Hadrian’s Wall runs 73 miles across the narrowest part of northern England, from Wallsend on the Tyne to Bowness on the Solway Firth. It was begun in AD 122 on the orders of the Emperor Hadrian, and substantial stretches still stand.
It is not the Scottish border
The most persistent misconception. The wall lies entirely within England, in Northumberland and Cumbria, and at its eastern end it is nearly seventy miles south of the modern border. The frontier between England and Scotland was fixed centuries later and has no relationship to it.
What was actually built
More than a wall. The full system was a defended zone several hundred metres deep:
- The wall itself, up to 15 feet high and 10 feet thick in stone.
- A deep ditch in front of it.
- A milecastle every Roman mile — a small gated fort — with two watchtowers between each pair.
- Sixteen larger forts along the line, housing garrisons of 500 to 1,000.
- The vallum behind — a flat-bottomed ditch between earth mounds, marking the rear boundary of the military zone.
- A military road running the length of it.
What it was for
Less a defensive barrier than a controlled frontier. Fifteen feet of stone will not stop an army, and it was never intended to. What it did was regulate movement — the gates at each milecastle allowed people, goods and livestock to cross under supervision and, importantly, taxation.
Hadrian’s biographer wrote that it was built “to separate the Romans from the barbarians”. It was also a statement: the empire has decided to stop here.
Who manned it
Not Italians. The garrison was made up of auxiliary units recruited across the empire — Batavians and Tungrians from the Low Countries, Syrians, Spaniards, North Africans, Dacians. Northern England in the second century was one of the more cosmopolitan places in Britain.
Vindolanda
The fort just south of the wall that has produced the most extraordinary finds in Roman Britain. Waterlogged anaerobic soil preserved organic material that survives almost nowhere else — leather shoes, textiles, wooden objects, and above all the Vindolanda tablets: thin slivers of wood carrying handwritten ink letters.
They are astonishingly ordinary and all the more affecting for it. A soldier writes home asking for socks and underpants because the British weather is dreadful. An officer’s wife, Claudia Severa, invites her friend Sulpicia Lepidina to a birthday party — the earliest known writing in Latin by a woman anywhere.
Excavation continues every summer, and volunteers can dig alongside the archaeologists.
Walking it
The Hadrian’s Wall Path is an 84-mile National Trail running coast to coast, usually walked in six or seven days. The best-preserved and most spectacular sections are in the central stretch, where the wall follows the crags of the Whin Sill — Housesteads, Steel Rigg and the much-photographed Sycamore Gap, whose famous tree was felled by vandals in 2023 to widespread national distress.
Walkers are asked not to walk on the wall itself, which is fragile and has no business having survived this long.