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.