Writing on the Wall

Hadrian’s Wall Spring Festival

Community and Education Poetry Readings

As part of the Hadrian’s Wall Tourism Partnership’s Spring Festival events, Writing on the Wall presented a series of Readings by participants of the Education and Community Workshops that took place from January to April 2002.

These workshops were run by Professional Writers and involved pupils and teaching staff from a number of schools as well as adults from Cumbria, Northumberland and Tyne & Wear.

The participants were encouraged and guided to produce a wide range of writing that creatively explored different subjects connected to the Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site.

The Readings were an opportunity for the work to be performed by the participants and to be available to a wider audience.

click on an image to enlarge

Kitty Fitzgerald

Waberthwaite CE Primary School
Ravenglass
Monday 27th May 2002

Kitty Fitzgerald

The pupils worked with Kitty Fitzgerald using different forms of writing – verse, diaries, letters and emails to extend their vocabulary and sentence building around the theme of Ravenglass in Roman times and today.

The work also included the use of nouns, verbs & adjectives, acrostics, time travel, lost artifacts and mysteries.

St Andrews CE Primary School, Heddon on the Wall
Tuesday 28th May 2002

Robert Forsythe

Robert Forsythe involved pupils in studying W.H. Auden and his connections to the North Pennines and Hadrian’s Wall. The petrol station at Heddon is mentioned in Auden’s play Hadrian’s Wall – An Historical Survey and the children have used this and other works to explore notions both of barbarism and the importance of the ordinary.

Hadrian Primary School
Carville Primary School

Hadrian Primary School
South Shields
Wednesday 29th May

Carville First School, Wallsend
Thursday 30th May 2002

Bill Herbert

Pupils at both schools worked with Bill Herbert and used visits to Arbeia and Segedunum to examine their sense of place and history. Parts of both forts have been reconstructed in the lifetime of the pupils and this experience offered parallels with the first building of the wall and its relationship with the then local inhabitants and the Roman settlements.

Corbridge Roman Site, Northumberland
Saturday 1st June 2002

Linda France

A community based adult writing group worked with Linda France and responded to various exhibits at the Corbridge Roman Museum.

They created their own contemporary version of the ‘Corbridge Hoard’ - a wooden chest containing a remarkable collection of objects, buried during the first half of the second century, and discovered in 1964.The group also traced the imagined origins of a selection of other ’found’ objects.

Linda France