Gallery 3 - Building the Wall Redux

In 2022, we created the exhibition Building the Wall as part of the award-winning Hadrian's Wall 1900 Festival, a year-long event celebrating 1900 years since the building of the Wall.

If you missed the exhibition, you now have another chance to see some of it as we've taken the information panels from the original exhibition and put them on display in Gallery 3. 

This compact exhibition explores who built Hadrian’s Wall and how, and considers the substantial practical and logistical challenges involved. It looks at questions such as: where did they get the stone? What tools did they use? How did they transport everything? How did they deal with the rivers and streams that needed to be crossed?

Many details of the design of the Wall varied over its great length. This exhibition mainly looks at the section of Wall between Wallsend and the original end of the Wall in Newcastle. It includes ground-breaking new research from the excavation of the section of Wall just outside the fort at Wallsend, including how water was supplied to the fort and bath-house, and the original appearance of the fort’s west gate. 

Watch: Keeper of Archaeology Alex Croom talks about the exhibition