Wallside Highwalk: Roman Walls Below Your Feet

The Wallside Highwalk in London overlooks the ruins of a second-century Roman wall and a 12-acre fort constructed with 35,000 cubic metres of Kentish Ragstone. Built between 190 and 225 AD, the wall incorporated an earlier Roman fort from around 120 AD that housed 1,000 garrisoned men. The site includes Bastion 11A, rediscovered during Barbican construction, and a medieval tower surviving at two-thirds of its original height.

London · from the walk “Secrets and Surprises of Barbican” · audio ~4 min · Generated

Wallside Highwalk, Barbican Estate, London EC2Y 8BH

Where did the stone for the Roman wall at London's Wallside Highwalk come from?

Look down... no, further down. Below the concrete walkway you're standing on, below the neat lawns and the still water of the Barbican lake... there it is. Rough, ancient stone, nearly two thousand years old, running like a scar through the landscape. The London Wall was constructed towards the end of the second century AD, enclosing a semi-circular area of approximately one hundred and thirty-three hectares on the north side of the Thames.......... But here's the thing most people miss. The defensive wall that would define London for millennia actually started with a Fort, built by the Roman Empire close to the modern Barbican around one hundred and twenty AD. When the wall itself appeared decades later, between one hundred and ninety and two hundred and twenty-five AD, it incorporated this fort, strengthening its outer walls. You are standing right above the north face of that original Roman fortress.......... Now, think about scale for a moment. The construction was a substantial investment of resources. An estimated thirty-five thousand cubic metres of Kentish Ragstone was quarried Seventy miles away, near Maidstone, and shipped via the Medway and Thames to London. Roughly one million blocks, brought on barges. That is an Extraordinary feat of logistics for any age, let alone the third century.......... But where exactly was the fort's garrison? The wall included over twenty bastions, and a large twelve-acre fort on the north-west section. The fort itself was the home of the official guard of the Governor of Britain, housing around one thousand men in barrack blocks.......... Now look to your left. See those two curving stumps of stone pressed against the wall? That is Bastion Eleven A... and it has a remarkable story. Bastion Eleven A was Not known when historians numbered the bastions. It was only rediscovered when the Barbican was being built. As part of the Barbican development, the churchyard around St Giles was lowered, and this lowering of the ground level revealed the remains of a completely unknown bastion. It was identified as Bastion Eleven A because it sat between the known Bastion Twelve and Bastion Eleven at All Hallows on the Wall. It survived as two curving stumps built against the city wall. Its outer section had been cut away by a seventeenth-century sewer that had been following the line of the ancient defensive ditch.......... And the towers nearby? The large medieval tower marking the north-western corner of the fort still stands at a remarkable two-thirds of its original height. Originally built as a defensive measure, the tower later became a refuge for Hermits... yes, hermits, living quietly inside a Roman military tower beside St Giles Church.......... During redevelopments of the churchyard in the nineteenth century, the wall became buried in earth and lay hidden until World War Two. The heavy bombing in the Cripplegate area exposed the tower once again. So it took the devastation of the Blitz to give us back these ancient stones... and then the Barbican builders, digging foundations for the future, accidentally uncovered secrets the Romans left behind almost two millennia ago.

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