Rocks of ages: how Hadrian’s legacy lives on

TO look north-eastwards from Wall-town Crags in Northumberland is to gaze upon an English wilderness. The ashen cliffs of the Whin Sill drop 75ft to a brindle-coloured plain that stretches far into the distance, its surface broken by patches of dark heather and the occasional glistening black splash of groundwater. What few trees survive are small and stunted, hunchbacked against a prevailing westerly wind that rattles the bent grass and sends crows somersaulting across the vast grey sky. The cawing corvine protests are the only sound of life. To stand here on a swirling day in winter (and winter goes on for a long time here) is to feel as our ancestors must have done: tiny in a big world. The Romans who arrived here in the first century looked at it and felt they had reached the lip of civilisation. They called the place End of the Earth.