THE WALL
Rome's Greatest Frontier
By Alistair Moffat
Extract
Chapter Six
Let One Stone Stand Upon Another
Once the line of the Wall had been accurately surveyed and marked (the Roman military made extensive use of maps), the countryside burst into a frenzy of activity. Detachments of soldiers were dispatched to quarries, woods, sandpits, rivers and streams to discover local suppliers of all manner of goods, to build limekilns, blacksmiths’ forges and workshops of all kinds. Smoke from thousands of fires plumed into the Northumberland skies. Not until the Industrial Revolution seventeen centuries later would the landscape of the lower Tyne see such to-ing and fro-ing.
Three legions were commanded to build the Wall. The II Augusta, the VI Adiutrix and the XX Valeria Victrix represented a combined workforce of at least 7,000 men. Each legate will not have needed reminding that their men had been set to work in hostile country. Having left a cohort behind at their regional bases at York, Chester and Caerleon, the legions also required protection, and their first action will have been to build secure quarters. In the midst of so much activity, it has been difficult to detect where they camped, but while use would have been made of existing forts, the construction of the Emperor’s Wall was a field exercise and the soldiers would have pitched their leather tents behind a palisade. Scouts no doubt rode out on regular patrols to anticipate enemy activity. There had been war in the north only three years before, and as each man worked, his weapons were not far away.
The legions built the Wall because they had all the necessary skills. In addition to their primary role as heavy infantry, many men were also stonemasons, blacksmiths, carpenters and carters. And each legion was used to operating as a self-contained unit. Hadrian and Nepos decided to use this to advantage. Construction of the Wall was split up into legionary lengths of about 8 kilometres each, what was thought to amount to a season’s work. And there would have been productive rivalry between the men of the II, the VI and the XX.
Building was supervised by a Clerk of Works known as the Praefectus Castrorum. His first task was not to send gangs to the line of the Wall but to assemble all the logistical elements needed to make the project happen. It was very complex, and logistics were the key to success. As a general rule of thumb, for every one man building the Wall itself there were a further eight working to support him, supplying materials, digging ditches, watching the horizon for warbands of enemy horsemen.
Gangs worked ahead of each other in a clear sequence. After the turf was cut out and preserved for later use, a shallow trench was dug along a line pegged out with cord by the surveyors. Flags, boulders and other large loose stones were brought forward by ox-cart (certainly at the east end of the Wall where the ground was not difficult) and bedded into the clay or earth, making as level a foundation as possible. Where the river was navigable, the Tyne would have been used to bring up materials. Barges and ships were the largest form of bulk transport available to the Romans. Meanwhile, at the nearby quarries (the furthest from the Wall appears to have been Black Pasture, 1.3 kilometres from the fort at Chesters), men were clearing vegetation and throwing down bottoming to make hard standing so that they could get at the stone and get it out.
More stonemasons probably worked at the quarries than on the Wall itself. With difficult journeys by ox-cart and pack-horse over rough country and often uphill, it was vital to keep carriage weight to a minimum. Once stone had been levered or cut out with wedges, it was roughly sized according to its use. Ordinary Wall stones were manageable and could be loaded onto a cart or a pack-saddle by one man, occasionally two. These blocks of what is known as squared rubble were cut flush at one end (the best end, according to the grain) usually with a scappling hammer rather than a chisel and mallet. The blocks were then tapered away from the cut face into a blunted pear-shape. This was done to make it easier for the less skilled men at the Wall, allowing them to bed stones quickly, only having to present a keyed course on the outside, what we see now. The tapered end was set to the inside so that it bonded better with the rubble and clay core, and also did not touch its neighbours at the sides and need to be cut to fit. This method of working made for rapid progress.
View cart
