Limestone Corner

Recently, I've had me socks knocked off a bit by rocks! This is Limestone Corner.

Before now, these would've been the pages I'd skim over in local guidebooks. But recently, I've lingered over limestone. I've wondered over the whinstone. I've gone crazy over quartz (four of Long Meg's Daughters up the road in Cumbria are made of quartz), and I've been intrigued by the igneous!

We pulled off the Military Road into a small lay-by and hurdled a style to find this amazing and impressive ridge of rock that blew the minds of the Romans.

Known as the northernmost point of the Roman Empire in Britain (other than a brief period in Scotland turfing the Antonine Wall), Limestone Corner is a cracker at Teppermoor Hill.

Every time one of us mentioned Limestone Corner, we voluntarily broke out into a round of Rhinestone Cowboy! A kind of archaeological earworm.

Regarded for their ingenuity and drive, the Romans were evidently scuppered at Teppermoor, and to be honest, you can maybe understand that there might have been a bit of head scratching and tunic tugging. Adaptability clearly went out of the window when it came to plotting their way through the rock! It appears that the geology caused hostility!

The first mind bender that would have turned the Roman Army barmy was that Limestone Corner was, in fact, made from whinstone. This tough, dark rock is found at intervals along the line of Hadrian's Wall and beyond, at Walltown, Cawfields, Steel Rigg and here at Teppermoor.

We loved the way the lichen and algae got it together, forming creeping mosaics, living symbiotically on the stones, intertwined, embracing the rocks, and the names that went with them - Yellow Map Lichen, Yellow Scales, Heamatomma Ochroleucum. Their profuseness is a sign that pollution here is less, and the air better quality.

The plan at Teppermoor was to build a ditch in front of the wall and a vallum behind it. This helped in defensive measures but also delineated the boundary of where not to cross if you wanted to keep yer nose in place. In the builder's ditch prep planning meeting, no one must have got the memo about the dodgy dolerite!

Having laid down its foundations many millions of years before, Hadrian couldn't mess with a force tougher than him and his men. Formed about 295 million years ago after the last ice age, magma forced its way through tectonic plates. Like toffee made at Beamish, it spread through the northeast and settled with whinstone becoming a fundamental part of Northern Britain's landscape.

The orders were to chip away at the landscape, ploughing a defensive ditch as the wall would have curled a corner at Teppermoor.

There are signs of chipping and chiselling. Some of the mammoth boulders still bear the marks of tools. There are humongous hunks of stone strewn to the sides of the ditch. Some look like Flintstone toasters, some like the heads at Easter Island. You can visibly see in places which bit was chiselled off where. The more you look, the more you can see that real effort has gone into shifting these monoliths. Up onto the brow of the hill, nuggets of heavy black rubble litter the landscape.

But it was the solidity of this stone that stopped the steely eyed soldiers in their tracks. Not even the resolute Romans could dig through dolerite.

You can see their disappointment as a visual tag on the land. Quarrying away. Clearing a way, attempting to slice through the land, but then someone from the higher echelons must've blown the whistle, pulled the plug on this stone pummelling prep.

No one really knows the reasoning for fleeing the plan. Were they taking too long or were they just not won over by gouging away at the whinstone? You can almost sense the feeling of the down tools order and men peeling themselves off the job, disavowing their link to the land.

And when you look, you can see the ditch becoming shallower and ultimately petering out.

It appears this rock was even too rock for the Romans.

If you're up for more stone (the crows) you can journey a little further up the road to Vindolanda or Housesteads Roman Fort.