Yesterday I went to the University of Glasgow to speak at their physics colloquium. Afterward my host took me to the Hunterian Museum. This has a big exhibit on Kelvin's electromechanical gadgets - but also one on the Antonine wall.

I hadn't heard of that wall! 160 kilometers north of Hadrian's more famous wall, it stretches 60 kilometers from a bit north of Glasgow to a spot on the Firth of Forth west of Edinburgh. Unlike Hadrian's wall, it's not made of stone, so there's not so much to see. It was made of turf on a stone foundation, sometimes with a wide ditch on the north side.

The Romans started building it two decades after Hadrian's wall. But only two decades after that, it was abandoned! The Roman legions withdrew to Hadrian's Wall in 162. After a series of attacks in 197, the emperor Septimius Severus arrived in Scotland in 208 to fight off the local tribes and fix up Hadrian's wall. But he didn't do anything about the Antonine wall.

So, wild savages like me formed border states in this area, which is now called The Old North. All of these states except the Kingdom of Strathclyde were gradually subsumed by Anglo-Saxons, Scots and Picts by about 800. The last to survive, Strathclyde, was incorporated into the Kingdom of Scotland in the 11th century. But the Old North still echos through history in the tales of Welsh poets.

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