One long wall

There is not much to say about Sunday. In the words of Nora and Frankie, we drove two and a half hours in a car and paid £12 each to see a wall that had parts of it missing. I thought it was great, personally. This is the one thing I wanted to do here that I was afraid I wouldn’t get a chance to do.



The wall was built in 120AD, so this is one of the oldest things I have beheld in Scotland. The wall was actually in surprisingly good repair, I expected much less. Several sections were actually intact enough to serve as the boarder of a sheep field. We walked along the public walk that weaves in and out of the sheep pasture land of the northern English countryside. We passed wild raspberries and I ate some.

Every mile, the Romans placed a mile castle or watch tower, and between each mile castle were two turrets. This spans across the whole of England, from Carlisle to Newcastle, for about 80 miles. The wall was supposed to be 3 meters wide, but is only 2 meters in some places. The wall was made even more formidable by carving two ditches on either side of the structure, making the wall even more defensible. All in all, the engineering feat is amazing, especially since this only took six years to complete. Now it is mostly sheep pasture land.





We had a great deal of fun pretending we were Romans and barbarians on the wall.






Time well spent, methinks.
See slideshow to the right for all the pictures (I lumped them in with the pics from Melrose)