If anything it was an even more spectacular sight than the stone Wall, for along its line the legionaries had stripped away the vegetation right down to the pink-white boulder clay beneath. The turfs they cut - and hauled here sometimes from miles away, for good turf was hard to find - were heaped up on a central strip of remnant greenery. The finished curtain wall was fourteen feet high and twenty feet wide at the base, punctuated by turrets of stone or timber, and a rampart of white clay was laid out before the Wall on the northern side. So as Brigonius looked down from the higher ground, the cleared strip of land stood out, a gash in the landscape brilliant white in the sun, with the green-brown line of the Wall itself running along its centre line.

At length he arrived at Banna. To the south of its escarpment the valley still cut deep, and far below the river washed as it always had. But the landscape bore the mark of the Romans. To the north a road set off straight as an arrow, heading for the northern outposts, and the hills where men had once seen the reclining form of a goddess now glimmered with the fires of watchtowers.

Banna itself was now the site of a Roman camp. As he approached Brigonius saw sentries silhouetted against a setting sun, their bare heads and spear tips clearly visible above wooden ramparts. The place bristled with activity, the roughly laid roads that led from east, west and south were full of traffic, and the turf all around had been churned to mud. The camp itself huddled against the escarpment, protected from any threat by a complex of ditches and a palisaded trench to the north, and the cliff to its back.

As he approached the camp’s defences Brigonius was passed through a line of sentries. Within was a neat array of the Romans’ leather tents. There were soldiers everywhere, of course, in their leather tunics and trousers, their woollen cloaks, their strapped-up military boots. Even more of them were sporting beards, such was the impression Hadrian had made during his visit last year. The camp was a sketch of the fort that would soon be built here, but it was already functioning, already an operational element in the system of the defence of the province.

Once there had been a Brigantian community here. A Roman watchtower had been built here long before Brigonius was born, a blocky stone pillar that had loomed over his boyhood. The watchtower still stood, but his home had gone, the roundhouses demolished, the defensive ditches filled in. Brigonius wouldn’t have recognised the place, save for the essential shape of the landscape.