If tradition is to be credited, the Romans were not satisfied with roads as a means of rapidly communicating information; speaking-trumpets or pipes, we are told, ran along the whole length of the Wall. Of this, Drayton, long ago, sang in his Polyolbion—
Townes stood upon my length, where garrisons were laid Their limits to defend; and for my greater aid, With turrets I was built, where sentinels were plac’d To watch upon the Pict; so me my makers grac’d With hollow pipes of brasse, along me still they went, By which they in one fort still to another sent, By speaking in the same, to tell them what to doe, And soe from sea to sea could I be whispered through.
Sir Christopher Ridley, in his letter tells us, that—
In this Wall was theyr a trunck of brass, or whatever kynd of mettal, which went from one place to another along the Wall, and came into the Captaynes chamber, whereat they had watchers for the same, and yf theyr had bene stryfe or business betwyxt the enemies, and that the watchmen did blow a horn in at the end of the truncke that came into the chamber, and so from one to one; there was certayn money payed yearly to the mantenance of this trunck by the inhabitants theyrabout, and doith yet pay to some gentilmen in Northymberland, the which money is called horn-geld money.[[39]]
THE THEORY PROBABLY INCORRECT.
Camden also refers to this curious tradition. Once, but only once, have I met with this story in my own rambles. Such myths will not long outlive the introduction of the electric telegraph. ‘There are no old people upon the Wall now,’ as a man of three-score lately said to me, when I was endeavouring to persuade him to gather up from his still more ancient neighbour the fire-side lore of by-gone times.
It is curious to observe that a similar statement is made respecting the Barrier of the Upper Isthmus. A correspondent writes—
One old man told me, that when he was young, on digging through one of the wall stations—at Upper Croy—they came upon stone pipes, laid horizontally in the soil, and joined at the ends like those for water. From the elevation of the place, it is quite obvious that they could not be water conduits. This old person said that the idea he had heard ‘learned people’ give of these pipes, was, that they were for speaking through. That the pipes were found, and made of stone, not clay, is certain.
Pipes of lead are occasionally met with in the ruins of the stations, and pipes of burnt clay are of very frequent occurrence. To this circumstance the tradition probably owes its rise. They are not, however, found in the Wall, and when placed in the stations, seem to have served a different purpose. One use to which the tile-tubes have been put has been the transmission of warm air throughout an apartment. The walls of one of the chambers of the ‘baths’ at Hunnum were lined with them. Others may have been used, especially in high situations, for collecting rain-water from the roofs of the dwellings, and conveying it to cisterns. Besides, the inutility of the contrivance militates against the probability of its adoption: the sentinels at their posts could easily transmit hasty intelligence from end to end, by the voice or by horns, without pipes imbedded in the Wall, which, even if constructed, would probably be useless for such a purpose.
This traditionary fiction is probably of more than mediæval antiquity. Xiphiline, in his life of Severus, tells some such marvellous tale about the towers of Byzantium.