(At the Wallsend reconstruction with Bill Griffiths)

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
That's amazingly high, what evidence did you use to build it at that height?

BILL GRIFFITHS
Tyne and Wear Museum Service
Well, there are a couple of bits of evidence. The first is a monk called Bede, who just lived over the river. He wrote, a few hundred years after the Wall went out of use, that it stood twelve feet high in his day. And there are some steps surviving at one of the mile castles on the wall, four or five steps, and if you extrapolate the line up, you come at about fifteen Roman feet in height for the Wall.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Now if I've got a Roman up there actually looking down on me, and if I'm a Briton who's come up against the Wall, is this actually what I would have seen? This great, neat wall of carefully cut stonework?

BILL GRIFFITHS
Well quite possibly not. There's some evidence to suggest the Wall may have been decorated, either covered with whitewash or a plaster render, or something similar. So it would have been this gleaming white structure.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
And so that would have been a really impressive thing that you would have seen from a great distance?

BILL GRIFFITHS
Quite possibly yes.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
(Moving over to inspect the excavation) The Wall may have looked impressive, but it seems it wasn't always that well built, as the Wallsend excavation is beginning to reveal.

Now I think a lot of people are going to have a very clear idea of the Romans being Grade One, organised architects. But this particular stretch of wall doesn't look very impressive to me.

BILL GRIFFITHS
Yes, a bit of a failure here. When they were building on this site I think they'd failed to take into account the fact that they were building at the head of a valley, and the ground's a bit soft in places. Clearly the Wall started to collapse or sink, and the south face of the Wall has fallen away and the north face has just tilted over with it.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE So it has been built in a rush then? These are people who actually need to get on with the job?

BILL GRIFFITHS
Quite clearly. If you've got eighty miles of wall to build, you don't want to hang about.

(At Brunton Turret)

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Further out along the wall at Brunton Turret there's more compelling evidence that things didn't always go according to plan. Perhaps the Romans weren't quite as ruthlessly efficient as we've been led to believe.

The first job the Romans had to do to build this wall was to send their surveyors out as advance parties to mark out exactly where the wall was going to be built. They were accompanied by parties that started to install a ten foot foundation, ready for the wall.

Now because this turret was made ready for a ten foot wall, the turret builders built the turret with two little bits of ten foot wide wall on either side. But then the plan seemed to change. This is the ten foot wide wing wall for the turret, and down here, at the bottom, there's still the remains of the nice new ten foot wide foundation for the ten foot wide wall, butting up against the turret.

But you can also see - over here - that the wall that was built later was actually built to a much narrower gauge. Now why should that have happened? We don't really know the reason, but there's obviously been a major change of plan. It could have been because the stone was running out, or possibly because the Romans were in such a hurry thanks to wars up here on the northern frontier that they really needed to get the job finished very quickly. There's one other possibility of course. The Roman governor, Aulus Platorius Nepos, who'd been charged by Hadrian with the job of building the Wall, had the end of his governorship coming up and maybe he wanted to get the job finished for maximum prestige.

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