Race, Nature, and Historical Memory

Hadrian's Wall was the northern boundary of Roman Britain. In 2022 we spent a week walking the National Trail's Hadrian Wall Path . It was the 1900th anniversary of the Wall. This chapter explores how race, nature, and historical memory were entangled while walking the Wall. Walking for leisure is racially coded. Our walk was play and a memorialisation of racialised people in rural England. Much of that presence is erased in the English rural idyll and spatial imaginary. Our absented presence underlines the fiction that racialised people in rural England are recent immigrants. This disappears the legacies of Caribbean slavery and the Raj's exploitation of India from the English countryside. Diversity was part of Hadrian's Wall, including the African Roman emperor Septimius Severus. Yet, diversity was absent from the 1900th celebrations. The erasure of racialised people from the events mirrors the erasure of racialised people from rural England.