Hadrian's Wall: Life on the Frontier The Flying Archaeologist

Nothing in our landscape is here by accident.

It's all part of the incredible story

of how people have shaped our country over thousands of years.

Every ridge, every bump has a meaning.

I'm Ben Robinson

and it's my job as an archaeologist

to try and unpick this great story.

And, from my point of view,

the best place to do that is up here.

Aerial photography is revealing a different view of the past.

I'm flying along Hadrian's Wall.

The view from above is blowing apart the idea

that this was just a barren, military landscape.

Who really lived here?

And did the Romans conquer this land earlier than we thought?

What we'll discover here

is not just changing our understanding of the Roman frontier,

but it's rewriting history.

Roman rule once stretched from Syria to Spain,

North Africa to Britain.

THIS was the edge of the Empire.

The Romans had established a frontier,

then, they built a wall across Britain

on the orders of one man.

In the year 122 AD, the Emperor Hadrian

ordered the construction of this mighty wall.

It was intended to mark the end of the Roman world,

to separate the civilised south from the barbarian north.

And there it stood,

an impermeable military barrier,

jealously guarded by troops until the end of Roman rule.

End of story?

Not quite.

A new picture is emerging

and it's not about what we can see down here,

but what we can see from up there.

'Hadrian's Wall was originally up to 15 feet high.'

It ran across a narrow part of Britain for more than 70 miles,

from what's now Tyneside, across Northumberland and into Cumbria.

Near the Wall was this -

an extra line of defence we now call the Vallum.

The Vallum is a big ditch

with two big banks on either side of it.

It's like the Roman equivalent of barbed wire.

You can still see the earthworks,

the lumps and bumps tearing through the landscape, even today.

At first glance, this is just a military landscape.

A mile away from the wall,

the Romans built a fort for soldiers on the frontier,

a site called Vindolanda,

which archaeologists have always thought dates back to around 85 AD.

But in the 1960s, aerial photography first revealed

that the site was much more than just a military base.

As you can clearly see on this photograph,

the fort itself was very, very prominent,

BUT thanks to aerial photography,

we can then see there's a heck of a lot going on

outside the walls of the fort.

That's really interesting.

-Here's the stuff that's readily apparent and that we can see.

-Yeah.

But what about all this slightly more vague material?

Oh, yeah, I mean, it looks sort of vague on the ground,

but on the aerial photograph, it looks, "Wow!",

this is, it's really jumping out of the ground.

The earthworks actually hinted at a huge vicus,

a civilian town next to the fort.

This has since been well excavated.

But on this photo, there's something else

which has intrigued archaeologists for all this time.

You see the corner of something appearing in the field,

it's a monumental sort of corner

which couldn't happen in a natural sort of way.

So you think, "Right, somebody's done that."

And then, the question is - who and why?

Andrew Birley believes this is a fort.

One that will change the history of the Roman frontier as we know it.

And now, his team is finally digging.

What have you got there?

I just got a little piece of copper alloy, that we've found,

so it's probably a piece of scale mail armour.

Definitely soldiers, then.

Yes, absolutely. It would appear so.

This is like the day it was buried, isn't it? It's incredible.

I think it's safe to say that they were repairing their armour.

You can imagine hundreds of these little scales,

they must have broken off occasionally

and they'd take one and just get rid of it.

-Fix your armour.

-Yeah, make it look nice, cos there's nothing else to do.

Right, there's no TV to watch.

'Emphatic evidence that this is indeed a fort,

'but why is this one special?'

We think that it's very likely

there was actually an earlier Roman fort on this site.

So that's what we're looking for here.

As we started excavating the ditches,

we were getting more and more evidence to suggest

that this actually could predate anything on this part of the site

that we've previously known about.

Pottery they've found suggests the fort was built in the '70s AD,

ten years before anything else around here.

If so, it suggests the Roman army

set up their military frontier across Britain

much earlier than the history books tell us.

This stuff just doesn't survive

-on 99% of archaeological sites, does it?

-Absolutely.

It's very rare that we get this. You can actually still smell the leather.

It's very thin, it's probably goatskin,

-so we imagine that this was a bit of a tent.

-Goatskin, tents, good grief!

And they had to patch them every once in a while cos, of course,

-up here, it's important that your tent is waterproof.

