Last updated 05:29, Friday, 20 June 2008

The Wall: Rome’s Greatest Frontier by Alistair Moffat. Birlinn. £16.99Alistair Moffat sees Hadrian’s Wall as “a monument to human sweat.” And he imagines the sweat. He visualises the teams of men who actually laid stone on stone.

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Reconstruction: How Vindolanda might have looked. The original stones had to be quarried and then they would be hauled by teams of oxen at a steady lumbering speed of three kilometres an hour

Thirty men would work as a unit, 15 on the north side and 15 on the south.

Three on each side would actually work as masons, laying the stones. Four would be involved in the tricky job of mixing the mortar, carrying it and keeping it wet.

A further three would fill the core between the two walls with rubble and four more would be needed to provide the clay to bond it, and then, as Alistair suggests, there would be one man or lad who was the classical equivalent of the tea-boy.

That was just on the wall itself. The stones had to be quarried – no light-weight task – and then they would be hauled by teams of oxen – they provided the real sweat – moving at a steady lumbering speed of three kilometres an hour.

And then there was a ditch to be dug and roads to be made and mile-castles and forts to be built.

Hadrian’s Wall was an enormous undertaking.

There were 73 miles of actual wall and a further 26 miles of sea-wall stretching down the Cumbrian coast.

It took 30,000 men to build the wall over a 10-year period and those 30,000 men were responsible for lifting 24 million stones.

The wall is one of the great monuments of ancient civilisations. It appears to have been undertaken by men with iron wills and rigid determination.

Milecastles were built, as you would expect, every mile, but, for the Roman soldier, every mile meant exactly every mile.

The consequence is that at one on the best-preserved milecastles at Cawfields the northern gate opens inconveniently onto a precipitous drop.

But the Romans were cultured, cultivated people and not just a military machine. An elaborate tombstone, for instance, was found in Denton Holme.

The sculpture shows a lady wearing rich and expensive drapery, sitting on a high-backed armchair holding a circular fan with a pet bird in her lap.

“A child stands beside her. It is a confident stylish memorial to a luxurious way of life not seen again in Carlisle until the 20th century.”

Alistair Moffat is good on getting inside the wall. Unlike many historians who are cautious and precise with the facts but fail to appreciate the bigger picture, he wants to know what it was like to be a Roman soldier on the northern frontier of a vast empire.

He wants to get his hands dirty, understand why the wall was built and what life was really like at the time.

He draws extensively on literary sources, especially the Roman historians, to give a vivid picture of life at the time and sets the wall in the wider context of the centuries of Roman rule in Britain so that we are not just aware of a line of stones but of the whole society that produced it, from the time when Julius Caesar first ventured on the shores of Albion to the days when the Romans, fearful of the hordes of barbarians spreading inexorably westwards abandoned these shores to defend their heartlands.

The result is a book that more than any other on Hadrian’s Wall communicates something of its historical excitement.

Hadrian’s Wall is history on our doorstep.

The Wall: Rome’s Greatest Frontier is available from Bookends, 56 Castle Street, Carlisle, and 66 Main Street, Keswick, and www.bookscumbria.com