The sandal is extraordinarily well preserved; its leather looks soft, comfy and was clearly expensive. This is designer footwear, made clear by the still readable stamp in the insole – a maker’s mark that shows the shoe was imported from Europe. The Roman equivalent of ‘Gucci’. The lady to my right shakes her head. “It’s unbelievable,” she says. “It’s like it was just taken off a second ago.”
It is a sensation you need to get used to. We are in the museum at Vindolanda, the Roman fort and settlement close to Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. This marks the starting point of a 7.4-mile looping walk designed to reveal the area’s phenomenal Roman remains, as well as its wide expanses of rugged beauty. But the first challenge is how you drag yourself away from these display cases.
Click here to view the route
Inside are just some of the staggeringly intimate objects unearthed here over the decades of archaeological excavations – from items like coins, baby shoes, beautiful Samian-ware pottery, drinking vessels, marble altars, even a wig – to the more military traces of what was a Wild West frontier of a place at the very edge of the Roman Empire: swords, spears, breastplates, the skull of a decapitated native which had once been stuck on the ramparts as a warning to other troublesome tribesmen.
Among the many archaeological riches, the most famous are the hundreds of thin slivers of wood covered in ink handwriting, the ‘Vindolanda tablets’. These incredible first-person documents, letters and accounts are an unparalleled window into the lives of the people who called this outpost home nearly two-thousand years ago, and the oldest handwritten documents ever found in Britain. Party invites, children’s exercises, kit lists, petitions for leave from soldiers, requests for beer, letters moaning about the state of the roads – they are remarkably familiar things. In fact, standing in front of their scrawled handwriting, the voices and personalities they contain leap into life: “A friend sent me 50 oysters from Cordonovi,” says one. “So I'm sending you half…” Another – more wincingly – requests the prompt return of a favoured pair of castration shears.
Remarkably these tablets are still being unearthed along with many other important finds, thanks to the particular preservative quality of the peaty soil and the fact that the Romans built nine complete forts and towns on the same spot over the centuries, each compressing and sealing the layers below, including whatever lost or discarded items they contained. The uncovering of these layers has been more than a life’s work for one family. Eric Birley began excavating here in 1929 and as we leave the dark, quiet of the museum, we breach out into bright sun and the sound of steel on stone from where archaeologists continue to work under the leadership of Dr Andrew Birley, Eric’s grandson and figurehead for the Vindolanda Trust.
“You’ve got to imagine the mix of people that would be right here,” he tells me, gesturing over the stone remains of a bathhouse, temple, tavern and workshops with a trowel. “Soldiers, their families, veterans, freemen, slaves, merchants – from Germany to Belgium, North Africa. There were Dalmatian infantry, even Syrian archers stationed here. It was a bustling and hugely diverse military society.”
But it’s fair to say that Vindolanda was never exactly a glamorous posting. This was a far-flung frontier originally founded with the purpose of controlling the important cross-Britain road running from east coast to west coast, known as ‘Stanegate’, and to exert dominance over the local and frequently hostile and rebellious tribes. Skirmishes and reprisals were frequent and bloody and eventually led to emperor Hadrian’s construction of his six-metre-high wall in 122 AD to keep the barbarians at bay and his empire intact. Within six years it spanned 70 miles across Britain, from the Solway Firth to the River Tyne, slung with forts, watchtowers and garrisons of soldiers. In Roman minds at least, this was the very edge of the civilised world.
After more time wandering the fascinating footprints of Vindolanda with Dr Birley, we strike off to reach Hadrian’s Wall itself, still visible as a pale-grey line of stone hugging the high line of hill a mile to the north. Pacing west along the old, arrow-straight course of Stanegate, we turn right and up to cross the present road (B6318), stopping for an early lunch at the wonderfully named hamlet of ‘Twice Brewed’, ducking into its inn for hearty roast beef and gravy sandwiches.
A sample or two of some twice-brewed local beers later, we feel duly fortified to tackle the short climb up to the wall. Flower meadows and sheep pasture give way to heathery tussocks, and then we are immediately upon it: a wide, solid, stone ribbon, its blocks still bearing the chisel marks of Roman masons, as it dips and rolls with the undulating land from sea to sea.
