Newcastle sits on the north bank of the River Tyne, near the eastern end of the line the Romans drew across Britain nineteen centuries ago. The city grew from a river crossing the Romans fortified, was rebuilt by the Normans into the “new castle” that gave it its name, and later became one of the engines of the industrial north. We came for the Hadrian’s Wall collection at the Great North Museum, and stayed for the castle the whole city is named after. The two sit a short walk apart, and they tell the same story from two ends.

The Great North Museum

The Great North Museum, the Hancock is a free museum on the Newcastle University campus, a short walk north of the city center. It brings together the old Hancock natural history collection with the university’s Museum of Antiquities and its Greek collection, so under one roof there is a life-size cast of a Tyrannosaurus, Egyptian mummies, Greek art, a planetarium, and the Hadrian’s Wall gallery we had come to see.

The Hadrian’s Wall gallery holds the single greatest collection of objects from the whole length of the Wall. Down the middle of the room runs a scale model of the entire frontier, more than fifty feet long, with interactive points that follow it fort by fort from the Tyne to the Solway. Around it stand the things pulled from the Wall over two centuries: altars, inscribed stones, sculpture, and the carved dedications that soldiers and officers left behind. The inscriptions are the heart of it. They carry the names, ranks, and home provinces of individual men posted to this frontier, people from across the Roman Empire who lived and died at its far northern edge.

The gallery is a good introduction to the Wall, but it is an introduction. The Wall itself runs seventy-three miles across the country and needs a day of its own to walk, and we left that for a later post.

Hadrian’s Wall

The Wall was begun in AD 122, on the orders of the emperor Hadrian, and ran from the Tyne in the east to the Solway Firth in the west, the narrow neck of the island. It was a stone frontier the Romans built to mark and hold the northern edge of the province of Britain, with forts, smaller milecastles, and turrets set along its length, and a garrison drawn from across the empire. It was not a battle line so much as a barrier and a checkpoint, controlling who and what crossed, taxing trade, and marking where Rome decided its world ended and the unconquered north began.

The Wall belongs to the beginning of the story we told in the peopling of England. It was the Roman frontier while Britain was still a Roman province, three centuries before the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes crossed the North Sea. Rome held this line, then left the island around 410, and it was into that emptied Roman Britain that the peoples in that post arrived. Standing at the Wall, or in front of the model of it, is standing at the edge of the island as it was just before the peopling of England begins.

Newcastle Castle Keep

The Castle Keep is the oldest standing building in Newcastle, and the reason the city has its name. The rock it stands on has guarded the river crossing for nearly two thousand years. The Romans built the fort of Pons Aelius here, “the bridge of Aelius,” Aelius being the family name of the emperor Hadrian, the same man who ordered the Wall. The fort marked the eastern end of that Wall before the line was later extended downriver to Wallsend. Nothing of the Roman fort stands above ground now, but the site never stopped being fortified.

In 1080 Robert Curthose, the eldest son of William the Conqueror, built a timber Norman castle on the old Roman ground after a campaign against the Scots. That “new castle upon Tyne” is what the city is named for. Curthose brings the site into the peopling of England at its far end. The Normans were the last of the peoples in that story to arrive and stay, crossing from northern France in 1066, and the castle they raised here is the frontier story closing where it began. The Wall marks the island just before the peopling of England starts; the Norman castle marks its close, three centuries of incomers later. The wooden castle was replaced with the stone keep that stands today, built for Henry the Second between 1172 and 1177 by a royal engineer named Maurice. A gate, the Black Gate, was added in the 1240s. The two are run together now as one site, though the railway to Scotland was driven straight through the gap between them in the nineteenth century, and the main line still passes between the keep and the gate.

We climbed through the floors of the keep, past the garrison chapel and the great hall, and came out on the roof. The views from the top were the best part, the city and the river laid out below, the high rock over the Tyne, the bridges crossing where the Roman one crossed, the reason every builder from the Romans onward chose this spot.