We rode the coach north and west [from Fountains Abbey], up and down hills on little winding roads, until everyone was car-sick. The hills grew higher and the valleys steeper--real forests appeared, not just tree plantations with the conifers planted in straight lines on the hillsides. We drove for miles beside the mounded remains of Hadrian's Wall with the ditch on the north side. Most of the Wall has been plundered to make the little pasture-walls that quilt the countryside, or the scattered shepherds' stone cots, now abandoned. We came to a high place on the Wall, with a wide view north to the Scottish border, and walked among the remains of a Roman fort, built a thousand years before the Abbey.
The little museum featured pictures of what the Commandant's quarters would have looked like, how the men slept in their barracks, the arrangement of the latrine. The museum didn't have many artifacts--a spear head, a Sicilian coin. It had a life-size model of a Roman on guard, wrapped in a wool cloak, eyes squinting against the wind. It was cold while we were there, even though the sun shone. Those soldiers were a long way from home.
In the end the Wall was not overrun but deserted, as the troops were called home to defend the Empire against attack closer to the capital. I suspect that many of the Romans just stayed here and contributed a Mediterranean strain to the mongrel English mix. [Then-three-year-old] Chris ran a half-mile along the top of the wall to where it disappeared in a copse of tall trees, and had to be brought back.
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