Tuesday England Blog Post:
Well, that was a pretty long day. Right now it’s 8:24 Greenwich Mean Time, so school would normally be getting out for you yanks. We are wrapping up a twenty-eight hour day. The flights were fairly uneventful; actually the students were tremendous helpful and flexible as we navigated a great deal of downtime at both Logan and Newark International Airports.
After connecting with Gareth at Glasgow Airport, we met Paul, our bus driver, and started the journey south from Scotland to England. All those clichés about the hills of Scotland and sheep are clichés for a reason. We saw many, many sheep; in fact, for some students, it was their first time seeing actual livestock… lots of livestock. Rather than succumb to the temptation of heading to the hotel and falling prey to the clutches of an early sleep and the subsequent trap of jet lag, we had our first encounter with Roman Britain: Vercovicium (or Housesteads Roman Fort, as it is currently known).
Stop me if you’ve heard this before… the leader of a powerful nation is determined to manage a relatively tame border by erecting a wall. No one is quite sure why the wall will be useful, and it will require a great deal of resources to build and maintain that wall. The wall will not necessarily keep anyone from crossing the border, but it will look impressive. The wall eventually becomes a financial and bureaucratic boondoggle, and it is eventually abandoned. That leader is…. take a guess… NOPE! Not that one… It was the Roman Emperor Hadrian.
Around AD 122, Hadrian visited the Roman province of Britannia to check out the success of the latest imperial expansion. Northern Roman settlements had to deal with the occasional raiding party from tribes such as the Picts (think early Viking-types). Not long thereafter, construction on a wall that would span the entire eighty mile width of Great Britain (at that latitude). Hadrian had decided that Rome should no longer focus on expansion of the empire but rather the defense of the current empire. Every couple of miles along this wall, there was a fort to house a garrison to protect the Northern Roman border. Vercovicium is the most intact ruin of these forts, and we got to explore those ruins and walk along a portion of the wall. In fact, the Vercovicium ruins have one the best-preserved examples of a Roman latrine. In AD 138, after Hadrian’s death, the next Roman emperor, Antoninus, gave up on Hadrian’s wall and built his own wall one-hundred miles north. Forts like Vercovicium were abandoned despite the considerable cost of building and maintaining them.
It was a great way to stretch all of our muscles (mental muscles included) after a long travel day. After the tour of the fort, we boarded the bus for our hotel in Gretna Green. If you recall, Gretna Green is the elopement capital of the United Kingdom, and sure enough, as we were driving up to the front reception, a wedding photographer was staging shots of the most recent happy couple to wed at this picturesque little hotel. After a filling dinner (some of us… including me… had traditional Highland Chicken… chicken stuffed with haggis), we are all retiring for a well-earned rest.
Tomorrow morning we will board the bus for Rydal Mount and Haworth, respectively the literary homes of Wordsworth and the Brontes. I will post again tomorrow night and wish you all well.
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