Other Walls

Physical walls have been used throughout history to separate groups of people and to allow monitored passage from one side to the other - the Great Wall of China was rebuilt several times over a period of eight thousand years. It ran some 5000 kilometres compared to the 177 kilometre length of Hadrian’s Wall.

Hadrian’s Wall was not the only barriered frontier in the Roman Empire, though it was the most heavily fortified. A turf and timber wall was built in Germania to mark the edge of the Empire and protect the province from local tribes. Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius, constructed the Antonine Wall between the Forth and Clyde estuaries only a few years after Hadrian’s Wall was completed. The Antonine Wall was abandoned after only twenty years due to repeated attacks by unfriendly tribes, and Hadrian’s Wall once again became the northern-most frontier of the Empire.

Physical boundaries have been used in many countries in more recent history, including the Berlin Wall, which divided Berlin into east and west halves between 1961 and 1990. The checkpoints, including the famous Checkpoint Charlie, acted like Roman milecastles as a point of monitored crossing for pedestrian and vehicular traffic.

Defensive walls have always been contentious objects, as they are constructed to divide areas that have always been open to the people who live there. Native Britons were separated from their families and markets by Hadrian’s Wall in much the same way that East and West Germans were separated from their friends and places of work by the Berlin Wall.

Today, there are still numerous physical barriers around the world to prevent unrestricted movement of people. The US-Mexico Barrier and the Israel-West Bank Barrier are two that have caused great political and popular debate and are still under construction.