-Yes!

So they were repairing them constantly

and you can see the actual points where they've stitched through it.

It has a meaning. It's about someone's life in the past.

Absolutely. Every little artefact that we find, it does,

it links right to a person, at least one who actually handled it and did things with it.

But it may take years for the team to find that smoking gun,

the crucial evidence of the timber fort gates.

The tree rings on the wood would pin down the construction date.

It could prove that the Romans established their frontier

before we realised and 50 years before Hadrian built his wall.

This excavation is just one small part of a much bigger investigation

'of the whole area around Hadrian's Wall.'

Crucially, our view from the air

is putting individual sites in their context.

'Although archaeologists have been taking aerial photographs

'of Hadrian's Wall for 70 years or more,

'it's only now that Dave MacLeod and his team at English Heritage

'have finally pieced all that evidence together.'

Obviously, the focus tends to be, you know, this -

the Wall and the forts,

that's what people come to see.

But we know this landscape has monuments in it

of all types and all periods.

Here's Hadrian's Wall.

English Heritage has painstakingly plotted every archaeological feature

on an ordnance survey map.

Bit by bit,

from one side of the country

to the other.

By seeing how everything fits together,

for the first time, we're getting the full historical picture

of this whole area.

It's very much a broad-brush approach, obviously,

because what we can't do is go into great depth on any particular site.

'Some of the sites have been more closely studied

'and these are revealing the story of people

'who lived and worked around the wall.'

Oh, that's wonderful. Oh, look at the light!

The light is just perfect now.

It's fantastic!

'Roman camps are really prominent.

'They're a very distinctive shape -

'rectangles with rounded corners, like playing cards.

'These were inhabited by Roman soldiers

'for just a few days or weeks.

'Yet, you can still see them from the air.

'There's even the corner of one

'under the runway at Carlisle airport.

'I love these camps, because they really add to the human story here.

'These aren't about the commanders

'who lived in the comfort of the permanent fort,

'they're more about the lowly soldiers in tents

'being battered by the harsh weather.

'Whitemoss Farm, at the west end of the wall,

'is particularly interesting.'

If you think about something like Glastonbury or T In The Park,

one of the music festivals,

muddy fields full of tents.

Well, that's essentially what you've got with these camps.

The camps show up as crop marks.

Wherever Roman soldiers had dug ditches,

the crops grow differently now.

And even today, in very dry summers,

you can still see the imprints

of these ditches.

This was a site that the soldiers returned to again and again.

There's three, four, potentially as many as five camps here

that would have been occupied at different times.

But the one that we're potentially looking at in this field here

has got a whole succession of pits inside it.

They just look like blobs on the air photographs,

but what they would have been is probably the rubbish pits.

'Rebecca has analysed the number and size of the rubbish pits

'from the crop marks.

'By doing that, this field really comes to life.'

Because we can see this level of detail on this camp here,

I think that we're potentially looking at up to 1,500 men.

And there are clues that there could have been ovens here.

Below the round ovens, where the soldiers cooked and baked bread,

fire pits would have been dug,

and these can show as crop marks too.

When ovens on similar sites have been excavated,

they give us a fascinating insight into life in the camp.

You've got massively different styles in the ovens

and that may well suggest different cooking styles.

Potentially, different ethnic identities,

because the Roman army was made up of soldiers

from right across the Empire,

from North Africa to Syria, to Romania, to Spain.

A few marks in a farmer's field

provide a window into a truly multicultural community

and it's here, at the very edge of Roman civilisation.

Think about the sights, the smells,

the food that you could get along Hadrian's Wall.

You've got Syrian archers, Spanish cavalry.

If you went out for a night on Hadrian's Wall,

you could have one heck of a good time.

And some pretty exotic stuff to eat on your way as well.

Isn't it amazing that something as fragile as a rubbish pit

or an oven just used temporarily can survive all this time

and come beaming out at us from the air?

It'd show that that level of evidence still surviving is exceptionally rare

and what makes this site so fascinating.

But we can't be exactly sure what the soldiers were doing here.

Were they on manoeuvres? Was it a training camp?

There's another camp where we've now got proof

of what the soldiers were doing.

And it's been found using an aerial tool called LIDAR -

Light Detection And Ranging.

