Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2015
Some 300 years ago, in 1676, the year of Sir John Clerk‘s birth, Roger North, the biographer, visited Hadrian’s Wall. He was disappointed with what he saw: ‘it appeared only as a range or bank of stones all overgrown with grass, not unlike the bank of the Devil’s Ditch at Newmarket, only without any hollow, and nothing near so big’ (Birley, 1961, 9). In 1754, the year before Clerk died, William Stukeley had an audience of the Princess Dowager of Wales at Kew House.