I always find it weird how these old ruins only have the base of the wall visible. Like so across time the entire top of every stretch of wall was stripped for other use but only stripped down to the bottom foot of wall? Why? Why was every stratch of wall stripped down to the bottom when so much of this wall must have been so far away from any dwellings? Would it really have been easier to walk however far they needed to go to get to the wall to strip it down from the top down and take the stones back vs just making new stone bricks? Or was there some other motive behind stripping down the walls? ie political “We’re not ruled by the Romans any more so let’s pull that damn wall down!” But then to my knowledge we don’t see evidence of just loads of bricks lying around the bottom of these walls.
Silly story time:
Back in 1984 (I was 10 at the time) my parents took me on a 4 week vacation to England. I remember Hadrian’s Wall being one of the highlights for me on that trip.
Fast forward to a couple of years ago, I took my own family to England for a slightly shorter trip and insisted we drive up north for Hadrian’s Wall. My wife (an anthropology major for a while at Cal Berkeley) was wondering why we were driving 6 hours to the middle of nowhere to look at a Roman wall for a couple of days. But then once we got there, she got it. It was fantastic…we loved it, and I really appreciated how the experience for tourists has improved without getting super commercial or cheesy. A+ would return.
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I always find it weird how these old ruins only have the base of the wall visible. Like so across time the entire top of every stretch of wall was stripped for other use but only stripped down to the bottom foot of wall? Why? Why was every stratch of wall stripped down to the bottom when so much of this wall must have been so far away from any dwellings? Would it really have been easier to walk however far they needed to go to get to the wall to strip it down from the top down and take the stones back vs just making new stone bricks? Or was there some other motive behind stripping down the walls? ie political “We’re not ruled by the Romans any more so let’s pull that damn wall down!” But then to my knowledge we don’t see evidence of just loads of bricks lying around the bottom of these walls.
Silly story time:
Back in 1984 (I was 10 at the time) my parents took me on a 4 week vacation to England. I remember Hadrian’s Wall being one of the highlights for me on that trip.
Fast forward to a couple of years ago, I took my own family to England for a slightly shorter trip and insisted we drive up north for Hadrian’s Wall. My wife (an anthropology major for a while at Cal Berkeley) was wondering why we were driving 6 hours to the middle of nowhere to look at a Roman wall for a couple of days. But then once we got there, she got it. It was fantastic…we loved it, and I really appreciated how the experience for tourists has improved without getting super commercial or cheesy. A+ would return.
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