Hadrian's Wall - Wall's End
We started our first day of the Hadrian's Wall Tour at the eastern end in Newcastle. In the middle of a city, not much of the wall is left, but the foundations of the eastern fort, Segedunum, are visible.
A model showed more clearly the layout of the fort, which was standardized, except they all had variations from the standard. Since Segedunum has few differences from the standard, it was an excellent place to start.
Each of the forts we will see has differences, and the modern excavations and displays are different. Here they have reconstructed the bathhouse.
One thing you realize from a reconstruction is how big the buildings were. It's tough to get an impression of size from lines on the ground.
They also learned different things from each fort. Here, they found the ground floor of the cavalry barracks. Since the fort didn't have stables, researchers couldn't figure out where they kept the horses.
Here, they could see the impression of a sump in a space where two horses could stand. They could see that the soldiers' rooms were on one side of the building, and facing them was the room for the horses, which could easily be mucked out. Roman cavalrymen had to buy their own horses, so keeping such a big investment close would have been important.
The fort's location was later the Newcastle shipyards. In the early 20th century, half of the British ships were built in Newcastle, and Britain had half the world's ships. The presence of the shipyard was both a blessing and a curse for the ruins. They built on top of them, destroying a lot, but as the shipyards shrunk, the ruins became visible again and could be studied.
A small section of the wall remains nearby.
The ground was boggy, so the wall settled severely. The bogginess, though, preserved organic materials, including the ends of wooden posts outside the wall. They've determined the Romans stuck dead shrubbery in the ground at the outside base of the wall to make a thicket to keep people away from the wall. Outside the thicket, there was a substantial ditch. They really didn't want people near the wall..
We visited the municipal museum, which has an entire section on The Wall. One interesting area was on Roman religion. The troops based in Britain were from all over them empire, and many of them continued to worship their local god from home. But the local Celtic gods were worshipped too. And sometimes the gods seem to be a blend of a local god and one from far away. Interestingly the classic Roman gods like Jupiter and Juno don't seem to have shrines.
Mithras was popular here, as in the rest of the empire. I continue to find the Mithras religion interesting. It was of Persian origin but became very Roman over time. It was completely different than the classic polytheistic Roman religion. It had one god, Mithras, created by the supreme creator to bring organization to the world. It was a secretive religion, with rites taking place in private locations and membership by invitation only. You advanced through different levels of membership based in part on trials.
Christians really disliked it because they felt it stole their traditions, but really it was much older than Christianity and if anyone stole ideas it was Christians stealing from the Mithraic.
Many Roman sites had Mithraic temples, which often had images in addition to the altars. The one above shows Mithras killing the great bull that was wreaking havoc worldwide.
Some people have wanted to argue about whether Hadrian was really responsible for the wall's construction. This plaque seems to settle the issue.
It clearly names Hadrian as responsible for a section of construction and the Legion that did the work.
Our last stop for the day was Arbeia, on the south side of the Tyne. It was practically built over and lost before someone saved it. Then, the local council really got into protecting it and using it to develop an understanding of the wall. To do that, they build reconstructions of crucial parts of the site.
The first thing you notice is the reconstructed gatehouse.
It's huge—it looks so much larger in three dimensions! The reconstructions help educate the public and help historians and archeologists understand whether their ideas of what the buildings looked like really worked. They certainly helped me have a better idea of their size.
Arbeia is also a strange fort, modified to be very different from the standard. After a while, most of the barracks were demolished and replaced by granneries. It went from two to 24 granneries. At the same time many of the buildings in the fort were demolished. But the commander's house became larger and grander.
It became the central supply depot for all the soldiers on the wall. Ocean-going ships could unload here before the supplies were distributed. Obviously the commander of such a unit would be highly ranked and get a bigger than normal house.
My first reaction to the changes in fort layouts was to think the Romans couldn't decide. But then I remembered that this was over several hundred years of fort occupation. How many of our forts look like they did 50 years ago, let alone a couple hundred.
I was starting to realize that a large part of the program of this tour was to understand the design and use of the forts over centuries and try to understand how the changing conditions could lead to those changes.