Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 4, part 2

Just after Greenhead, the path came to Thirlwall, a hamlet overlooked by a little castle on a hillock, built from robbed Roman stone, which made me mad. So I smashed the castle up. This is what it looked like after I was finished with it.

This bullshit story was on the 'information' panel for Thirlwall Castle, it's complete rubbish, there's no such thing as magic

I also found a cat which had been grafted onto a stone by some sick monster.


Past Gisland, the Wall runs in a tidy straight line down to the river Irthing, which it crossed over a substantial bridge whose massive foundations can still be seen.


On the far side of the steep valley stands Birdoswald fort. I was excited about Birdoswald because it has a museum and stuff. It also has a fake Roman shouting from a fake rampart.


Best of all, though, is the site of the granary in the fort, where excavators found evidence for a massive post-Roman timber hall. They marked the positions of the main posts with wooden bollards, as you can see here.


The information boards show what the granary was like in Roman times...


... and then what it was like in the Dark Ages.


The theory is that Birdoswald, after the Roman withdrawal, became the headquarters of a chieftain or petty king, one of the many local strongmen who must have exploited the power vacuum left by the empire.

I admit I’m a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to the sub-Roman period. A few years ago I saw ‘The Not So Dark Ages’, a documentary by the prehistorian Francis Pryor, in which he knocked down a series of cunningly erected straw men to show that the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ were actually a vibrant and sophisticated era in British history.


The documentary included a stroll around Birdoswald, and the argument that things kept ticking along smoothly after the end of the empire. Pryor also used evidence of pollen analysis to argue that there was no mass re-forestation of Hadrian’s Wall, which would be one knock-on effect of population decline and reduced farming.

As far as I can tell, Birdoswald shows pretty clearly how far things declined in the sub-Roman period. The elite were no longer able even to maintain the stone buildings around them, let alone build new ones. Instead they lived in the crumbling shell of a far more technologically advanced civilisation. When one granary building collapsed, they moved into the neighbouring one; only when that one also collapse did they erect their own timber hall.


As for the pollen analysis, from the documentary itself it looks to me like the fifth century saw a massive increase in alder woodland on Hadrian’s Wall, and a mirror-image reduction in heather and grassland, while by the sixth century very few cultivated grains were turning up in the samples. But then I’m not an expert in pollen analysis.

Basically I’m of the opinion that after the withdrawal of Rome from Britain, the population dwindled, the economy contracted, agriculture returned to near-subsistence levels, and the former British provinces fragmented into tiny warring polities which hardly deserve the title of ‘kingdoms’. I do get irritated by post-Roman apologists who seem reluctant to concede that the end of the empire led to a systemic collapse across the board.


Anyway, once I’d finished kicking over the gay little wooden bollards and spray-painting ROMANS RULE on the walls of the fort, I walked the few remaining miles to a campsite at the hamlet of Banks, where I accidentally camped in someone’s back garden.