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Today the visitor to Berwick can be forgiven for believing it to be a Scottish town, as after all it stands on the northern bank of the River Tweed, an entirely Scottish river and it does seem to have a rather Scottish appearance. Berwick is also the name of a large Scottish Burgh and the old county of Berwickshire (of which Berwick was not part !) was in Scotland. Furthermore Berwick, is a little bit more closer to the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, than to the North East's regional centre of Newcastle upon Tyne.
Hadrians Wall - One of the greatest monuments to the power
- and limitations - of the Roman Empire,
Hadrian's Wall ran for 73 miles across open country.
Many people mistakenly believe that the wall was built by slaves. But by today's standards we could say that the wall was a kind of occupational therapy for Roman legionaries; men from all over the Empire who had voluntarily joined the army probably needed such an exercise to keep them fit and busy in what was, at that time, a lonely outpost at the farthest edge of the world.
The Roman army numbered amongst its ranks highly skilled architects, mason builders, surveyors and carpenters as well as soldiers for whom the wall was an opportunity to express their talents and also be part of what they felt was the greatest civilising force in the west at that time. Local people may have willingly helped for not dissimilar reasons. And undoubtedly local people benefitted from trade in goods and services.
The 84 mile National Trail takes walkers along the riverside route in Tyneside, through farmland in Tynedale and the grazing upland section dominated by the Whin Sill enscarpment. It then gradually descends to the rich pastures of Cumbria and finally the salt marsh of the Solway Estuary
Walking Hadrian's Wall Path National Trail should take about six days, or longer if you want to take everything in.
The Wall conceived by Hadrian was to be ten feet wide and about fifteen feet high, faced front and rear with carefully cut stones set in mortar, with an infill of rubble and lime cement or sometimes, puddled clay. The front face of the wall sported a crenulated parapet, behind which the soldiers patrolled the wall along a paved rampart-walk.
The foundations of Hadrian's ten-foot wide Wall were laid from Newcastle-upon-Tyne eastward for 23 Roman miles to Chesters in Northumberland, thereafter, apart from a few short lengths further west, the wall is reduced to eight or sometimes, six feet in width. We can assume that at some time during the early construction of the Wall, a decision was made to reduce its width, probably in order to speed-up the work.
The wall to the west of the River Irthing was originally built out of turf about sixteen feet wide, topped by a wooden palisade and walkway and punctuated by timber-framed turrets and milecastles. This 'turf-wall' was not long to endure, and section by section, it was all replaced in stone within a few years. It is thought that the reason why the western part of the Wall was built of turf was because there are no ready supplies of stone or lime near to hand along the western stretch, and at a later date it was decided to replace this with a regular stone wall. An alternative suggestion is that the turf-wall was temporarily substituted in order to speedily complete the barrier, possibly due to unrest among the tribes to either side, and was intended all-along to be replaced at a more leisurely pace later on, when arrangements had been made to quarry and transport the required stone.