Any Which Wall

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From the Hardcover edition. In addition to her books for children, Laurel has written two books of poems… More about Laurel Snyder. About Any Which Wall Four kids, a mysterious wall, and a good helping of common magic! Also by Laurel Snyder. Inspired by Your Browsing History.

The Evil Wizard Smallbone. Delia Sherman and Delia Sherman. Douglas Holgate and Max Brallier.

Any Which Wall

The Letter For The King. The Wizard of Oz. The Warrior Princess of Pennyroyal Academy. The Red Fox Clan. The Land of Neverendings. The Island of Horses. To Catch a Thief. The Game Masters of Garden Place.

Willa of the Wood. Mightier Than the Sword. Drew Callander and Alana Harrison. The Door to the Lost. Ghost of a Chance. The Jamie Drake Equation. Four Arms and Wildvine. The Selkie of San Francisco. Once its construction was finished, it is thought to have been covered in plaster and then whitewashed: Construction started in AD [15] and was largely completed in six years. The route chosen largely paralleled the nearby Stanegate road from Luguvalium Carlisle to Coria Corbridge , upon which were situated a series of forts, including Vindolanda.

The wall in its central and best-preserved section follows a hard, resistant igneous diabase rock escarpment, known as the Whin Sill. The initial plan called for a ditch and wall with 80 small gated milecastle fortlets, one placed every Roman mile, holding a few dozen troops each, and pairs of evenly spaced intermediate turrets used for observation and signalling. However, very few milecastles are actually sited at exact Roman mile divisions: Milecastles in this area were also built from timber and earth rather than stone, but turrets were always made from stone.

Hadrian's Wall

The Broad Wall was initially built with a clay-bonded rubble core and mortared dressed rubble facing stones, but this seems to have made it vulnerable to collapse, and repair with a mortared core was sometimes necessary. The milecastles and turrets were of three different designs, depending on which Roman legion built them — inscriptions of the Second , Sixth , and Twentieth Legions, show that all were involved in the construction.

The turrets were about metres yards apart and measured Construction was divided into lengths of about 5 miles 8. One group of each legion would excavate the foundations and build the milecastles and turrets and then other cohorts would follow with the wall construction. The wall was finished in Early in its construction, just after reaching the North Tyne , the width of the wall was narrowed to 2.

However, Broad Wall foundations had already been laid as far as the River Irthing , where the Turf Wall began, demonstrating that construction worked from east to west. Many turrets and milecastles were optimistically provided with wider stub " wing walls " in preparation for joining to the Broad Wall, offering a handy reference for archaeologists trying to piece together the construction chronology.

Within a few years it was decided to add a total of 14 to 17 sources [ which? The eastern end of the wall was extended further east from Pons Aelius Newcastle to Segedunum Wallsend on the Tyne estuary. Some of the larger forts along the wall, such as Cilurnum Chesters and Vercovicium Housesteads , were built on top of the footings of milecastles or turrets, showing the change of plan.

An inscription mentioning early governor Aulus Platorius Nepos indicates that the change of plans took place early on. Also, some time during Hadrian's reign before the wall west of the Irthing was rebuilt in sandstone to about the same dimensions as the limestone section to the east. After most of the forts had been added, the Vallum was built on the southern side.

The wall was thus part of a defensive system which, from north to south, included:. From Milecastle 49 to the western terminus of the wall at Bowness-on-Solway, the curtain wall was originally constructed from turf, possibly due to the absence of limestone for the manufacture of mortar.

This took place in two phases; the first from the River Irthing to a point west of Milecastle 54 , during the reign of Hadrian, and the second following the reoccupation of Hadrian's Wall subsequent to the abandonment of the Antonine Wall though it has also been suggested that this second phase took place during the reign of Septimius Severus. The line of the new stone wall follows the line of the turf wall, apart from the stretch between Milecastle 49 and Milecastle 51 , where the line of the stone wall is slightly further to the north.

In the stretch around Milecastle 50TW , it was built on a flat base with three to four courses of turf blocks. Above the stone curtain wall's foundations, one or more footing courses were laid. Offsets were introduced above these footing courses on both the north and south faces , which reduced the wall's width.

Where the width of the curtain wall is stated, it is in reference to the width above the offset. Two standards of offset have been identified: Standard A, where the offset occurs above the first footing course, and Standard B, where the offset occurs after the third or sometimes fourth footing course. According to Sheppard Frere , the garrison reflected the political rather than military purpose of the wall.

The wall provided the soldiers with an elevated platform from which they could safely observe movement of the local population.

It had "heavy provision of cavalry" which could sally out from any of the milestone gates though as mentioned earlier, the garrison was neither expected nor trained to the level necessary to defend a city wall. Overall the fortifications appear to have required additional strengthening after the initial design and were stronger than their equivalent in Germany, probably reflecting local resentment.

