Back to the Nearly All Romans calendar
Here we go again, wall building. By now the Roman soldiers had advanced a little more into Caledonia (as they called Scotland)
and a new emperor, Antoninus Pius decided to build a new wall in this further north location. Unluckily for him, this was known as the Antonine Wall. Hadrian’s Wall
stretched from Newcastle to Carlisle (atlas time) while this new one went from the Firth of Forth to the Firth of Clyde (well you shouldn’t have put it away should
you?). It was shorter, about 36 miles long, only about 10 feet high and had a 15 foot ditch on the northern side of the wall.
It took about 12 years to build and all the work was done by the 7,000
Roman troops stationed in Caledonia. There were 17 forts, so you can work out roughly how far apart these were, (divide 36 by 16 not 17 because there was a fort
at each end) and there were little fortlets between these big forts. The Romans also built a road called, imaginatively the military way, along the south side of
the wall so soldiers and supplies could easily move between the forts.
However, the reason I used the word “unluckily” about Mr Antoninus’ wall was that just 7 years after it was finished, the Romans abandoned it and all
the soldiers were sent back to Hadrian’s wall. One of the reasons for this may have been that this wall was built entirely of turf on a stone foundation and the Picts, possibly under Andy Murray, liked playing on grass and kept running up the wall and serving the Romans a volley of whatever was their latest weapon.
Forward to 155AD
