Anne Waggot-Knott

Here we are at the tentative periphery, the end of the line. But also the beginning.

By the beach at Bowness-on Solway, Hadrian’s Wall is invisible. Its most westerly remains are buried in the soil beneath us, but their story is everywhere. 

The wall here has a powerful unspoken reach, outward across the ocean to other nations and inward across our borderlands. It transcends what is known and what is not known, inhabiting a space between knowledge and mystery, artefact and abstract, history and illusion. It represents an impediment – a truly epic barrier – but also exploration and journeys across land and sea and time.

Good luck go with you combines seen and unseen elements. The process was free and experimental, conducted in snatched moments, going with the flow, inexact and unruly, like this part of the coastline. The roughly blind-debossed stones acknowledge the wall’s invisibility but also the structure and magnitude of the empire it contained. The great, ridged expanse of Bowness sands gives us sunlight and water in abundance, as far as the eye can see. There is a glint and a glare on the faraway sea, bright buoys bobbing in time. The surroundings immediately invited cyanotype, or ‘sun printing’. 

Hadrian’s Wall shares Bowness with another historic, linear structure. It was the site of a railway viaduct across the Solway Firth, carrying iron ore from Cumbria to Scotland. The bridge was demolished in 1934 after being damaged by ice floes but a few remaining viaduct supports, uncannily reminiscent of monumental Roman columns, stand proud on the old promontory. Fast forward in time and the graffiti dog looks back at us from the opposite shore of the Solway, where the Scottish stanchions of the bridge remain. 

Curlews call and sweep by, ground nesting on the foreshore then migrating with the ebb and flow of the seasons. 

Birds and dogs, beasts of sky and of land, endemic on the sands at Bowness as we all enjoy this wide open space. Beneath the village are the remains of a Roman Fort, Maia, named for the Roman goddess. One of the civilian artefacts uncovered here is a tombstone depicting a girl holding a bird and feeding a small dog. Companions on life’s journeys.

On a little shelter, hidden away in the Roman-inspired gardens by the beach, is carved the Latin sentiment FORTUNA VOBIS ADSIT: good luck go with you.