The stone wall, with a maximum height of about 15 feet (4.6 metres), was 10 Roman feet (3 metres) wide, wide enough for there to have been a walkway along the top, and perhaps also a parapet wall. At each mile a gate was protected by a small guard post called a milecastle.īetween each pair of milecastles lay two towers (turrets), creating a pattern of observation points every third of a mile. In front of both was a substantial ditch, except where crags or rivers made this unnecessary. Building in the east started at the point where the road from the south, Dere Street, met the Wall and where later a gate, the Portgate, was erected.Īs first planned, most of the Wall was to be built in stone, but the eastern 30-mile section was in turf. Its line was carefully chosen to make best use of the topography, and it was surveyed from each end towards the middle, or rather towards the crags, in sections. The Wall was placed slightly north of the existing line of military installations between the River Tyne and the Solway Firth. The inscription on the Ilam pan, a 2nd-century souvenir of Hadrian’s Wall found in 2003, suggests that it was called the vallum Aelii, Aelius being Hadrian’s family name. Before work was completed, 14 forts were added, followed by an earthwork known as the Vallum to the south. The original plan was for a wall of stone or turf, with a guarded gate every mile and two observation towers in between, and fronted by a wide, deep ditch. The building of Hadrian’s Wall probably began that year, and took at least six years to complete. Hadrian came to Britain in AD 122 and, according to a biography written 200 years later, ‘put many things to right and was the first to build a wall 80 miles long from sea to sea to separate the barbarians from the Romans’. The forts here were linked by a road, now known as the Stanegate, between Corbridge and Carlisle. By about AD 100 the northernmost army units in Britain lay along the Tyne–Solway isthmus. Permanent conquest of Britain began in AD 43.
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