Pike Hill Signal Tower
About
Pike Hill stood on high ground overlooking the Stanegate road, one of a chain of signal towers built in the early second century to watch the frontier before Hadrian's Wall existed. Its foundations run unusually deep for a 6-meter-square tower, suggesting real height, and the site kept turning up soldiers' gear into the fourth century. When the Wall was built two decades later, its line was bent slightly off-axis just to incorporate this older tower.
What happened here
A small stone tower with a timber top, sited so that it can see the next one along the line. Half a dozen men live in it. They watch the ground in front, and they watch the tower on either side. A signal — fire and smoke at night, something visible by day — passes a warning down the chain far faster than a rider can, though it can only carry a message that was agreed in advance. The rest of the time it is a lookout post on a road, a river crossing or a frontier line, and the work is boredom punctuated by inspections. Supplies come up from the fort behind. Towers on a frontier stand within sight of each other for hundreds of miles.
In ancient writing
- Historia Augusta, Life of Hadrian 11.2
Records Hadrian's construction of an eighty-mile wall across Britain to separate Romans from barbarians, the frontier system this tower belonged to.
Sources
Nearby
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