136 Hadrian's Wall. [Sess. 



it was done. You see the soldiers portrayed in the actual 

 work, although doubtless the native Britons were pressed into 

 the service for the carrying and unskilled work. Most of those 

 who have done the pilgrimage of the wall have travelled from 

 east to west, and we shall follow this plan in our attempt to 

 discover what now remains of it. As would naturally be 

 expected, in the vicinity of towns or in places of agricultural or 

 industrial activity, little or no vestige of it remains ; but the 

 unexpected does sometimes happen, and a piece of the Eoman 

 Wall was accidentally uncovered at Wallsend-on-Tyne in pre- 

 paring the slip for the building of the Mauritania. That bit 

 of wall saw the coming of the longships of the Saxons, so 

 graphically described by Mr Kipling in ' Puck of Pook's Hill.' 

 It was disinterred, and I suppose swept away to further the 

 building of the latest triumph of naval construction. 



It is only a scrap, of course, but it shows many characteristic 

 features of the wall. You can see that it consisted of an 

 outer section of carefully dressed stones, laid in regular 

 courses, and an interior mass of rubble and cement. The 

 breadth of the wall on the ground-level, here about 8 feet, is 

 clearly seen. As was to be expected, Newcastle has wiped 

 out of existence the wall and the station which stood at the 

 crossing of the Tyne. The station took its name from the 

 bridge, named Pons Aclii in compliment to Hadrian, who was 

 of the Aelian family. This bridge was actually in use down 

 to the thirteenth century, and from the bed of the busy but 

 dirty Tyne many relics of the Eoman times have been 

 dredged up. One of the most interesting of these is an altar, 

 not inappropriately dedicated to Neptune by soldiers of the 

 6th Legion, known as the 'victorious, pious, and faithful,' 

 doubtless after a safe voyage over the rough North Sea. 



In the Black Gate Museum at Newcastle is a bust of 

 the Emperor Hadrian himself, which is specially interesting, 

 because the original, of which this is a copy, was dredged up 

 from the bed of the Thames and is now in the British Museum. 

 Having inspected the very interesting Eoman antiquities in 

 the Black Gate Museum, and having visited the interesting 

 church of St Nicolas, which contains the tomb and marble 

 effigy of Dr Collingwood Bruce, the historian of the wall, 

 whose book should be in the hands of every visitor, we 



