Roman Britain / by R.G. Collingwood.

  • R. G. Collingwood
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Roman Britain / by R.G. Collingwood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Hadrian’s visit his legate Aulus Platorius Nepos decided to connect the forts by a massive wall, eight feet thick and perhaps twenty feet high, provided at regular intervals with fortlets and sentry- boxes for the accommodation and shelter of the troops which were to patrol it, pushed right to the sea at either end with new terminal forts at Wallsend and Bowness, and having a new military road running close behind it to give direct communication from fort to fort. Thus was designed the ‘ Roman Wall \ To construct it all the three legions of which the regular garrison of Britain was com¬ posed were called in ; for great works of military engineering were carried out not by contract but by military labour, and the legions contained artificers skilled in every kind of craft and trade. The Wall was built with a concrete core and an ashlar facing; each unit of each legion was given a certain section to build, and recorded the fact by inscribing its name on a tablet; in front a defensive fosse was dug; at regular intervals of about a mile fortlets 60-70 ft. square and known to antiquaries as 4 mile- castles ’ were built, projecting from the south face of the wall, and capable of housing a hundred men in their hutments; and 500 yards to left and right of each milecastle a turret, fourteen feet square internally, served as a shelter, a signal-station, and a stair¬ case. The whole Wall was thus divided up into 500-yard lengths, separated from each other by a turret, a milecastle, a turret, a turret, a milecastle, a turret, and so on ; where it encountered a fort, the fort was generally made to take the place of either a milecastle or a turret. Along the top was a rampart-walk, patrolled by the sentries, and reached by stairs either at a fort, a milecastle, or a turret. In spite of the impressive appearance of this huge fortification, seventy-three miles long, with its ditch in front and its forts behind, it was not in the ordinary sense a military work. It was not intended to stop invading armies of Caledonians, while Roman
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