Thus the little group, barely speaking, at last approached Banna. Here, not far from its western end, the Wall strode over a high ridge from which Wuffa could make out the hill country to the north, and to the south a river wound through a deep wooded valley.

A small, mean village of Anglish farmers huddled a little way away from the fort, down the northern slope. On arrival, Ammanius led his party to the village, fearlessly summoned the chieftain, and demanded to know if the man knew anything of this ‘Last Roman’. Wuffa and Ulf had haltingly to translate for him, for these Anglish knew no Latin, and Ammanius certainly knew no Germanic.

Yes, said the Anglish farmer-warrior, he knew all about Ambrosias, the Last Roman. In fact he and his people had been keeping the old man alive for years.

The Anglish had been encouraged to settle here by their kings. They had chosen not to live inside the old fort, but they would rummage there for abandoned tools, coins, even bits of jewellery, the detritus of centuries.

And in Banna they had found Ambrosias. For generations the old man’s family had lived in the township that had grown up inside the ruined fort. With the coming of the Anglish his family had all packed up and gone, the farmer neither knew nor cared where. But the old man, stubborn, had remained alone, scraping at the dirt of a small-holding inside the walls of the fort. He was magnificent, in his frail way. He had even raised his rusty hand-plough and had threatened to break the heads of any burly Anglish who tried to evict him from his fort.

Some impulse led the Angles to tolerate the old man. They even shared their ale with him. Ammanius, hearing this, complimented the farmer on a Christian generosity surprising in a ‘hairy-arsed heathen’. But Wuffa knew it was easy to be awed by the Romans’ mighty ruins. Perhaps to the Anglish, some of them newly arrived from across the sea, the old man of the Wall had seemed like a relic of vanished days, a living ghost. They may even have been trying to propitiate the gods of the Wall by keeping him alive.

But it had been fifteen years now, the burly farmers grumbled, and still the old man refused to die.

They rode into the fort. Choked by grass and weeds the place was very old. Halls of wood and wattle had been erected on the neat rectangular foundations of vanished stone buildings, but even these latter huts had slumped back into the dirt from which they had been shaped. But the place was not quite abandoned.