Professor Rob Collins

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696 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 28 May

Professor Rob Collins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Ancients · The Fall of Hadrian's Wall · 28 May 2026 podcast

And so his narrative, based on our archaeological evidence, is completely wrong.

But what is interesting is that he does have this narrative of there being a very late Roman, final phase Roman government refurbishment, or in his words, a construction of Hadrian's Wall.

And

And the way he describes it is that this wall is constructed to connect the towns that were along its length.

And I think if we consider Gildas's words and the context in which he's writing, that tells us, I think, two important things.

One, there is this memory of some sort of

very late Roman construction.

We could say refurbishment maybe that he's attributing as a new construction, but he's saying it's connecting the towns that are there.

And so the other thing we can question is in Gildas' own time, is he aware of there being towns or larger settlements along the length of the wall that he thinks have then been connected along the wall, but are in fact the wall was built and that created those settlements.

They came after.

And so Gildas actually might be giving us a very strong,

bit of contemporary evidence of there are still people living in those forts along Hadrian's Wall.

But we also have to remember, we don't know where Gildas is writing.

depending on which part of Britain you live in, you might claim Gildas for your part.

It's usually Wales or Cornwall, but you know, sometimes in Brittany, they want that claim too.

So we don't know where he's writing.

So we can't also be particularly confident that his, when he's writing about places other than Wales, his evidence seems to be very good for Wales, but outside of Wales in Cornwall, it's,

It's very sketchy, very generic.

So again, we have to think of Gildas as writing from a distance, at least for Hadrian's Wall.

And so we always have to take that with a little bit of a pinch of salt.

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