Frere believes that the milecastles, which would have needed — men, were held by a patrolling garrison of Numeri , though he concedes that there are no inscriptions referring to Numeri in Britain at the time. Command headquarters was at Uxelodunum nowadays called Stanwix near Carlisle, where the Ala Gallorum Petriana was based. A signalling system allowed communication in minutes between Stanwix and York.

Any Which Wall by Laurel Snyder

Further information on the garrisoning of the wall has been provided by the discovery of the Vindolanda tablets , such as the record of an inspection on 18 May between AD 92 and AD 97 where only of the full quota of Dutch and Belgian troops were present, the rest being sick or otherwise absent. This turf wall ran 40 Roman miles, or about Antoninus was unable to conquer the northern tribes, so when Marcus Aurelius became emperor, he abandoned the Antonine Wall and reoccupied Hadrian's Wall as the main defensive barrier in In —, the Emperor Septimius Severus again tried to conquer Caledonia and temporarily reoccupied the Antonine Wall.

The campaign ended inconclusively and the Romans eventually withdrew to Hadrian's Wall. Bede , following Gildas , wrote in [AD ]:. Bede obviously identified Gildas' stone wall as Hadrian's Wall actually built in the s and he would appear to have deduced that the ditch-and-mound barrier known as the Vallum just to the south of and contemporary with, Hadrian's Wall was the rampart constructed by Severus. Many centuries would pass before just who built what became apparent.

In the late 4th century, barbarian invasions, economic decline and military coups loosened the Empire's hold on Britain. By , the estimated End of Roman rule in Britain , the Roman administration and its legions were gone and Britain was left to look to its own defences and government. Archaeologists have revealed that some parts of the wall remained occupied well into the 5th century. It has been suggested that some forts continued to be garrisoned by local Britons under the control of a Coel Hen figure and former dux.

Hadrian's Wall fell into ruin and over the centuries the stone was reused in other local buildings. Enough survived in the 8th century for spolia from Hadrian's Wall to find their way into the construction of Jarrow Priory. The wall fascinated John Speed , who published a set of maps of England and Wales by county at the start of the 17th century.

He described it as "the Picts Wall" or "Pictes"; he uses both spellings. A map of Newecastle sic , drawn in by William Matthew, described it as "Severus' Wall", mistakenly giving it the name ascribed by Bede to the Antonine Wall. The maps for Cumberland and Northumberland not only show the wall as a major feature, but are ornamented with drawings of Roman finds, together with, in the case of the Cumberland map, a cartouche in which he sets out a description of the wall itself. Much of the wall has now disappeared.

Long sections of it were used for roadbuilding in the 18th century, [25] especially by General Wade to build a military road most of which lies beneath the present day B " Military Road " to move troops to crush the Jacobite insurrection. The preservation of much of what remains can be credited to John Clayton. He trained as a lawyer and became town clerk of Newcastle in the s.

He became enthusiastic about preserving the wall after a visit to Chesters. To prevent farmers taking stones from the wall, he began buying some of the land on which the wall stood. In , he started purchasing property around Steel Rigg near Crag Lough. Eventually, he controlled land from Brunton to Cawfields. This stretch included the sites of Chesters, Carrawburgh , Housesteads , and Vindolanda. Clayton carried out excavation at the fort at Cilurnum and at Housesteads, and he excavated some milecastles.

Clayton managed the farms he had acquired and succeeded in improving both the land and the livestock.

His successful management produced a cash-flow, which could be invested in future restoration work. Workmen were employed to restore sections of the wall, generally up to a height of seven courses. The best example of the Clayton Wall is at Housesteads. After Clayton's death, the estate passed to relatives and was soon lost at gambling. Eventually, the National Trust began acquiring the land on which the wall stands.

At Wallington Hall , near Morpeth, there is a painting by William Bell Scott , which shows a centurion supervising the building of the wall. The centurion has been given the face of John Clayton.

Although Hadrian's Wall was declared a World Heritage Site in , it remains unguarded, enabling visitors to climb and stand on the wall, although this is not encouraged, as it could damage the historic structure. On 13 March , a public event Illuminating Hadrian's Wall took place, which saw the route of the wall lit with beacons. On 31 August and 2 September , there was a second illumination of the wall as a digital art installation called "Connecting Light", which was part of the London Festival.

In , a National Trail footpath was opened that follows the line of the wall from Wallsend to Bowness-on-Solway.

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The only ancient source for its provenance is the Augustan History. No sources survive to confirm what the wall was called in antiquity, and no historical literary source gives it a name. However, the discovery of the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan in Staffordshire in has provided a clue. This small enamelled bronze Roman trulla ladle , dating to the 2nd century AD, is inscribed with a series of names of Roman forts along the western sector of the wall, together with a personal name and phrase: This can mean several things, but one of its lesser-known meanings is "straight line", "course", or "direction".

This sense was used by Roman surveyors and appears on several inscriptions to indicate a line between places. So the meaning could be "according to the course".

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