Professor Rob Collins

I'm not going to be reaved every couple of years.

And it's expanding of the farms.

It's agricultural improvements.

And so where you see more Hadrian's Wall stone is when you travel along Hadrian's Wall and you look at the farms and the old barns and outbuildings and such, rather than, say, the castles and the churches.

So that sort of purposeful robbing and reuse is a much more recent and modern phenomenon.

And I mean, let's not forget the Romans created a fantastic infrastructure for Britain.

I mean, those Roman roads survive.

They have medieval names.

So the main road from York...

up to what would have been, you know, Gravend, you know, near the Antonine Wall is called Deer Street.

And that's Deer Street from Dera, the early medieval kingdom, which was broadly Yorkshire.

It's the road to Dera or the road from Dera.

And so that Roman road

has retained its medieval name.

The road south of Hadrian's Wall, which was used through the Middle Ages, is called the Stain Gate, the stone road.

But it's a Roman road.

So if you're raiding from the north or coming from northern England and raiding into Scotland,

you're really still using the Roman road network, which has gates through the wall.

So you're not always having to climb over the ruins of the wall to get where you need to go.

And I suppose if the wall was in the way for some of those key routes, that's where it's more likely to be cleared and robbed.