1993 Biking Britain

Walls & wells

I spent much of my first full cycling day in England, toiling up the hellish road alongside and south of Hadrian’s Wall. Although the Romans conquered what is today England and had led an expedition as far as Inverness, what is today Scotland proved impossible to conquer or control. In 121AD, therefore, Hadrian ordered a protective wall to be built from coast to coast just south f the current border between England and Scotland. The wall took ten years to complete and was 73 miles long, eight feet wide and twelve feet high. Every Roman mile (1,481m) a fort was constructed, ad two turrets between the forts. I visited the well-preserved Housesteads Fort and saw the underground heating and the public baths and the wall stretching into the distance both east and west. And made an interesting discovery: like the Zulu warriors under Shaka, Roman soldiers were not allowed to get married or have sex. Presumably all that sexual frustration translates into the warlike aggression of the successful soldier.

In the Peak District in Derbyshire, I attended a well-dressing or well-flowering. Well-dressing is an ancient pagan rite, a giving of thanks for clean water. Pagan water worship was banned by the early Christians, but well-dressing was revived in Tissington after the Black Plague – Tissington being the only town to survive the plague unscathed. Today, may Derbyshire towns “dress” their wells in an annual celebration of disease-free water. A wooden frame is constructed and packed with clay from the local river. A paper template of the design, usually but not always religious, is placed over the frame and clay, and a horse-nail used to “trace” the design onto the clay. The design is then “coloured-in” using natural materials – leaves, petals, seeds, lichen, parsley, beans and so on. The end result lovely to behold.