The Antonine Wall is less well known than its southern neighbor Hadrian's Wall. There's a good reason for it. There's nowhere near as much left of this wall as that one. First off, it was never built in stone. The 'wall' is actually the very opposite of a wall. It's a ditch with a slightly higher hill on the southern side. The original embankments would have been built of earth and wood. The wall was never built from stone. It is in fact very similar to the way that Hadrian's Wall was constructed at that time. Large sections of Hadrian's Wall were originally turf and wood just like this one, with only the parts that had ready access to stone built out of it. It seems unlikely that Hadrian considered Roman expansion to be permanently at an end. He was well known for shoring up the Empire's defenses but this does not mean that he never intended it to expand again. At any rate his successors abandoned his wall and pressed northward into Scotland. Antoninus Pius pushed the line to just north of Glasgow and built the wall that is named after him. This wall was not as easy to defend as the southern one even though it's only about half as long. The area that it's built in is pretty flat and any hills are not utterly unscalable. It was abandoned within twenty years only to be reoccupied later by Septimius Severus and then abandoned again.
