The Antonine Wall

After speaking to Hugh about this run along Hadrian's Wall (HW) I seemed to remember something about another Roman wall, built for the same basic reasons as Hadrian's was. I did a bit of research and found that such a wall did exist, and its remains still do. It was called the Antonine Wall (AW) and was built further north, roughly from Edinburgh to Glasgow, coast to coast. I'd always thought, based on my naive-school-boy appreciation of history, that Hadrian's Wall had been the northern-most border of the Roman Empire, but this, as the following paragraph of world-class history research will show, is quite obviously a vicious lie!

This is the real deal: The Emperor, Vespasian, who, with amazing foresight engineered his assention to be in the summer of 69, lead the Romans all the way up to the River Tay. I don't know why. After a while they got beaten back down to where HW was then built in AD 122. In AD 142 the Romans managed to recapture southern Scotland and built the AW along where they got up to, having pushed back all the trouble-making barbarians and the AW remained the most northern border until about AD 210. It must be said that the AW was more of a large bank of earth, rather than the rather monstrous 6 metre high wall HW claimed to be, but I still think that HW gets too much of the limelight, and the AW should be given its fair share of the glory.

The AW is 60km long, and at a mere half the length of HW would therefore make an excellent training run, and warm up, to the real thing.