The night-time half of our holiday in Northumberland has been spent at Battlesteads Observatory, seeing the light emitted from stars and nebulae thousands or millions of years in the past. The days have been spent looking for the more recent past along Hadrian’s Wall, and it’s been just as amazing.
We went to Housesteads Fort on Sunday morning -a threatening-drizzle day with sunny patches and a stiff breeze, ideal for walking up the steep bank to the museum and the fort. The museum is tiny, but contains a lot of finds, information and a short film, along with a coffee machine and a range of books and postcards and souvenirs. And themed alcohol. Why not.
It was two hours full of wandering among the foundations, reading the information boards and imagining the life of the soldiers standing guard on the Wall nearly two thousand years ago. It did make me think of George Martin’s ‘Song of Ice and Fire’ (Game of Thrones, if you prefer TV to books) and it was no surprise that his great ice wall and the soldiers who guarded against the beasts to the north was said to have been inspired by a visit to Hadrian’s Wall.
We were free all day on Monday, so we spent the time in Vindolanda, the archaeological dig around the area of the barracks / village that supplied soldiers to garrison duty at Housesteads. Finds were noted as having been dug up around the area in the 19th century, and from 1972 Robin Birley (picking up after his father’s deep interest) began a long-term excavation that is still going on today. Each year, volunteers spend time in summer digging deeper and further afield to find out more about the buildings, the water supply, the lives of the people who lived there. Volunteer slots opened online last week and were all filled within an hour.
The foundations show where the buildings were; the village outside the fort walls and the barracks, commander’s house and bath-house – and the toilets. The toilet at Housesteads claims to be the oldest toilet in Britain, though I bet there’s hedges and ditches that could tell a few tales of pre-Roman history. The illustration of three Romans sitting in the communal loo with their little wiping sticks in hand is going to stay with me for some time.
Having seen the explanation of the whole site in the entrance hall, walked around most of the site and heard the lectures at the listening posts, we headed downhill to the cafe and museum. Nice cafe, with good lunchtime food and a mural of Romans enjoying a party. Great museum.
There’s a display cabinet of shoes, and it brings home that these were people. Delicate sandals that cost a fortune, soldiers’ boots, child’s shoes. All with the imprint of the feet that wore them. There’s a cabinet of tools, of horse gear, of weapons. There’s a cabinet of coins, some of them bright and distinct as modern coins – and I remembered Lara Maiklem’s comment on coins, that she found Roman and mediaeval coins with the words and images still distinct, and modern ‘copper’ coins rusting into nothing after a couple of years.
The best part was finding out about the Vindolanda tablets. The film about them shows Robin Birley explaining that they dug down at the end of a year’s session and found a hole full of muddy remains of something. They marked the spot, covered the hole and returned to it the following year. And found a cache of writing on wood tablets, burned but not well enough to obscure most of the writing. It’s believed that the commander burned the correspondence and records in the second century AD, before the legion marched off to fight in Dacia, but that the Northumbrian drizzle put the flames out and the next legion just shovelled mud and clay over it, sealing the documents off from further decay. The letters are details of troop numbers, an invitation to a birthday party, an application for leave of absence and an appeal for friends from a soldier just arrived in the area, among hundreds of others. They’re people far from home putting ink to wood about their daily lives.
Our legs and backs gave up before we came to the end of it, and next summer there’ll be an army of volunteers digging up more finds, more buildings, more evidence of Roman life. Two metres down under our feet, the people who were here 1,800 years ago. We have to come back.
The man behind the ticket stall saw us leave and came out to ask whether we’d enjoyed our visit. He seemed genuinely interested. We chatted with him for another ten minutes about the lovely countryside, the history, the interest, the Wall, and reassured him we’d be back for the rest. We didn’t tell him how good it was to have so many people who really did hope you’d had a good day, and weren’t just saying the words because it was in the script, but I think that’s been the best part of visiting Northumberland.
Julia Chalkley 