The Edge Of Empire

A hike along the Antonine Wall reveals Rome's brief hold on Scotland

- by PETER ROSS

WHY should you walk the Antonine Wall? Because it isn't there!

It’s not like Hadrian’s Wall, which is beautiful and romantic, a symphony in stone rising and falling with the Northumberland countryside. The Antonine Wall, constructed during the reign of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, has all but vanished from Scotland.

To walk its 60km (37 miles), as I did over four days, is a work of mind as well as body, and it asks as much of the imagination as the legs. It is an act of recomposition: lost music played from a fragment of manuscript page.

We — I had my son Jack with me, a boy of 16 — had chosen to make the journey from east to west. This would have two advantages. One, we'd be walking in the same direction as the wall appears to have been built. Two, as Glaswegians, we'd be heading in the direction of home.

We began in Bo’ness on the south bank of the Firth of Forth. It was the day of the annual Children’s Fair. Lots of the old mining towns have fair days and galas, but none on quite this scale. Many families build frontages, known as “arches”, in front of their homes: Disney castles, medieval fortresses, fairyland grottoes, anything goes. Not much to do with the Romans, but proof that, almost 2,000 years later, people round here still build big.

The Antonine Wall was laid upon the waist of Scotland, its most slender part, in or around AD 142. During its 20 or so years of occupation it was defended by a force of 5,000 men and marked the north-western frontier of the Roman Empire.

The rampart, built from stacked blocks of turf, sloped inwards as it rose to at least 10 feet.

North of this wall — in other words closer to the so-called “barbarians” — was a V-shaped ditch about 40 feet wide and 12 deep. This ditch is what wall-walkers mostly see — when they can see anything at all.