Hadrian's Wall (The Landmark Library)

Hadrian’s Wall stretched across northern Britain as one of the Roman Empire’s most ambitious frontier works, but its history is about far more than a line of stone fortifications. Adrian Goldsworthy explains why the wall was built, how it developed and how it fitted into Rome’s wider system of frontier control, placing the monument within the military and political history of Roman Britain.

Goldsworthy also reconstructs the communities that lived along the frontier: soldiers drawn from across the empire, their families, traders and local civilians whose lives centred on the forts and settlements around the wall. Archaeological evidence is used to explore construction, garrison life and the monument’s later history and survival. Concise and accessible, this Landmark Library volume offers both a history of an extraordinary Roman structure and a human portrait of the frontier society that grew around it.