(Walking along the Wall)

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
The Wall remains something of an enigma - and for me that's a large part of its appeal. Perhaps it was rather less dramatic and romantic up here than we'd like to believe - and the Wall more humdrum and bureaucratic, a kind of glorified customs barrier, rather than a final frontier.

As you head further West, into Cumbria and down from the crags, the Wall begins to fade away again. But it's in this section that some of the best evidence is turning up about what happened to the Wall and the garrisons at the end of Roman occupation.

In the third and fourth centuries the frontiers of the whole empire were under threat from Barbarian hordes. The Romans pulled away resources from this remote Northern frontier, to deal with crises closer to home, and the Wall began to crumble

(At Birdoswald Fort)

Birdoswald Fort is really the last significant stopping point on the Wall and excavations here have shown what the end of Empire meant for the garrison.

In the year 410 the Roman empire abandoned Britain, but she'd already been run down for decades. Barbarians and civil war had all played a part, but the crunch came when the pay chests stopped. Money disappeared and industries like pottery collapsed. Like everyone else the soldiers here had to fend for themselves.

Many stayed because after those centuries of intermarriage this was their home. The evidence that's turned up at Birdoswald suggests that they evolved into a warrior band. Using their ramshackle fort as a base, perhaps they controlled and lived off the local population, like a Dark Age protection racket.

It's strange to think that some of these local children visiting Birdoswald today could be the descendants of those Roman soldiers turned Dark Age chieftains. But I like to think that those soldiers, like the Wall, and the Roman Empire itself, are a part of all our pasts.. Five miles west of Birdoswald, the priory at Lanercost shows us where much of the wall stone ended up - plundered by the monks and forming the foundation of another great building project, itself now in ruins.

(At Lanercost Priory)

There's no more appropriate place to bring our journey to an end than a ruined priory built out of stones from Hadrian's Wall. If it hadn't been for the church - well frankly we wouldn't know very much about the Romans at all.

The monks preserved the Romans monumental architectural tradition in their buildings, and Latin literature in their libraries. That meant that when the Renaissance came, ancient books on subjects like architecture, farming, history, medicine and warfare were there to be read and learned from. Those books - and other relics that people found lying around - kick started the modern world - our world.

But perhaps the greatest legacy is the Roman sense of order. In their arrogant and intrepid quest to control their environment - and there's no better example of that than Hadrian's Wall - they set a pace for the modern world, and like them we've found that things are never quite as simple as they ought to be.

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