All in all it's just...another brick in the wall

You see a lot of wall while holidaying in Carlisle and Northumbria.  Today's blip is taken from just next to Birdoswald's Roman Fort where the longest continuous stretch of Hadrian's wall is still visible.  Impressive enough now but imagining at it's original height of 4 meters, one gets the impression there wasn't much to do than either wall build or invade the neighbours back in ye olden days. Thank goodness for the invention of Scrabble, which finally gave everyone something more peaceful to do in those long northern winter hours.  Unless you play it like RM, in which case it's full on viscious and handbags at dawn.  Can you tell I lost another game last night?

Birdoswald Fort was interesting for its scale - it housed 1,000 soldiers in its day (AD122), predominantly the remains of the outer edges of the fort remain.  Much of the rest of it is lost to history, and some of what was there is guessed at given they've never done a full archeological dig.  Plenty of local houses and barns are built in a similar stone of course.

Bakingly hot (27 degrees) with not much shade. We fortified ourselves with Romanesque fruit scones and sicilian lemon sorbet.  Perhaps the soldiering life wasn't such a bad one after all...

Extra: The main window of St Martin's Church, Brampton, the only church designed by the Pre-Raphaelite architect Philip Webb.  I know, all this culture is most out of character, I promise we'll be back to more mundane considerations by the weekend.