Military History | Housesteads — The Courses Clayton Restacked

The Wall running downhill from the north-east corner of Housesteads holds a level crown for hundreds of metres, course on course, capped in turf. Very little of that shape is Roman.

John Clayton, town clerk of Newcastle, assembled a Roman Wall Estate out of the farms the Wall crossed. English Heritage gives 1838 for his purchase of Housesteads; no document for the year has been published, and no other producer supplies it independently. From about 1848 into the 1880s his workmen cleared the fallen debris off the curtain, picked the Roman facing stones out of it, restacked them dry, packed the interior with earth and sealed the top with turf.

The National Trust's field records count the courses. On Hotbank Crags the Wall averages eight courses under its turf cap, of which up to five are original Roman masonry still set in hard mortar over surviving Roman core; the rest is Clayton's dry work. Between Rapishaw Gap and Housesteads Wood, up to six of eight. At Steel Rigg, three of seven. Nothing anywhere was taken back to Roman height.

That Clayton saved the central sector from the quarrymen is a claim with an author. The World Heritage Site's management description gives other reasons in the same breath — this is upland the plough never worked, and where the Wall served as a field boundary it was left standing — and records that the sector was extensively quarried regardless.

Even the fort's Roman name is a reconstruction. The Notitia Dignitatum has Borcovicio, the Ravenna list Velurtion, and one stone from the site reads VER; Vercovicium is what modern editors made of those. Clayton's own 1855 paper on the milecastle immediately west of here calls the place Borcovicius.

The National Trust owns Housesteads, English Heritage runs it and charges admission, and the fort stands in the guardianship of the Secretary of State. The Trust's own record asks that repairs to the Clayton Wall be supervised by an archaeologist.

📸 Cover: Hadrian's Wall running downhill from the north-east corner of Housesteads, the Clayton Wall's coursed drystone face and turf crown in the foreground; photograph by Steven Fruitsmaak, 27 October 2007, public domain. Second image, the fort's own north wall looking east toward Housesteads Wood; by Derek Voller, 15 May 2015, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Geograph and Wikimedia Commons.