John Carlos Baez on Nostr: Yesterday I went to the University of Glasgow to give a physics talk, and my host ...

Yesterday I went to the University of Glasgow to give a physics talk, and my host took me to the Hunterian Museum. This has a big exhibit on Kelvin's electromechanical gadgets, and 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 as much to see. It was made of turf on a stone foundation, with a wide ditch on the north side at points.

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. Wild savages like me formed border states in that area, which is now called The Old North. But all of these 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.

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