It wasn’t finished. Eventually there would have been towers and such. However, there were troops stationed near the wall that could respond to a potential invasion from the north. It was never intended to stop say a small raiding party but to give a defensive advantage against a large force that would be spotted. In general, the wall is built at the top of an embankment so it would give a pretty nice advantage to the defending force.
Lobell, Jarrett A (2017). “The Wall at the End of the Empire”. Archaeology . 70 (3): 26–35
Tomlin, R. S. O. (2018). Britannia Romana: Roman Inscriptions & Roman Britain . Oxford: Oxbow Books. pp. 100–102
It worked to slow down incursions. Even a well-equipped army would need to climb over / break through the wall, and to do this in large numbers would take a while.
The main legionary camps were some distance from the wall, and the wall gave them time to form up an army to respond.
What you see now is a reconstruction along the central section from what stones remained available after a thousand or so years of their being re-used elsewhere. So it could have been a fair bit higher.
Plus, it may not have been just a defensive barrier but also included the equivalent of customs posts checking trade and collecting duties on goods.
There were some fortified camps along the Roman side of the wall for rapid response. roughly every 7 miles. Almost every mile there was a small guard post & gate setup. I just checked these are literally referred to as milecastles. The 2 turrets or small towers between each pair of milecastles.
The wall slowed not only armies but made it a lot tougher for raiders to pull back with captured prisoners/slaves and livestock. It also interfered with unregulated trade.
In addition to the wall, there was a long ditch built in parallel to much of the wall.
Once built, Hadrian’s Wall boasted 80 milecastles, numerous observation towers and 17 larger forts. Punctuating every stretch of Wall between the milecastles were two towers so that observation points were created at every third of a mile. Constructed mainly from stone and in parts initially from turf, the Wall was six metres high in places and up to three metres deep. All along the south face of the Wall, if there was no river or crag to provide extra defense, a deep ditch called the Vallum was dug. In some areas the Vallum was dug from solid rock.
30 years ago I visited a small stretch of the wall and one fort.
Yeah, that’s what I was about to say- every Roman mile, there was some kind of manned fortification, typically called mile castles or mile fortlets.
I"m guessing the theory was that the guys in those only really had to be able to see a half mile in either direction, and that in the case of a bunch of angry Celts showing up, they’d send for reinforcements from the larger forts near the wall, like say… Housesteads or Vindolanda.
Historians know of no one named Hadrian who made it through the wall. That’s a 100% success rate.
The OP leaves out two important facts. First, It’s wrong to think of the Romans huddled behind the wall. As @What_Exit’s link says:
It may also be considered that the Wall formed but one part of a wider system of frontier control. Cavalry are attested at many forts on the line of the Wall. To use these soldiers as frontier guards would be a waste of their skills; it is more likely that they patrolled the area to the north. Certainly later scouting to the north of the Wall is attested as well as treaties between the Romans and their northern neighbours.
And it’s wrong to think that a mere short wall was the only defense:
At about the same time another significant change was made, the construction of a great earthwork, known since the time of the Venerable Bede writing in about 730 as the Vallum, behind the Wall from Newcastle to Bowness-on-Solway. It consisted of a central ditch with a mound set back on each side. It formed a formidable obstacle and perhaps should have been seen as the Roman equivalent of barbed-wire protecting the rear of the frontier zone. Now crossing the frontier was only possible at a fort where the access point, a causeway, was surmounted by a gate. The number of points where the frontier complex could be crossed was reduced from about 80 to about 16.
The “barbarians” to the north were completely respected as fighters. The Romans constructed the best counter-systems of their time.
Exactly; it was a fortification, not just a passive barrier, as was the less celebrated Antonine Wall. Ditto for the disjointed Great Wall of China, The Great Wall of Gorgan, and the Theodosian Walls.
It also somewhat eliminated the motive for raiding parties of Celts.
The wall and the moat/mounds alongside it made it really hard for a raiding party to steal anything more than what they could carry in their hands. And that’s not much. (It isn’t like the peasants behind the ball had stores of jewels, gold coins, etc.) The most valuable was livestock, and getting a herd of cattle, pigs, or sheep over the wall (while the Roman soldiers were coming after you) would not be easy. And a group of kidnapped Roman women would be even harder.
When you can’t come back from a raid with much plunder, and can lose warriors to the Roman guards, the cost-benefit of raids across Hadrian’s Wall becomes questionable – easier to just raid a nearby tribe on this side of the Wall.
The government paying a Legion (5,000 people covered in expensive clothes that rust at the hint of a wet breeze) to sit in the middle of a rainy god-forsaken island in the middle of nowhere is going to expect something for it’s coin. Grab a shovel, jack.
Yeah, the OP’s photo shows this rather nicely; members of an attacking force have to climb a steep bank before they reach the wall; the defending force has the advantage of already standing on high, relatively flat ground.
The dyke-and-bank defensive ring around many an iron-age hill fort serves a similar purpose. Your enemy has two choices:
Run up the bank and arrive exhausted at the top, right when you need to fight.
Creep up the bank, avoiding exhaustion, but giving the defending force a time advantage.
As for “clamboring over” the wall, it might have been possible for soldiers to do so, especially with some sort of ladder arrangement. But try to get your horse over. Hmmm, now you have a problem.
