By KAY COOPER kay.cooper@hexham-courant.co.uk

Published at 09:44, Friday, 03 July 2009

YOU would be looking at Beggar Bog Farmhouse for some time before you thought of ‘military installations’.

Vantage point: Beggar Bog Farmhouse – peaceful now but once a theatre of war – with Housesteads Roman fort in the distance.

This traditional Northumbrian stone house – up for sale – nestles amid sheep-chewed slopes at the edge of Whin Sill, where the only decibels worth mentioning are produced by disgruntled peewits.

But Beggar Bog Farmhouse actually stands within a stone’s throw of two of England’s most historic structures for war – the Roman fort of Housesteads and the B6318, Tynedale’s so-called Military Road.

The latter, which runs from Heddon-on-the-Wall to Greenhead almost without a kink, looks Roman in its javelin straightness. But we have an 18th century soldier to thank for the B6318. His name was General George Wade.

General Wade was commander-in-chief of North Britain at the time of the Jacobite uprising of 1745. He witnessed first hand how terrible roads delayed his troops as they dashed across from Newcastle to head off the southward-marching army of Charles Stewart. The Bonnie Prince got past the King’s army, though he only got as far as Derby before retreating north again.

General Wade immediately put in a planning application for a decent, modern east-west link to stop such an embarrassment happening again. He’d relied on road improvements as a military strategy before.

Between 1725 and 1737 General Wade oversaw the construction of more than 250 miles of Scottish road to speed up the movement of troops in pursuit of those pesky Jacobites.

Sadly, the old soldier was never to see his Tynedale Military Road built. By the time planners approved the scheme he had been dead three years.

But now – 260 years later – General Wade’s dream road scheme is beloved by tourists as they follow its length, popping into site after site along the Roman Wall. One of the most spectacular of those sites is right across the road from Beggar Bog Farmhouse.

The Roman fort of Housesteads covers five acres, with barracks, granaries, a hospital and ingenious self-flushing latrines still clearly laid out across the landscape.

The Romans had two names for the fort, both made up from the local Celtic. The earliest name seems to have been Borcovicus, or “the hilly place”, and the House of Commons followed this tradition when they discussed the sale of the fort in 1929.

Hexham’s MP Douglas Colonel Clifton Brown was alarmed that England could lose Borcovicus, cherry-picked by a money grubbing developer.

But the First Commissioner of Works, Mr Lansbury, could reassure him: “I am happy to be able to announce that the owner, Mr John Maurice Clayton, has decided to make a gift of this important camp and of the adjoining stretch of Roman Wall on either side, to the nation,” he said.

The Romans also knew Housesteads as Vercovicium, or “the place of the fighters”.

A military installation the size of Housesteads would have housed a fearful complement of fighting men, but the elite among them must have been the First Cohort of Hamian Bowmen – the only Roman archery regiment in Britain.

A gravestone found at Housesteads shows one of these Hamian archers with his pointy helmet, oriental dagger and curly thigh-high bow. The Hamians would have been superb secret weapons. From the northern battlements of Housesteads they could fire arrows far into no-man’s-land to pick off stray Picts.

The Hamians came from Syria, and another Middle Eastern immigrant left his mark a few hundred yards west of Beggar Bog Farm.

This was Mithras, the Persian sun god. In his Housesteads temple – one of three on Hadrian’s Wall – an exotic-looking sculpture was found showing the god’s birth from the Cosmic Egg, surrounded by the 12 signs of the Zodiac.

We’re used to reading our horoscopes in every paper and magazine today, but this carving found in a Tynedale field was the first time that Leo, Sagittarius, Taurus and the like were ever seen in Britain.

There is another little chapel which is even closer to Beggar Bog Farm and would seem to be the achievement of an Aberdeen-born Christian missionary called James Smith.

James started his career in authentic missionary manner, ministering to the heathen in the South Seas. But “domestic affliction” brought him back to England where he settled in Haydon Bridge.

As the Christian Witness of 1865 put it, James “had his attention specially directed to a very barren district called Beggar Bog, hard by the Roman Wall. Here he excited much interest, gathered a congregation and succeeded in erecting a neat chapel where the Gospel is still preached to the rustic people.”

James’s chapel is presumably the one marked ‘Scotch Presbyterian just over the road from ‘New Beggar Bog’ on the map of 1856. But there is no chapel marked on the map of 1894.

In 1938 another visitor helped to put Beggar Bog on the map. This was Alfred Wainwright, the legendary fell walker and commentator of the wide open spaces, who trekked from Settle to Hadrian's Wall, and wrote an account of his journey.

Wainwright naturally wanted to visit the fort at Borcovicium on his tour, and he recalled he had to pay for the privilege – to a farmer-caretaker who lived at “Beggarbog Farm”.

l Beggar Bog Farmhouse is for sale via Strutt and Parker of Morpeth.

Published by http://www.hexhamcourant.co.uk