The Milecastle Gateway

The approach

Park at the Once Brewed visitor centre and walk west on the Hadrian's Wall Path. The first mile is gentle and gives you the long view: the Wall running along the crag, the ditch on the north side still visible as a shadow in the grass, and the military road on the south that has done more damage to the monument than fifteen centuries of weather.

The milecastle is the fourth you pass, sitting in a dip rather than on a high point. That is not a mistake in the Roman plan. Milecastles were placed at intervals of one Roman mile regardless of the ground, because they were for administration — gatekeeping, patrols, and a crossing point — not for defence in the dramatic sense.

What a milecastle actually was

A milecastle is a small fortlet built into the line of the Wall, roughly 15 by 18 metres internally, with a gate through the Wall at each end and barracks for a detachment of perhaps eight to thirty men. There are eighty of them along the Wall's length, of which the outlines of about half survive.

The turrets, by contrast, were smaller still and placed at intervals of about a third of a Roman mile between the milecastles. If you can hold both numbers in your head while walking, the whole line stops looking like a wall and starts looking like a signalling system.

The find itself

The cache is in the north gateway of the milecastle, which is the gateway on the far side of the Wall from the modern path. The gateway has been partly reconstructed and the north end is open, but the passage floor is original masonry and is protected.

Stand in the passage and face north. On the left-hand side, the wall of the passage has a gap where the springing stone of the lintel has fallen and been reset. The third facing stone back from the left edge of that gap is loose. Ease it out — do not lever it — and the container sits in the void behind it.

Where people go wrong

• Looking on the south side. The south gateway is more obvious from the path, but it was rebuilt in 1900 and has no void behind the stonework.
• Tugging at stones. Many are loose because the wall was dry-built, not because they are meant to come out. Test each one by hand before applying any force, and if it does not move freely, it is the wrong stone.
• Treating the turret three hundred metres east the same way. It is a scheduled monument with no cache in it, and the stones there are not loose at all.

Access and safety

• The Wall here is a scheduled ancient monument. Do not climb on the wall itself, and do not walk along the top of it.
• The ground on the north side falls away into a steep bank. It is greasy in winter.
• Livestock graze the field. Close gates and keep dogs on leads between March and July.

After the find

The Milecastle Inn is a forty-minute walk east and does a solid lunch. The Roman Army Museum at Carvoran is the better stop if you have children and the weather has turned.