Hadrian's Wall

Hadrian's Wall stretches 73 miles across northern England from Wallsend on the Tyne estuary in the east to Bowness-on-Solway on the Solway Firth in the west, following a line that roughly corresponds to today's border between England and Scotland. Begun in 122 AD during the reign of Emperor Hadrian following an imperial visit to Britain and largely completed within six years, the wall was the northernmost permanent frontier of the Roman Empire and represents one of the most significant surviving Roman structures anywhere in the world. The wall reaches its most dramatic surviving form in the central section, where it follows the crest of the Whin Sill — a band of hard dolerite rock that produces a natural escarpment — with sections standing up to three metres high and accompanied by a deep ditch to the north. The designated Hadrian's Wall Path National Trail follows the entire 84-mile length (including the approaches) from coast to coast and is one of England's most rewarding long-distance walks. Day walkers focus on the central section between Steel Rigg and Housesteads for the most complete surviving wall stretches and the best scenery. Housesteads Roman Fort (Vercovicium), maintained by English Heritage, is the best-preserved auxiliary fort on the wall and offers extensive excavated remains of barracks, headquarters building, granaries, and a latrine. Vindolanda, a short distance south of the main wall, has produced extraordinary organic preservation of wooden tablets bearing handwritten letters and records from the 1st and 2nd centuries — among the most intimate texts surviving from the Roman world. The Sycamore Gap near Steel Rigg, site of a lone sycamore tree that became famous from the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, was the subject of an act of deliberate vandalism in 2023; the stump and fallen tree remain as a point of pilgrimage.