AN INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGIAN UPON HADRIAN'S WALL

Archaeology like society
is rather stratified.
Traditionally the older the archaeology
the more glorious the archaeologist.

Industrial archaeology was
too modern to be real
and its demands
too daunting to realise.

Fashions change.
More visitors went to Beamish.
The Romans became boring.
Marine archaeology in snorkel and wet suit hit TV.

Archaeological taste,
like the society it serves
tends to specialise (read divisiveness)
which is why catholic tastes are my dish.

The Romans built roads, walls,
bridges, even cornmills,
here on their frontier.
They quarried, worked stone.

Skills that Northumbrian bastle makers,
Georgian house builders, leadminers,
farm dykers, railway navvies were all to share
here in the coming centuries.

I have never been an actor,
dressing up as a legionary
re-enacting conflict, makes me nervous
but I am fascinated by tolerance

And how a world class object
visible from space
might be a fulcrum
between inclusivity and exclusion.

Should it celebrate division
between barbarism and civilisation?
A gay man concluded
"Whoever deprives an unoffending man of his right is a barbarian".

He was writing of Hadrian's Wall
and how what separated the barbarian and the Roman
was that the latter did not leave
the scene of the crime but made it home.

That is the essence of the imperial spirit.
Now we live in a post age.
Post empire, post modern, post nationalisation,
even post GPO.

Will our email and internet,
our chat rooms and moderators
teach us tolerance
just as Hadrian's Wall
strides across the neck of Britain?

A neck that is largely a quiet landscape
telling of past vulcanology.
But as is proper to a microcosm
the counterpoint to Burgh Marsh
was (is, will be?) at Wallsend.

Saxon style at Corbridge or Ovingham,
Armstrong violence at Housesteads,
George Stephenson's railway,
Alex Glasgow's songs,
Which do you want to celebrate?

They are all together
in the lee of the Wall.
I know what I want:
Peace in Our Time
and a station on the border at Gilsland.