Knitting Hadrian

Following a fine and loopy tradition of Kissing Day (July 6), and National Wiggle Your Toes Day (August 6) is Knit in Public Day on June 9th.


Alerted to this Noble-Day-Not-To-Be-Missed by she of www.kamsarmer.blogspot.com, I celebrated by knitting a summer cotton scarf in beautiful blues using Wendy Supreme Double Knit in the back garden of No. 2 Doe Park (Here you can see: my wattle, our purple wheelie bin, and a tiny chip of the vast, monstrous, and collossal Queen Maude Land of an un-recycled plastic water bottle iceberg in a city that does not/can not recycle plastic god damned bottles. My advice to you and everyone you know or will ever meet is this: Renounce Plastic Water Bottles! Use Your Public Water Supply! A tremendous amount of energy goes into cleaning municipal water. Bottled water is shipped huge distances in petroleum-based plastic bottles. Its sanitation is not even always guaranteed. This is a relatively unpopulated band wagon with plenty of room. Hop on with me! More ranting soon and often.);




then suddenly in Liverpool with the beautiful Iconic Waterfront looming like Shalimar beyond, then a little later 200 miles to the north on Hadrian's Wall in Northumbria along the Scottish Borderlands.




Knitting along Hadrians' Wall is to be recommended. The chunk shown here is the footing of a bridge over the Tyne, built in, oh...127-ish, after the first one washed away in a freak deluge, led to a large fort where soldiers (who were an Iberian Legion) stationed for months on the wall could R and R, and, you know bivouac, I suppose and have a sauna, and loll around practiciting hand-to-hand combat. They could also recieve their mail there. The postal system throughout the Roman Empire was so reliable and established that you could send away for harnesses wrought in Tunisia or Phonician pottery and, eventually, it would arrive at this fort on the Scottish border, the northern-most point in the Roman Empire.

Hadrian's wall is the most southerly of the several Britannic frontiers built. The first, the Gask Frontier, was much further to the north to watch the Scottish Glens and passes into the Highlands from which indigenous tribes like the Caledonii and Picts(described as 'pugnacious') would launch attacks when they weren't fighting each other.

Hadrian's Wall runs 80 Roman miles (a Roman mile is 1000 paces) from the North Sea at Newcastle, up and over the country's Pennine spine, to Solway Firth at Carlisle.

This neatly built bridge abuttment lying in a sheep pasture under some oaks, with its chisel and crow bar scrapes and phallic ornamentation (the Roman soldiers were Mithraic and rather earthy) is at a fort right at the top of the Pennines which run 300 miles down the center of England like a fold. Here the River Tyne, limpid when it isn't deluging, over which the bridge was built more than once, runs east to the North Sea, but a mile further on, we and the River Irth headed west.

When the Romans bugged out not long after this bridge was built, the wall, once about 12 feet high, and its forts, turrets, milecastles, and temples were battered into the moors and crags by the elements, dismantled and scavenged (the town hall at Carlisle is made of Roman wall stone) and pulverized for fertilizer (archeologists cringe to find lime kilns on their sites) into waist high, but 9 feet wide, stretches, tell-tale squares, a nine-foot wide ditch and mounds running across the country, the strangely lumpy landscapes that had been quarry, and the road along the back of the wall is now the the A69. In modern currency it is estimated that the wall would have cost 3 billiion pounds to construct.

When the Romans left Brittania in the