As soon as you see its winding line, you understand why this enormous structure was built at this point. As well as safeguarding the vital Stanegate thoroughfare now behind and below us, the hills clearly form a natural border. Whin Sill stretches across the moor like a tidal wave, running across the very shoulders of northern England. Upon its completion in 128 AD, this giant boundary must have seemed an insurmountable barrier to anyone on the wrong side, almost alien in its dimensions, uniformity and precision.
Today, it might not feel quite so forbidding, but it is no less evocative. Walking beside the wall, brushing it with your fingers, you can’t help but feel the presence of the past and the many soldiers that must have walked exactly where you do. Over its tufted, grassy top, to the north, the landscape rolls away like it is a different world, even under the bright sun and a cobalt-blue afternoon sky. Then, after passing the square remains of a milecastle – one of the many little square forts positioned every Roman mile along the wall – we chance upon a more modern slice of history.
Dropping almost vertically down, Hadrian’s Wall hits a little gully or ‘gap’ before rising straight up again on the other side. At the bottom an old tree rises from next to the stones almost filling the space with its dense canopy. This is ‘Sycamore Gap’, the dramatic and iconic setting for the violent encounter between Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood and Guy of Gisburn in the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Under the shade offered by the tree’s branches we drink from water bottles before a group of schoolkids enter into the tranquil scene, excitedly scaling the wall, shrieking like marauding barbarians.
The rewards of walking this section of the wall are not only historical; the views are jaw-dropping as the path rises and runs along the high escarpment leading to Housesteads, another evocative Roman fort and museum situated to the east of Vindolanda and under the ownership of English Heritage. As we rise onto the cliffs above Crag Lough, we look down over a surface that reflects the sky, rippling into rings as its trout flick and rise for flies. Then it’s headlong into a calm, seemingly ageless pinewood filled with the chatter of birdsong. By the time the wall meets Housesteads, the shadows are starting to lengthen. We are victims of our own gawping and have no time to venture inside. So, after slapping the stones goodbye, we cut around the site to begin the leg back to Vindolanda, downhill, away from the great perimeter, back towards civilisation and Rome.
Crossing over the modern road again we pass through fields that bubble and shriek with the calls of curlews. A female rises from her nest in the high grass and circles above us, passing close enough that we can make out its iconic long, down-curved beak. Butterflies cling to stems; the landscape buzzes with life. We rejoin Stanegate and head west along leafy lanes back towards the start when, opposite the front gate of a farm, a sign proclaims that we are beside a Roman milestone.
The column of sandstone has lost its writing over the years – which presumably gave the distances to the nearest major Roman settlements like Corbridge or Hexham – and it leans a little too, but this is now the only milestone left standing in its original position in Britain. Once these stones would have been along all this country’s Roman roads. Walking around it, tracing its surface with my fingers, I once again get the sense of recent departure. Surely over the many hundreds of years this site was occupied by the Romans, the children of Vindolanda would have done the same as me – perhaps too those Syrian archers and thousands of infantrymen from every far-flung corner of the empire. It makes you think.
The market town of Hexham is only a fifteen-minute drive from Vindolanda and the nearest place to stay. After picking up the car, we are soon winding our way through its picturesque streets as evening light begins to honey the sandstone facades. Our hotel – the handsome, smart-fronted BEST WESTERN Beaumont Hotel – is the easily the best-positioned place to down bags in town. Our room faces gorgeous grounds and, if I poke my head out of the window, I can see the fine abbey they belong to, dating back to 674AD, sitting at the end of the road.
After checking the daily changing menu and promising myself the local sea trout, I take a quick stroll down to have a nose around before dinner. It seems wherever you are in this region, even the rarefied atmosphere of Hexham Abbey, you’re never far away from Hadrian’s iconic structure. The Saxon crypt inside this exquisite building was built using Roman stone lifted from the wall, but it’s a striking Roman tombstone for a 25-year-old standard-bearer named Flavinus by the abbey’s night stairs that draws my attention. Carved in sandstone and once brightly painted, it depicts the young soldier riding a horse over a cowering, defeated barbarian – a native Briton – with the Roman squarely kicking his backside as he passes. It smacks of pride; the soldier must have put money aside to afford a headstone that told a story of his own bravery as well as asserting the everlasting dominance of Rome. And just like when standing in front of Vindolanda’s designer sandals, handwritten tablets, nit combs and finest pottery, the two thousand years between then and now vanishes in a heartbeat. As dusk falls outside I feel the magic of places such as these: it is that they make the distant past seem very close indeed.