Super-sized

What's left of Hadrian's wall still amazes visitors

Author: By M. R. Montgomery, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 9, 1998

Page: M1

Section: Travel

This could be disappointing if you arrived expecting to find that the famous Roman wall still stood in all its glory, spanning England from South Shields on the North Sea to Bowness-on-Solway on the Atlantic. But that would mean that nothing had happened since the fourth century AD, or 1500 years BP (Before Present). For an American tourist, with urban American legs, there is still enough wall standing to make the feet ache after what all British guidebooks (and all Britons) will describe as a ``brief walk.''

The Romans conquered southern England without any particular difficulty. But near this narrow spot on the island, they began to run into Picts, a fearsome crowd. (The Scots were still in Ireland, and must have been awesomely fearsome to conquer the Picts a few centuries later.) Hadrian's Wall does not cut across England at its narrowest point; it was simply as far north as the Romans could get without squandering more manpower than the game was worth.

What boggles the visitor's mind is the scale of the thing, whether much of the wall still stands or not. Ascending the hill toward the finest stretch of remaining, standing wall from an exceptionally charming bed-and-breakfast in the valley -- the Holmhead -- there isn't a scrap of wall to be seen. What you do see from the hillside is the Holmhead building, an adjoining massive ruined castle (Thirlwall), and dozens of small houses and farm buildings and several miles of stone wall, everything built from stones pulled down from the wall.

At first you ignore the farmer's wall. But after paralleling it for a quarter mile or so, and climbing a few hundred feet next to the wall, it suddenly sinks in that you are looking at the only stone farm fence you've ever seen made out of squared-off rectangular stones. From the height of land achieved, you can see similar fences marking field boundaries to the eastern and western horizon.

The original Roman wall had trimmed stones on the outside, the inside filled with less geometric rubble. The farm walls tend to use the squared stones up to three or four feet, with one or two courses of less precise stones on top. As is often the case, there is more knowlege of antiquities than realities. The fences may have been raised in the lasthundred years, when local farmers shifted from a dependence entirely on sheep to a mixed agriculture with milk cows and beef cattle. The squared-stone walls would have been more than sufficient for sheep, the few extra feet of rougher wall would get the fences up above a cow's nose.

The height of land above the Holmhead inn -- the Cawfields -- has a subtle distinction. Although it is not quite the highest point above sea level for the Roman wall, the remains of the wall are higher above the ground than anywhere else. In fact, if you have seen Cawfields, you have seen both the best and the most accessible, well-preserved section of Hadrian's Wall. That you have done this will not satisfy Pauline Staff, who, with her husband, Brian, manages Holmhead.

It will not do that the visitor see only a mile or two. One must be off in the morning to Once Brewed National Park Center and ascend again through fields full of the evidence of cows and sheep, and occasionally also full of sheep and cows, and see Housesteads and make a nice walk along the wall (``a nice short day's walk,'' according to Pauline) and catch the bus back from Hexham to Greenhead.

What Pauline did not say (and neither did Brian, after kindly dropping the visitor at Once Brewed) was that Housesteads, although only slightly higher in elevation than Cawfields, was more precipitous. Nor did the visitor heed the advice of the local visitors' map: ``Milecastle 42 sits prominently on the crags of the Whin Sill. This is one of the most rugged sections of the Wall, which reaches its highest point at Winshields Crag.''

After a ``few minutes' '' walk from the Once Brewed visitor center (the pleasant woman had no idea what was brewed once), which took this tourist a solid 20 minutes, one reached the Roman wall where it snaked up a hill that appeared to be roughly a 60-degree angle.

Crude stone steps paralleled the wall and, as the remains of the wall disappeared into the ground, topped the remnants and snaked along north of the wall on the edge of a several-hundred-foot precipice. It looked steeper than any set of stairs ever encountered, considerably more difficult, and frankly unappealing. The visitor's sense of inadequacy was only compounded by the sight of a large male person in jogging gear who was running down the wall. And it was only increased by the arrival of a group of Britons, all of whom appeared to be at retirement age or past it, who proceeded to sturdily, effortlessly, march up the wall and almost bound from stairstep to rock to mud to another cut-in stone stairstep.

Fortunately, for the precipice-challenged, the Romans built a military road along sensible terrain just south of the wall. This Pennine Way is still quite obvious on pasturelands. The grass grows shorter and thinner on the ancient stone pavement, and where the Pennine Way comes to a farmer's stone wall, you will find a stile or a gate. It has, apparently, been a public way since AD 400. It makes an alternative path along the wall, and by judicious exploration, the nervous visitor can see the best of the wall by angling up the rolling hills rather than cravenly creeping along the steepest sections of the wall and it's accompanying pathway.

As the day wore on, it became perfectly obvious that this visitor was not going to make it to the excavations and museum at Chesters (home of ``the important Clayton collection of sculptures and Roman inscriptions,'' per the visitors' guide), let alone to the town of Hexham and the bus to Greenhead. By following the advice of passing (and relatively slow-moving) local walkers, it was possible to find the village of Bardon Mills a mere three miles farther on, find the Mill Pub, and find, not too long after, the bus back.

Upon remarking to Pauline Staff that the wall path really required a walking stick, once one reached a certain age, the visitor was told that she never used one. Asked how she got up and down the steepest sections, Pauline explained: ``On all fours.''

The visitor trudged upstairs to change clothes and shower. He had descended the steepest part of the path on all fives, which explained why the seat of his trousers were all mud- and grass-stained.