Millions of light beams are shot from the air

onto the ground and bounced back.

We can then build a very accurate digital model of the landscape,

which can even reveal what lies under trees and woods.

The computer allows us to change the angle of light

and this makes features that were invisible stand out.

Look at this section of Hadrian's Wall,

right at the bottom.

There's just the hint of a Roman camp.

This lay undiscovered until 2010,

when, from hundreds of miles away,

archaeologist Bryn Gethin had a speculative look

at some of the LIDAR images on the internet.

The first bits I looked at

just happen to be here, where we're walking up to now

and I was very sure I could see a Roman camp on it.

We're right by Hadrian's Wall, right on the Vallum, yet no-one has seen this site before.

-That's right.

-And you've never been here before?

No, I've never been to this particular spot before,

cos it's, although the Vallum is very impressive,

it's a rough, tusky old field.

If I was walking on the Hadrian's Wall path,

I'd have walked right past it and never seen it.

It's 56.8...

'This site seems unremarkable at ground level.

'But, actually, further investigation has revealed

'that the camp was next to a Roman quarry.

'Humphrey Welfare and his brother Adam have measured the site

'and they're just finishing off a detailed archaeological survey.'

We can begin to tell the story without having to excavate anything.

This camp, without the LIDAR and air photograph,

we simply would not have seen.

It's quite a reasonable size,

it's enough for a cohort of Roman soldiers, about 500 to 600 men.

So what were the soldiers in this camp here to do?

First of all, to quarry and select the stone to build the wall.

You found the place where the wall builders actually lived.

How do you feel about that?

Oh, I'm really pleased.

I'm very pleased that Humphrey and Adam have managed to interpret

what, in many ways,

seems like another Roman camp on Hadrian's Wall.

It makes sense.

It's right next to the wall,

and once the soldiers had dug a big hole to get the stone,

the quarry became part of the defensive ditch known as the Vallum.

How important is this camp to our understanding

of how this frontier was built?

It gives us another little insight,

a little window into what happened during the construction of the wall.

And that's how archaeology builds up,

piece by piece, building confidence

that we can reconstruct the past,

despite the passage of time.

People tend to think that the wall was this big grand design,

this masterpiece that was executed all in one go.

And sites like this show us

that, actually, the engineers, the troops,

had to adapt to local circumstances

and they didn't always get it right.

Just occasionally, you can see evidence

that the quarrymen seem to have got it wrong.

Here we are in one of the Roman quarries

and a huge boulder which has been left.

All around here,

there are hundreds of impact marks from chisels.

They've been trying to split this rock

and clearly, someone's come along and said,

"Oh, for goodness' sake, forget it!

"That's not sandstone, that's a much harder rock."

And so, they've given up.

So this is a little monument to human failure

and a lot of bad language, I'm sure.

Lots of people visit this area

and they look at the spectacular archaeology.

But as they're walking along,

they're missing all these other parts of the landscape,

this fuller story.

All these fragments of crop marks,

all these sites, actually add up to people and their endeavours

and the way that they worked the land.

It wasn't just soldiers,

the view from above is shining new light

on just how many people lived on this frontier.

Early aerial photos started to change our ideas

about Roman forts like Vindolanda.

Aerial photography will tell us,

"You know what? I think you've got something out there."

And really, it's aerial photography

that first told us that, you know,

we need to really broaden our view of the site, of the fort,

we need to move outside of the fort itself.

And outside, excavation of the vicus, the civilian town,

is revealing ever more about the communities

and families who lived here.

There are families of soldiers here and we see them in the documents.

They're commemorated in burials,

we find them on the discharge documents from the soldiers.

These families were a part of the community.

Excavations at Vindolanda

have produced hundreds of writing tablets,

many of them are letters

with fascinating details about everyday life.

"If you love me, Brother, I ask that you send me some hunting nests..."

"For the day of the celebration of my birthday,

"I give you a warm invitation..."

"..of socks from Sattua, two pairs of sandals

"and two pairs of underpants."

The most famous tablet is a friendly memo between two soldiers' wives.

One invited the other to a birthday party

and then, puts her own little scroll at the bottom that says, you know,

"Sister, dearest, I'd love you to be there.

"The day wouldn't be the same without you." And all this.

