♪ (When Fortune Turns the Wheel, Brothers Gillespie) ♪
England is saturated with Roman history. A ruthlessly efficient invading force, the
Romans changed Britain forever. Arriving in AD 43, they brought with them military might and advanced
engineering along with cultural forces in the form of new religious practices. Today the Romans live
on through us in countless ways but there can be few Roman legacies so poignant as the majestic
Hadrian's Wall which originally stretched from Wallsend in North Tyneside on the eastern tip
of England westwards to an unknown location as it stretched down England's western coast.
The emperor Hadrian visited Britainnia in AD 122
and decided to build a wall marking the limit of the Roman Empire right across northern Britain.
While it is a wall, it appears as if it was always intended to manage small-scale movement north
and south. Perhaps it should be seen really about controlling the landscape around it.
It's not a fundamentally closed barrier. It's 73 miles long and that's 80 Roman miles and it's got
80 milecastles, a very large of turrets as well as 17 more substantial forts along its entire length.
It's linked in to the network of Roman roads that were constructed throughout England and
Wales. It might feel like the end of the Earth, especially when you're standing here in winter,
but it was very much plugged into an empire that stretched thousands of
miles all the way to present-day Iraq and even as far as the Sahara Desert.
And now it stands as the most remarkable monument to the Roman Empire as well as to the tenacity
and the spirit of the people who built it and the tribes in the areas through which it ran.
The dramatic landscape that surrounds the wall today serves as a reminder of what an incredible
feat of engineering it was. Hadrian's Wall sprawls over a vast and variable stretch of terrain
and the men who contructed it had to build over rolling hills,
fierce river torrents and the hard rocky outcrop of the Whin Sill.
The wall took more than a decade to build and it required the collective efforts of soldiers from
all three of the Roman legions that were stationed in Britain at the time. Each legion consisted of
around about 5000 men and we've got inscriptions from right across the wall that actually tell
us who built certain sections. These are called centurial stones and they really help to fill in
some of the detail, the human endeavour, that went into the construction of this fantastic monument.
For some, being on the wall could have been extremely difficult. For others, it could have
been extremely boring. Outside of open warfare there was always training and there were duties
around the fort and there's evidence that things perhaps got a little bit slack in prolonged times
of peace. One writer has actually commented, "what did you expect was going to happen? Rome dropped
500 or maybe 1000 men with money in their pockets into the middle of a wilderness." You can imagine
the rest. They wanted to buy wine, they wanted to buy extra food, they wanted to buy company
and of course small settlements built up around the forts to be able to cater to those needs.
But it wasn't just soldiers who came from distant lands: they brought with them
many of their gods and goddesses and we see evidence of those being worshipped along the wall.
The official religions of course are well recorded and we see lots of dedications
to Jupiter for example, but we also know that other gods travelled from elsewhere in the Roman
Empire - Mithras is a fantastic example - and also we see some of the local gods subsumed into the
Roman religious practices or surviving as spirits of local places that we see attested to in small
carvings and inscriptions. So we see this really heady mix of beliefs from all over the empire.
Some of the men stationed on Hadrian's Wall would have come
thousands of miles from their homeland. There were Dacians from modern-day Romania,
and there were bargemen from the Tigris in what modern-day Iraq based now what is now
South Shields and it's fascinating to think of all those partings, all these people moved from
their home countries to places that felt so very very alien to them.
Hadrian's Wall was likely built by men who were foreigners to the area,
billetted thousands of miles away from their homes and families.
Fortune Turns the Wheel is a classic song of the locality resonating with this site. This is a
beautiful parting song often sung between friends at the end of a night of drinking or at funerals
as the gathered bid a friend or family member farewell. The lyrics convey the regret of a
bitter-sweet goodbye as the protagonist prepares to launch head-first into an uncertain future,
one that will hopefully see a reunion with the assembled company should luck befall them.
It's sung for us here by the Brothers Gillespie, who grew up just a stone's throw from the wall.