A miniature version of China's Great Wall is Hadrian's Wall located in northern England. Constructed in 122AD by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, this Wall was intended to defend Rome, then occupiers of Britannia, from invading barbarians.
Masterful in design, awe-inspiring in its scale, this World Heritage Site spans 73 miles, from Wallsend on the River Tyne to Bowness-on-Solway. The Wall runs through remote countryside, over moors, salt flats and sand dunes, and traverses present-day urban cities of Newcastle and Carlisle. It took three legion of soldiers some six years to construct. Along the way, one finds the remains of 17 Roman forts from which the soldiers worked to construct the Wall, then guarded the frontier.
This summer, I hiked Hadrian's Wall and viewed the Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders film, How to Train Your Dragon. These two seemingly disassociated events merged together for me in a wonderfully moving way. While the Wall was constructed in an effort to keep out those unlike us, the film portrayed a hapless young Viking who aspired to hunt and slay dragons as his ancestors before him. But then an encounter with a young dragon convinces the Viking-boy that there is more to the 'enemy' than he had assumed and had been told.
Too often we build personal walls that keep others out - by our criticism, by prejudging their hearts and motives, or simply by being too preoccupied with our own lives to give others entre. Oh, may it be that history will recall us as having been, not constructors of walls but rather, like the young Viking lad, bridge-builders.