What it's really suggesting to me, together with a few other ones,

is that people were living a normal life up here.

It paints a picture of a secure landscape,

a frontier buzzing with life.

Aerial photography in recent years has shown

that the civil settlements outside the fort

are much bigger than we thought they were.

If you think about each fort along Hadrian's Wall

holding about 500 people and then, having a vicus outside

where you've got

up to 2,000 people probably,

strung right away along the country,

you've suddenly got a lot of people.

'The civilian towns were also places of great economic potential.

'Roman soldiers had money to burn.

'They needed services, shops, taverns.

'It reminds me of the way a modern army town,

'like Catterick Garrison, in North Yorkshire, works today.'

Just like at Vindolanda,

there's a civilian community here outside the military base.

Here, there's places to gamble, places to drink,

there's places where you can buy food that isn't army food,

where you can buy clothes that aren't army clothes.

Economically, the presence of the army here

is very, very important to this place.

And, equally, the army appreciates having somewhere like this close by.

So the presence of the Roman soldiers created a market economy,

though the army still had control over the civilian towns.

But what was beyond that military zone around Hadrian's Wall?

There's an idea that it was a wilderness,

populated by just a few scattered native tribes.

'This is where the aerial mapping programme is changing our thinking.'

Beautiful! Look at that!

HE CHUCKLES

Isn't that wonderful?

'For many years, the only remains of native sites

'that the archaeologists could really see

'were hillforts like this.'

What they suggest is insecurity, warfare.

What we thought we saw was a very militaristic landscape,

very sparsely populated

and all we saw was what survived at the surface.

Then, suddenly, when we started to fly, a whole new world emerged.

We started to see, instead of these very few hillforts,

huge numbers, tens of thousands of isolated farms,

completely undefended.

You cannot have a landscape like that in an insecure world,

because your family's on the line, lives are at stake.

You can only have a landscape like that

when people are so used to peace that they take it for granted.

And that utterly changes the story of how we see the Romans.

It suggests that the Romans

weren't just an aggressive occupying military force.

Over time, they had to forge working relationships

with the native population.

A wonderful sight, brilliant!

This native settlement,

at a place called Milking Gap, in Northumberland,

is an intriguing example.

It's a little Iron Age farmstead.

And pretty much in the middle, we've got the house,

which is a straightforward roundhouse.

It's thrilling to be in a prehistoric house, isn't it?

I wish we still had the roof.

You can just sort of imagine it,

you can picture it all coming together.

This is not a Roman structure

and they're doing things

that you'd expect a prehistoric population to be doing in this area.

They're farming, they have a house.

This probably typifies

how people lived in this landscape.

To the west, on the Solway Plain,

crop marks show Iron Age farms everywhere.

In other areas,

earthworks of larger settlements are still visible.

Putting all the aerial photo evidence on the same map,

is now showing that, in many areas,

there were farms and settlements

every few hundred metres.

The aerial photography is showing us

that this landscape was settled and farmed

hundreds of years before the Romans got here,

it was already a managed landscape.

And contrary to what you might imagine, when the Romans came,

they didn't destroy everything in their path to build the wall.

I think there's a danger of thinking of a frontier or a military zone

as a sort of sterilised zone,

scorched earth, if you like, around it.

But, actually, it's probably not possible to sustain life

in that kind of area.

Is it possible that Rome actually encouraged people to live here?

That's the really interesting part about this site.

We are slap bang in the middle of that militarised zone

of the frontier, between wall and vallum.

So the Roman army seemed to have allowed this farm at Milking Gap

to stay in the military no-man's-land at least for a time.

Why?

Some local farmers no doubt provided food to the soldiers,

but the natives didn't just help with the necessities of life,

they also provided some luxuries too.

When sites, including Milking Gap, have been excavated,

surprisingly, we've found jewellery made by natives

but using Roman glass.

Similar bracelets to this have been found at Milking Gap.

This cobalt blue is particularly popular.

The local population are using Roman material

to make something which is purely their own

and they see glass bottles not as something useful as containers,

but as a useful recycling material for making a glass bracelet.

Certainly, several of these have been found in Roman forts,

where they look as if they have been sold to the Roman soldiers

as probably gifts to give to their friends.

