Ever in search of moral panic, the Daily Mail has reported that an excess of tourists taking selfies on Hadrian’s Wall has caused a portion of it to collapse. Sadly for this theory, the National Trust, which cares for the stretch of wall in question, says there is no evidence the damage has been caused by selfie-takers.
Erosion, weather and invasive plant species are the most likely culprits, and restoration work will be shortly under way to renovate this section of early-20th-century wall-building. Nevertheless, says the National Trust, please don’t walk on the wall, but alongside it.
Ah yes: 20th century. Hadrian’s wall was, it is true, built in AD122. (Its precise purpose is still debated – border control, symbolic marker and propaganda tool are more likely explanations than an order to keep the barbarian hordes at bay.) The wall, as it arcs up and down the Cumbria and Northumberland hills, is impressive – and one of the most beautiful and satisfying walks to be done in England is along its 74-mile (119km) length. But its appearance – and status as a tourist destination and hikers’ trail – is the complicated endpoint of a story of depletion, antiquarian rediscovery and the invention of the heritage industry.
William Camden was the first serious scholar to try to catalogue the antiquities along Hadrian’s Wall in 1599. It was dangerous territory then, “full of ranke robbers”. He managed, though, to record that he had seen local women using an altar to the Syrian goddess Atargatis as a washboard. My favourite early visitor to the wall (a man I wrote about in my book Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain) was a 78-year-old called William Hutton. In 1801, he travelled on foot from Birmingham and back, walking along the wall twice – 35 days, 17 miles a day. He railed against its destruction, remonstrating with local landowners who were using the wall for building materials.
It was the lawyer John Clayton (1792-1890), a Newcastle-based antiquary, who bought about 20 miles’ worth of the wall (and surrounding lands) to protect it. He had his workmen “consolidate” the tumbled stones. Those that have collapsed are an Edwardian consolidation of his Victorian consolidation.
For Hutton, the wall was imbued with moral meaning. It should act, he thought, as a monument to human cruelty and wickedness. It “pronounces the human being as much savage as the brute”, he wrote. I don’t necessarily disagree. Hutton was, however, wrong on one count – that walking the wall would not take off. “I am,” he wrote, “probably the last that will ever attempt it.” If he’d had the chance, I’m fairly sure he would have taken a selfie.
