The Lord of the Rings,
'Longshanks' and the Anglo - Scottish Border

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Hadrian’s Wall

The path that the hobbits travelled through
from Bree had ‘initially served forts along
the walls of the old kingdoms of Aragorn’s

ancestral homeland’.  

Scull and Hammond recognised that Tolkien
was most probably referring to the road that
lay next to Hadrian’s Wall, the northern frontier
of Roman Britannia. Aragorn’s literary ancestry seems confirmed as Scotland with its old border of Hadrian’s Wall.

The Roman Road was called the Stanegate, serving a number of Roman forts. There were also watchtowers which were also used for signalling to other Stanegate forts and towers. Ultimately, the road deteriorated, was built upon, and is now very close to a road locally known as ‘The Military Road’ (B6318) which was built just after the Jacobite risings.  The Wall was conceived by the Emperor Hadrian in AD 122, yet peace only came 1600 years later.

There are so many old roads throughout England, including old Roman roads and even older ones, but this one has that 'edge' in modern parlance, an 'edge' between the ancient massive Roman empire and the 'barbarian!!' north, between the chaotic land when the Romans left and the more ordered old northern British kingdoms of Gododdin and Dalriada. Close to this road became the border between these old  kingdoms and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England, between Scotland and England, and  finally the region that became home to the Border Reivers.

Tolkien had sensed the potency of this road by the side of Hadrian’s Wall, a

potency captured by both its illumination on 13th March 2010 and by the thousands who attended from all over the world. The lit beacons reminded of both the centuries of violence and of final peace.

Scull and Hammond. 'The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide' HarperCollins. 2006 p371

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanegate