Hadrian's Wall

I guess every school-child has heard about Hadrian's wall, and since we were passing by, we stopped to inspect what's left of it. Actually there's not a lot. It's certainly more than a garden wall, but really there's much less of it, and it's much less impressive, than the unbelievable quantity of dry stone-walling which marks the boundaries of every desolate field in every deserted valley from Dovedale to the Borders.

In the Youth Hostel common room, a teacher was giving a gang of kids a demonstration of how superior Roman weaponry was to what the locals had. As if it's not bad enough that the whole thing is a glorification of militarised colonialism, the guy was actually talking about the Brits as 'the enemy'.

I must admit that we were there at dusk after a snow storm; but even though I'm as concerned as anyone that computers don't take over from reality, I must say that this one experience I would have much preferred to have via a CD-ROM reconstruction...