Their economic thinking must have altered over a few generations

to the point where they see the real possibilities

of producing things to sell to the Roman garrisons,

because the guys in these forts, they need their comforts.

It's perhaps the greatest recent discovery from the air.

All these native settlements south of the wall

show just how well populated the military frontier was

before, during and after the Romans arrived.

Many natives would have had to learn to live with their conquerors.

But what about life just outside the Empire,

on the other side of the wall?

There's a perception that what was going on north of the wall

was the edge of the known world,

barbarian territory, barren, of no interest to Rome.

'Our view from the air is revealing something quite astonishing

'about this theory as well.'

Yeah, if you could whip it round in a turn now.

Let's have a look.

There's definitely a little enclosure there.

'I'm flying just north of the wall,

'and I can see native settlements and Roman camps,

'all sorts going on.'

Living to the north of the wall - no different from the south,

as far as we can tell. The same sorts of sites occur in that landscape

as they do down there.

You just have to mentally remove this.

Take this all away and you have a continuity of landscape,

a continuity of settlement and tradition. Life goes on.

This photo shows a key Roman installation north of the wall.

It's the site of an aqueduct,

built to provide a water supply to one of the forts to the south.

But, at this point,

the photograph shows us that it meets a native settlement.

Instead of avoiding it,

it runs into the ditch,

around the circuit of the ditch

and out the other side.

That's really interesting, what was going on here?

It shows a comfort in their own security and power, in a sense,

and that they're happy for something as important as a water resource

to be placed north of the frontier.

Now, you don't put your water supply into enemy hands.

Clearly, they were very confident

that this was an area that was theirs,

even though it was beyond the wall.

Small clues like this question a preconception

that Hadrian's Wall was this impenetrable divide

between the Roman Empire and Caledonia,

the barbarian land beyond.

Aerial archaeology is showing

that there was not just Roman military activity

on the north side of the wall, as well as on the south,

but there was movement.

I'm at Port of Tyne,

which is right on the eastern end of Hadrian's Wall.

And just like this border, Hadrian's Wall was not there

to totally stop access and to stop movement,

but to control people and trade.

Hadrian's Wall was not a solid barrier.

Every Roman mile there was a fortified gateway,

which today we call a mile castle.

The mile castles were the main crossing routes.

There's a black shale which comes from Midlothian,

which is being found in carved jewellery

in South Shields, York and further south.

Now, Midlothian at the time is way beyond the frontier,

this is very much in barbarian territory,

but luxury material was being transferred through,

so it's obviously coming through the wall.

If the frontier didn't change life immediately

for those north of the wall, it certainly did over time.

After all, the Romans ruled for nearly 400 years.

Hadrian's Wall came to effect social change

between those inside the Roman Empire and those outside.

North of the wall, they are abandoning the native settlements

in the mid to late second century.

We don't know where they're going.

South of the wall, they go on occupying the native settlements

and they start to build little bathhouses and rectangular buildings

and they start to have a completely different lifestyle.

So the wall is forming some sort of barrier,

but it's a cultural barrier rather than a defensive barrier.

We are seeing the frontier through new eyes.

It wasn't just a wilderness outpost

populated only by patrolling Roman soldiers.

It was a multicultural place with diverse communities,

south and north of the wall.

We've found where the soldiers who built the wall camped.

And aerial photography is even leading to discoveries

that suggest the Romans could have established the frontier

earlier than we thought,

up to 50 years before the wall finally went up.

We are on the cusp of answering some more big questions.

When was this part of Britain pacified? When was it conquered?

When was it taken into the fold of the Roman Empire?

From huge numbers of native farms

to Roman camps and then large towns,

there's a fuller story here

and it's about so much more

than a military barrier on the edge of Empire.

'Unless you're half a mile up in the sky looking down,

'very often you don't really see how all these things connect together.'

Hadrian's Wall isn't just this thin line, it is a whole landscape

that facilitated the Roman rule in this area for almost 400 years

and that's an incredibly impressive achievement.

What the aerial photography is showing us

is that this is a landscape that's about far more

than just Hadrian's grand design.

It's about the efforts of ordinary people, ordinary soldiers,

the native population.

The traces of what they did are visible to us today

after all this time,

and their efforts are written in the landscape.

To me, that makes this place even more special.

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