07-01-2008, 11:13 PM
Quote:I think that I shall stay with J Collingwood Bruce who considered that the Wall probably joined the fort at it's NE and NW angles.
Collingwood Bruce was following Horsley, as he readily admits, stating
'The Wall, passing through the site of St, Nicholas'-church, would, of course, be its northern boundary' (The Roman Wall, 1851, p.125)
Note the conditional - 'would' not 'was', because there was no evidence upon which to base this surmise, only what they could deduce by comparison with other sites (and produce the attached reconstruction). There certainly appeared to be empirical evidence for the course of Hadrian's Wall on Collingwood Street (which CB cites), but not of the fort being joined to it. Modern archaeologists using modern techniques, not hearsay, have excavated the north wall of the fort (see my posting somewhere several miles above) and found part of a building to the north of it.
At its closest, as Collingwood Bruce suggests above, Hadrian's Wall probably followed the line of Collingwood Street and passed close to St Nic's. A good 100m to the north of the north wall of the fort identified by its excavators (I suspect at least some modern scholars would place it slightly further south than that, but only by the width of a cathedral, still leaving 50m of clear air between HW and the north wall of fort). I see no reason to doubt the excavators' delineation of the fort, and plenty to carp at with Horsley's and Collingwood Bruce's conjectures, but they are not to blame over this as they simply did not have the evidence to work with, as somebody had been inconsiderate enough to plonk a medieval town on top of the fort; now, however, we have the north wall of the fort.
As Holmes tells Watson 'It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. Insensibly, one begins to twist the facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. It biases the judgment.' The north wall of the fort is an archaeological fact and it does not, on the available evidence, coincide with the line of Hadrian's Wall. Nor is there any evidence that there was any sort of spur wall linking the two.
Which ever way you cut it, application of a glinting, keen-edged Occam's Razor suggests the fort was not attached to the Wall.
Mike Bishop
