance from their cars and coaches.

      Although any Northern Englishman can answer in five words the question: why was it built? (“To keep the Scots out”), there is still learned dispute on the point. The suggestion that it was erected to keep the inhabitants of England in has been advanced, not altogether frivolously; so far as the Wall was there for effect, it certainly operated in both directions. The layman, looking at its imposing size—it was originally about twenty feet high and ten wide, and although no part of it today is as tall as this, it is still an awe-inspiring barrier—may be excused for thinking it was a defensible castle wall on a gigantic scale. In fact, it was not intended to be a Maginot Line. As Viscount Montgomery has pointed out, it was a deterrent rather than a defence, which could never have resisted a well-organised invasion, and indeed the wild men from the north overran it and its chain of castles and platoon strongpoints on at least three occasions.

      But it was not an obstacle that any raider could take lightly; even if he succeeded in crossing it, and escaping the attention of Roman sentries who were never more than half a mile away, and usually no doubt a good deal closer, he still had the problem of returning with whatever he had lifted on the southern side. The Wall was, in effect, a glorified police beat seventy miles long, manned by hard men who must have detested it. Any soldier hates cold and rain; to some of the men who garrisoned the wall, and who came from the Mediterranean lands, the raw damp and biting northern winds must have been intolerable. One can feel sorry for a cavalryman named Victor of the First Ala Asturum, who was born in North Africa and is buried at South Shields; he must have felt a long way from home. When one looks north into the bleak distance from Housesteads, and considers the kind of enemy who lived there, one can see that the Wall cannot have been a popular posting.

      But whatever it did to the morale of Roman soldiers, the Wall had a lasting effect on the minds of those who lived either side of it. The regions and the people might have different names from those they bear today; the frontier might shift, as it did; the Romans might go and be forgotten; new waves of people and cultures might come to the land, but the Wall stayed, a permanent reminder of division. Long before there were Englishmen and Scotsmen, long before they had chosen their own subjects of contention and violence, long before there were Elliots or Fenwicks or Armstrongs or Ridleys, the frontier had been made, the line drawn. Undoubtedly, if the wall had been maintained at the outpost line of Forth and Clyde, or if, by some queer turn of history, the boundary had been established from Mersey to Humber, it would have happened there instead, in a different, unimaginable way. Publius Aelius Hadrianus, with the eye of a sound soldier and administrator, caused his wall to be built across the shortest distance and on the best defensible line. It was not his fault that the country on either side might have been designed for brigandage and foray; nor was it his fault that the people who came after were what they were. Land, until it is highly civilised and urbanised, gets the kind of people who are suited to it, and the country of the Wall was no exception.

      By Hadrian’s work, however, the first tangible and lasting division was made. He did as much as anyone to ensure, quite unintentionally, that the people who live in Gretna speak with a different accent from those who inhabit Longtown, a few miles away. And the men who built the Wall in the rain, and defended it, and died beneath it, and begot their children to grow up beside it, and finally left it, probably looked back as it faded into the mist and thought what a waste of time it had all been. They were quite wrong.