What did the wall look Like?
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- Опубликовано: 24 янв 2025
- What did Hadrian's Wall look like? Was it just a wall or was there more to this Roman frontier in Britain? Join Alex Iles from Iles Tours to learn some of the stories connected to Hadrian's wall and discover how it looked when it was constructed.
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Book Suggestions
Hadrian's Wall: Rome and the Limits of the Empire, Adrian Goldsworthy (2018) Head of Zeus
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Hadrian's Wall: Archaeology and History at the Limit of Rome's Empire, Nick Hodgson (2019) Robert Hale read.amazon.co...
The fluency of knowledge and passion for the history of the North East, is second to none. Fascinating! Thank you Alexander Iles for sharing your knowledge👍
Thank you Chris, very much appreciated and looking forward to creating more vidoes in the future!
Thank you. I've just started walking the Wall. A couple of comments, if you don't mind. Too much wind noise which blotted out your speech on occasion. A diagrammatic cross section would have improved comprehension - for me, at least. Walking the Wall above Housesteads, which I think is the narrow wall, I was impressed that there was plenty of room for battlements *and* a walkway. However in some of the steeper sections, such as Sycamore Tree Gap, any walkway must have been a succession of steps, otherwise soldiers in their hobnailed sandals would have been in extreme peril.
I was impressed by Milecastle 38. The north gate has a lintel that is about 2 feet high and opens onto a more or less sheer drop. This seems to argue that the Wall was built by technocrats who said, "This is a mile, so you build a castle *here* - and it has to have a north gate because the plans say so." No concern for practicality or usefulness. It's the same with the turret on top of the hump between Milecastle Gap and Sycamore Tree Gap. It would have made better sense if it was built 40 yards further west, but no, some engineer paced it out and *this* was where the turret had to go.
Bureaucrats haven't changed.
This was a very early episode! Thankfully the production quality has changed a lot!
At last Hadrian's wall makes sense! I was taught that it was a short stone fence that offered almost no protection. Alex Iles scores big again!
Hi James - whoever taught that really didn't understand how the frontier worked! At six metres high and up to two meters and eighty centimetres wide at its wider points it was a huge defensive barrier!
The argument against battlements is that there is no evidence for a walkway on the wall-top (other than at the forts, milecastles and turrets). Indeed, it would have been unlikely as most of the troops manning the wall were cavalry.
I'm aware of this argument. Only a 1/4 to a1/3 of the troops are cavalry. Also - your only cavalry when your on your horse!
@@AlexIlesUK A cavalryman not using his horse is a waste of an expensive horse. You don't need a walkway on the wall - there wasn't one at comparable limes on the Rhine etc. A turret every 1/3 of a mile is enough to detect and signal any threat, met by cavalry or infantry sallying forth. And the Narrow wall is far too narrow for a walkway anyway. The expert David Breeze is against the notion.
Aye David is great but even if you don't have a walkway the Calvary troops are still manning turrets and milecastles. Else you've got a gap in the defences, and that's a cavalry soldier not in his horse. It's a topic up for debate and I may change my mind but I currently subscribe to the idea of a fighting platform.