Dr. Francis McIntosh

So maybe, you know, extended family living in one or two roundhouses within maybe an enclosure.

And that's what George Joby is one of the famous excavators of, you know, these settlements up here.

But also later on, Nick Hodgson and Tynan Weir Archives and Museums have found them alongside the Northumberland coastal plain and

Yeah, it's that smaller settlement where you know your neighbours and you might loosely be part of a wide tribe, but there's no large sort of what we would see urban centres or anything like that.

Yeah, so, I mean, you've got to go back 50 years, actually.

The Romans first rock up, you know, in, say, what we see now as Northumberland in the 70s AD.

And they've always been putting forts in place there, but then they're carrying further on because the Romans want to take the whole island.

But then they wanted to obviously come back and put this line, which is a lot more permanent.

Yeah, it's not just the wall or even just the wall, mile, castles, turrets, forts.

To the north of the wall is a double ditch.

The south of the wall is what we call the Valum, which is another big ditch.

And that potentially could be hundreds of feet sort of wide from the north part of the north ditch to the south part of the Valum.

Yeah, to sort of cover.

And so that's then all a no man's land or a no-go zone.

Or, yeah, you know, you could only be in those places.

places if you had permission or you're part of the military so it does wipe out a large swathe you know the wall itself is only maybe three four meters wide maximum but it's not actually just that footprint it's much bigger so yeah and the soldiers who then become stationed along hadrian's wall i've got a feeling they'll probably be quite a list won't they they're not just all local britons or all from the heartlands of italy are they

No, so probably neither of those, actually.

The Romans learned fairly early on in their imperial conquest that you should not station people locally from where you recruited them.

The Batavian revolt in the first century went very badly.

Yeah, because that's local troops who are then being asked to put down a local uprising.