Brian Roamin' Britain

Hadrian's Wall, in 126, delineated the northern-most frontier of the Roman Empire.

At the northern-most jut in this northern-most frontier, Brian surveys the whole Roman Empire to the civilized South.






While Liz surveys the wild North.

The Wall was built of stone because, as long as 500 years before the Romans arrived, Celts and indigenous people had felled the vast oak and pine forests that had covered the island, in order to forge iron. Axes presumably.

Here are Brian and Liz goofing around with auto-photo mode looking as if they have been slain, but actually attempting to alert you to the basaltic whitstone chunk above their decapitated heads that shows dramatic and impressive evidence of having been hewn.



And hewn it had been. By a Roman craftsman-soldier, no less. With Roman craftsman-soldier tools who was thinking Roman craftsman-soldier thoughts the last one being something like: "Criminy. This basaltic whitstone is a bugger to chisel. I'm off to the baths." And here it lies to this day getting rained on and snowed on and stoats and rabbits and sheep and now we come and sit on it and look at Scotland to the north. Oh the weird time-folding under an indifferent sky.

The Wall gives the landscape an exciting "Those tha' came before us" feel. It's always pleasant to think of that "What the...!" moment of discovery: the feeling that the Basque farmer must have had brushing himself off and feeling around for broken bones after falling through a hole in what turned out to be the roof of the Altamira caves, lighting a Bic, and being surrounded by buffalo. Or the Chinese farmer digging a well on the outskirts of Xian and finding himself wallowing shin deep in scowling, terra-cotta heads. Or! just west of these photos, the English farmer out in the morning on the bog to look over his sheep in an especially dry summer, that had -unbeknownst to him (and that's the best part) - caused the peat to recede revealing a chunk of what turned out to be a Roman Mithraic temple bubbling up from the sedge. What else is in there?

They didn't know about us, but we know about them. Someone will know about us, cobbling our world together by deciphering epitaphs, graffiti, battered hard-drives, and falling through roofs of what will turn out to be semidetached houses, leisure centres, the chippy... and they'll form opinions...