206 Titty MEETINGS. 
back garden overlooking the firth. A small altar stone, dedi- 
cated to Jupiter, has been built into the front wall of a stable 
adjoining the King’s Arms Hotel. The inscription is now much 
weathered. ‘The line of the wall itself can be traced pretty 
continuously in the fields between Bowness and Port Carlisle. 
At no point does it now rise much above the level of the sur- 
rounding land; but at some places—where it slopes towards a 
water course, for example—the masonry can be detected. It 
was a herculean work, one of the many wonderful products of 
mechanical skill and vast labour which the Romans scattered 
over the lands which they held temporarily in their grip. A 
massive structure, twelve to fifteen feet high, and some eight 
feet broad, it was faced on both sides with squared freestone, 
conveyed often from distant quarries, and filled inside with 
rubble, bound together with strong mortar. At every mile there 
was a guard house, or “ mile-castle;’’ every few miles a fully 
equipped station for a body of troops. And a deep fosse was. 
excavated alongside the wall, on its northern side, as an addi- 
tional defence. About fifteen thousand men, the late Dr Bruce 
has calculated, would be required to garrison the wall. The 
same authority estimates that the stone wall and the earthen 
rampart, or “vallum,’’ which crossed the same belt of country 
and was roughly parallel with it, would engage the labour of 
ten thousand men for two years, and represent an outlay of more 
than a million pounds of our currency. MHadrian’s Wall is the 
name popularly applied to the stone structure; and Dr Bruce 
regards it and the vallum as contemporary works, and ascribes 
them both to that Emperor, who visited Britain in 119. But it 
is open to question whether it was not simply the vallum that was. 
the work of Hadrian, and the wall itself was erected during the 
later reign of Severus, when it had been resolved to give up the 
attempt to conquer Scotland, and to fix the line from Tyne to 
Solway as the boundary of the Roman Empire. 
The Solway at Bowness presents at full tide a sheet of water 
two miles in breadth; but when the tide recedes its sands are 
left bare to such an extent that it is fordable by those who know 
how to avoid the dangers of the course; and until the building 
of the railway viaduct brought the opposite shores into closer 
contact, a carrier at Dornock Brow used to act as ferryman, if 
we may use the word. A board displayed as a signal on the 
