Professor Rob Collins

And if we think about turrets as being an elevated observation platform, at the very least, it's a tall point where a soldier can look further.

Many of those are retained and they are definitely retained in those locations where you can be sneaky, where a raider could try and sneak through the landscape and try and get across the wall.

It's more in the kind of flatter lowland situations where those turrets are more likely to be abandoned.

So Hadrian's Wall isn't necessarily the bristling soldiers on top of towers every third of a mile sort of situation it was at the start, but it is still garrisoned, still occupied.

Any evidence we have from mile castles that have been excavated, there's always some form of evidence, sometimes only a few sherds of pottery, but that it's still being used and occupied in the later 4th century.

So it's not just the forts, the big bases that the soldiers are based at, but also those smaller installations.

And that's really important because that means the wall as a monumental complex is in operation.

So it's not just, oh, we've kept the forts.

They are sustaining the wall as a monument and there looks to be activity at those turrets, at those mile castles.

Yeah, so there's a real important shift in the late Roman Empire when they, under Diocletian and Constantine again, they restructure everything, all of government, but also the army.

And a key thing that they do is they separate the soldiers that will be in field armies and are effectively mobile armies that will move around as the emperor needs them to,

and the frontier armies.

Now, there are a few different Latin terms for these frontier soldiers.

One of the fun ones is ripari or riparencis, which is effectively the river soldiers.

So those are the ones along the Rhine and the Danube.

They often get called the ripari.

You get another term, the castellani, the soldiers of the castles, which again gets applied to the soldiers in the frontiers with their permanent forts.

But the one which has the widest use and the most staying power is the limitanei.

I'm partial to it because Limitus will be a reference to the frontier, to the limits of the empire.

So it's the men of the frontiers, the soldiers of the frontiers.