Arcadia Scotland

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.” Maya Angelou

Study abroad transgresses and crosses borders. These can be physical, linguistic, political, cultural – but at the end of the day, study abroad is about experiencing and exploring new identities. The Scotland Center had a theme of walls this semester to engage and encourage students to think about the nature of physical boundaries.  We took students to visit two walls – The Berlin Wall and Hadrian’s Wall.

Joining with students from the English and Irish Centers, the students studying in Scotland were accompanied by Dr Alex Collins to visit the vibrant city of Berlin. One part of this event was to see a reconstruction of Checkpoint Charlie one of the points of entry across the barrier between the West and the East that was central to the political identity of Europe in the 2^nd half of the 20^th Century emerging from the ashes of World War 2:

The Berlin Wall from 1961 to 1989 was the physical inhumation of political and state differences, a symbol of the Cold War, representing differences between communism and capitalism, and also a local barrier preventing mass emigration to West Germany from the East through Berlin.

 It was a period in time so close to today, yet for myself and our Arcadia students, before our lives (or at least for myself before anything I can remember). Yet it feels present today. While in Berlin we encountered the legacies of numerous ‘walls’ – numerous divisions, both physical and cultural, whose results were utterly inhumane. And in the face of a new potential walls, both in the UK and in the US, it was prescient to see it.

Dr Alex Collins

I was lucky to be a part of the excursion to Hadrian’s Wall led by Dr Jen Novotny. Hadrian’s wall was a consequence of the Roman invasion of Britain in 43AD. About 50 years later, a line of 14 forts was established along a road connecting the Solway Firth and the Tyne.  This line reflects to some degree the current divide between England and Scotland – although not the current border as the entire wall sits in England.

In the year 120 Emperor Hadrian ordered the building of a 73 mile wall to mark Rome’s northern frontier and to attempt to control the peoples living to the North of the wall. There was to be a guarded gate every mile with 2 watch towers between each gate. 14 forts were eventually built along the length of the wall. It was completed in 128. One wall was not enough for the Romans though and 10 years later they pushed North establishing a new turf wall roughly between the current cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh called the Antonine wall. However, by 158 the Romans returned to Hadrian’s wall to maintain their original frontier. By the 180s Northern tribes were crossing the wall and invading Roman territory. The Romans successfully defeated this incursion and strengthened the wall partly by narrowing the gates.  They had a presence at the wall right up till the early 400s until they eventually withdrew from Britain after radically changing England through centuries of occupation and settlement.

To see a wall of military occupation with the students was a wonderful experience. This was very much a wall to demarcate for what the Romans perceived as a civilized and ordered world from a group of peoples whom they thought of as barbaric, savage and primitive. The Romans referred to these individuals as nasty little Britons. Ultimately though it was the Romans that eventually pulled back after the tribes of Europe brought down an empire. The Romans twice pushed up North of the Antonine wall into Scotland in the 70s under Agricola and then in the 210s under Severus. There are some fascinating remains of Roman forts going right up into the North East of Scotland – but any longer occupation of Scotland only lasted about 40 or 50 years and was purely military in nature.

When I considered Scottish identity as I stood on the wall currently located in England looking to the North reflecting upon Scotland’s status as a unified cultural and political space, it may have been this physical boundary that cemented in some sense the origins of a nation. Out of something that was a result of conquest, military and political domination that no doubt caused so much grief, death and hardship to a previous settled group of peoples, a physical wall may have become the start of a cultural unification of these individuals to the North – although there is no evidence that the Caledonians or later the Picts were anything other than a disparate set of tribes. It was not until many centuries later that a line of unified kingship is identifiable in Scotland. It is in the 800s that a nation can clearly start to be recognised under a single political authority albeit a nation partly created out of a new external threat – the Vikings!

On the one hand a wall keeps oneself safe and unifies a self-contained identity within that physical boundary, but on the other hand, locking oneself away creates a stronger identity in the other. Walls divide as that is what they are built to do - however many guarded gates you insert.