Professor Rob Collins

But let's not forget that Corbridge is a sizable Roman town of its own, right?

So there's a ready quarry of stone there.

over at Carlisle.

Again, you've got a Roman town, but a big Roman fort.

Yeah, I mean, there's lots of stone at Carlisle as well.

So I think it becomes a question of what's most readily accessible.

The bits in the central sector that are kind of further away from any larger settlements that we know of are probably the, as they are today, are the bits that have survived the best and are the ones that are probably least likely to have been robbed.

In terms of understanding that process of collapse, we can see from medieval documents that actually the wall survives as a ruin, as an earthen embankment or whatever, well into the Middle Ages.

And most of the destruction that we understand of the wall historically has generally come from the 18th century and after.

And so I don't want to kind of paint this romantic notion of Hadrian's Wall standing to its full height up to the 18th century, but it probably stood in varying states of high ruin into the Middle Ages properly in some cases.

I think if we think of that long-term history, you know, through the early Middle Ages, there's very few structures that are built in stone, really.

It tends to be primarily Christian foundations.

And where those are built in stone, they still tend to survive.

So we can pinpoint those locations and we can make estimates of where they might be stealing stone from.

It's not really until you get to the 11th and 12th centuries that you start getting other larger stone structures, you know, castles, for example.

Normans, yeah.

Yes, the Normans, right?

We can blame this on the Normans.

And when we look at where those castles are, the big castles, Newcastle, Carlisle, which are royal castles,

When we look at those castles, there certainly is some Roman stone incorporated, but there's also a lot of fresh quarried stone.