I now travel over a large common, still upon the Wall, with its trench nearly complete. But what was my surprise when I beheld, thirty yards on my left, the united works of Agricola and Hadrian, almost perfect! I climbed over a stone wall to examine the wonder; measured the whole in every direction; surveyed them with surprise, with delight; was fascinated, and unable to proceed; forgot I was upon a wild common, a stranger, and the evening approaching. I had the grandest works under my eye of the greatest men of the age in which they lived, and of the most eminent nation then existing; all of which had suffered but little during the long course of sixteen hundred years. Even hunger and fatigue were lost in the grandeur before me. If a man writes a book upon a turnpike road, he cannot be expected to move quick; but, lost in astonishment, I was not able to move at all. The first time I visited the spot, this passage, through which there runs so fine a vein of youthful enthusiasm, was fresh in my recollection. The shades of evening were beginning to gather round me, and the blackness of the furze which covered the ground, gave additional solemnity to the scene. I looked for the venerable old man, as if expecting still to find him fixed in his enthusiastic trance; but he was not there. After all, he had moved on; and a few years more removed him from this scene, to sleep in the church-yard under a humbler and less durable mound than his favourite general and emperor had here raised! The section given in page 52, exhibits the state of the works at this place. The north fosse is very boldly developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth milestone: the whole of its contents lie strewed on its outer margin. Near the eighteenth milestone, on the left of the road, is a mound, which I take to be the remains of a mile-castle. In one part near here, the Wall, as seen in the road, measures ten feet wide, but it speedily becomes narrower. [Sidenote: ST. OSWALD’S CHAPEL.] Where the ground begins to dip strongly to the North Tyne, St. Oswald’s chapel stands. On the north side of the road, is a field called Mould’s-close, in which a number of bones and implements of war have from time to time been turned up, and which is supposed to be the site of a battle. The tradition runs, that from the fight which was won here, England dates her advancing greatness, and that, from the fatal results of a conflict to be lost on the same ground, she will date her decline. [Sidenote: BATTLE OF HEAVEN-FIELD.]Hodgson says, ‘Was this the site of part of the battle of Heaven-field, which Bede says was fought just north of the Roman Wall, and in memory of which the chapel of St. Oswald was built?’ That it was, the narrative of the venerable historian will probably shew—