Words on and off the wall
Last updated 13:37, Thursday, 17 April 2008
Today Hadrian’s Wall is a World Heritage Site visited, walked, clambered and climbed on, tramped along, dug, explored, examined in every last archaeological detail – one of the great monuments of ancient time.
Murus ille famosus (that famous wall): Depictions and Descriptions of Hadrian’s Wall before Camden by William D. Shannon. CWAAS, £7.50
Off the Wall Walking by Laurence Shelley. Thetis. £8.99
This great defensive work on the very edge, the cold, wet and northern edge, of the Roman Empire, seems like a line, vallum and wall, indelibly scored across the landscape with all the arrogance of imperial power from sea to sea.
It must always, since its construction almost two millennia ago, have been something people were aware of both locally and nationally and yet, surprisingly for a period of 800 years or so, there are scarcely any records of the wall and certainly nothing in the way of a definitive description of what was, until modern times, the biggest civil engineering project undertaken in this country.
William Camden visited the wall several times before his last visit in 1599. His survey of the whole of Elizabeth’s kingdom, now known as Camden’s Britannia, included what has been considered by historians to be the first substantial account of the wall since the days of the Venerable Bede back in the seventh century.
In his new book, William Shannon has collected all the medieval references to the wall to show that it did not, in fact, disappear from public consciousness for such a long time.
The Lanercost Chronicle, as might be expected, refers several times to an ancient or old wall while the Wetheral Cartulary from 1200 talks of an ancient ditch and wall.
One author, Ranulph Higden, writing in 1320, and under the ambitious title Polychronicon, drew on most of the previous contradictory sources to produce an influential account. He wrote of Carlisle: “That city has within it some part of that famous wall that crosses Northumberland”.
Others followed, including some, such as John Hardynge from Warkworth, with local knowledge, but it was a slow process sorting out fact from accumulated fiction.
The quality of awareness is sharply revealed in the series of old maps which are reproduced in this volume. Matthew Paris in 1250 draws a straight line across the very oddly shaped country, but the line itself is beautifully crenellated.
There is no knowing what William Camden might make of Laurence Shelley’s quixotic account of six days spent “walking” the length of the Roman Wall.
A beautiful wood-engraving of the soles of a pair of apparently blistered feet – the patches are in fact images of Roman coins, etc – might serve as a warning to the serious historian or determined pedestrian.
This is no detailed, informed account of the murus ille famosus here. Laurence is one of those indefatigable explorers who catches the bus to Bowness rather than walk the walk and finds his amusements in the idiosyncrasies of B&B land-ladies and the arguments he hears at bus-stops.
He did like Tullie House, though, especially the Whispering Wall and the broccoli and Stilton soup and he learnt about the Border Reivers for the first time.
If you enjoy talking to quirky egotists who can make the sight of a jellyfish or putting plasters on blisters amusing, you’ll enjoy making the acquaintance of Laurence Shelley.
If you’re seriously interested in the Roman Wall stick to old William Camden and his successors.
In fact, it is interesting to speculate what historians might make of our awareness of the wall 1,000 years from now if all they had to go on was Laurence’s travelogue.
It is understandable why medieval historians had such a limited and often inaccurate picture.
Murus ille famosus and Off-the-Wall Walking are both available from Bookends, 56 Castle Street, Carlisle and 66 Main Street, Keswick, and from www.bookscumbria.com
