Hadrian's Wall

by Jessie Mothersole

At the Engine Inn at Walbottle I was able to get a bottle of lemonade, and was also plentifully supplied with soap and water in the back-kitchen by the kindly landlady. So I went on my way much refreshed.

Soon I came to Walbottle Dene House, a farm-house on the right, in the front garden of which are the splendid remains of the northern gateway of a mile-castle, the first mile-castle to be seen uncovered. The course of the road was altered here to avoid injury to this mile-castle after it had been excavated. The huge stones can be easily seen by looking over the low garden wall.

Wall-stones appear in the hedge on the right a little farther on; and then comes Walbottle Dene, a steep little ravine, with paths traversing its tree-covered sides, green with ferns and fresh spring foliage, and the Newburn flowing through at the bottom.

In the mining village of Throckley, I saw crowds collected for a funeral. The miners on strike were sitting in rows on the path opposite the house, dressed in their Sunday clothes, to do honour to their neighbour. A late-comer overtook me, and said as he passed: "A hot day." I said: "Yes; I am glad it is fine for your holiday." From that we came to the question of the strike (as I had intended), and the respective claims of the owners and the miners. He told me he had been in every trade you can name, and coal-mining was the worst. I said: "Then why are you in it now?" and he replied: "Because of the pay." He then described to me the unhealthiness and the dangers of a miner's life, and to emphasize it he said: "You should compare what these men are now with what they looked like six weeks ago; why, they are not the same men!" He drew such a vivid picture of the hardships, that I said, in all good faith: "Oh, if only a substitute could be found for coal!" But there I found he did not agree with me at all, any more than the owners would have done.

It is a truism that there must be something wrong with a society in which the workers in a disagreeable and dangerous calling would not have it made less dangerous because the very danger gives them a claim to higher wages. They are used to the danger, and they are used to the wages; they would rather keep both! And who can blame them, things being as they are? Perhaps some day we may reach a condition of society in which every labour-saving device, or danger-averting discovery, will bless the whole of the community, and penalize none. This must surely come about in proportion as we learn to think of mankind as "one body," and to see that if one member suffers, every member is bound to suffer with it.

There can be no real gain through another's loss.

My miner-friend took my remarks very good-temperedly, and joined the groups seated on the ground as soon as we came up to them.

Opposite the Filter-beds at Throckley, I turned off on the left, through an inviting-looking green meadow, and, crossing the Vallum, sat down under some trees to rest. A man and a boy were busy chopping and carting logs of wood in the little plantation near me—another sign of the coal-strike. Soon after returning to the road I saw traces of another mile-castle.

All this time the Wall-ditch can be traced on the right for the greater part of the way, and the Vallum on the left, at varying distances from the road, about 30 to 50 yards. At the top of the hill leading down to Heddon-on-the-Wall, both the Wall-ditch and the Vallum are a delight to the eye which has perhaps hitherto been tempted to see them as monotonous. Both ditches are cut through the sandstone rock. This was a specially good place for testing the shape of the Vallum-ditch, and sections made in 1893 proved it to be flat-bottomed and not V-shaped, just as it was later found to be along its whole length.