Housesteads Fort, Hadrian's Wall

The fort was an afterthought

Hadrian's Wall was begun in AD 122, probably planned before the emperor's own visit to Britain that year. The first design had no forts on the line: only milecastles every Roman mile and turrets between them, along a stone curtain running 73 miles from the Tyne to the Solway.

Then the plan changed. At Housesteads the builders pulled down one of their own new turrets, Turret 36B, and around AD 124 raised a stone fort in its place, its north wall set on the foundation already laid for the Wall.

By about 130 the fort stood at the end of a mile-long crag of the Whin Sill. The Wall had been slimmed as the work went on, from ten Roman feet thick to eight in places.

A playing card on a cliff

The fort covered 2.2 hectares in the classic Roman shape of a playing card, with a gateway in each side. Inside stood stone barrack blocks, the headquarters building, the commanding officer's courtyard house, granaries and a hospital.

In the second century the garrison was a double-strength cohort of auxiliary infantry, some 800 men whose unit name is lost, with legionaries from the Second Legion Augusta. The better-known First Cohort of Tungrians arrived only in the early third century.

Housesteads had no running water. Its people collected rain in stone-lined cisterns, and its latrine is one of the best preserved in Roman Britain.

North of the rampart the cliffs fell away to moorland and loughs. To the south lay the Vallum, a broad ditch between earth banks, and two miles south-west the older fort of Vindolanda on the Stanegate road. The Wall may have been plastered and whitewashed, but whether it gleamed here in 130 is unknown.

The name comes from a farmhouse

The Romans called the place Vercovicium; an inscription with the letters VER is read as short for it. The modern name belongs to the eighteenth-century farmhouse of Housesteads, and the ruins of the farm still lean against the fort's south gate.

In 1838 the antiquarian John Clayton bought the farm, cleared later buildings off the Roman remains and rebuilt stretches of the Wall nearby. In 1929 a later Clayton tried to auction the fort; it failed to reach its reserve and went to the National Trust in 1930.

The fort was occupied for almost 300 years. By 409 the Romans had gone.

Why Britons still walk it

Hadrian's Wall is named in England's primary history curriculum as the emblem of Roman Britain, and it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987. It is also misunderstood. The Wall lies entirely in England and has never been the border with Scotland; its turf-built successor, the Antonine Wall of 142, crossed what is now central Scotland.

How much this landscape means became clear in September 2023, when the lone sycamore at Sycamore Gap, west of Housesteads, was felled overnight. The tree came down across the Wall itself, and in 2025 the two men responsible were jailed for more than four years.

Sources

• Wikipedia (en): Housesteads Roman Fort
• english-heritage.org.uk
• Wikipedia (en): Hadrian's Wall
• gov.uk