The Wall

Rome's Greatest Frontier

De: Alistair Moffat

Narrado por: James Cameron Stewart

Hadrian's Wall is the largest and one of the most enigmatic historical monuments in Britain. Nothing else approaches its vast scale: a land wall running seventy-three miles from east to west and a sea wall stretching at least twenty-six miles down the Cumbrian coast. Many of its forts are as large as Britain's most formidable medieval castles, and the wide ditch dug to the south of the Wall, the vallum, is larger than any surviving prehistoric earthwork.

Built in a ten-year period by more than thirty thousand soldiers and laborers at the behest of an extraordinary emperor, the Wall consisted of more than twenty-four million stones, giving it a mass greater than all the Egyptian pyramids put together. At least a million people visit Hadrian's Wall each year, and it has been designated a World Heritage Site.

In this book, based on literary and historical sources as well as the latest archaeological research, Alistair Moffat considers who built the Wall, how it was built, why it was built, and how it affected the native peoples who lived in its mighty shadow. The result is a unique and fascinating insight into one of the wonders of the ancient world.

©2008 Alistair Moffat (P)2023 Tantor

Alistair Moffat comes through again!

The Author
I am delighted by Mr. Moffat’s ability to make history a fascinating adventure. I also appreciate his occasional lyrical or humorous turn of the phrase. This is the fourth of his books that I have read/listened to and I am looking forward to the next one.
The Narrator
Some reviewers really trashed this narrator. Narration is critical to my enjoyment of audiobooks, so initially I steered away. I bought this after an Audible pop-up only because I forgot about the negative reviews (and my own preview listen. At first I could not get past the images in my head of John Cleese doing his best pompous and supercilious Brit voice in various Monty Python skits. That faded eventually and I simply enjoyed the narrative. There were several parts that he read particularly well, IMHO. Don’t let the narrator keep you away from this wonderful book.

Narrator

This is the first Moffat book I didn’t mind ending, and not because of the information, but rather the narrator. So bland and boring.