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us? Or did we change America? And who were we—was there really a consistency that could be defined?
    The answer, I decided, was some, some, and definitely yes. And I knew that the best way to examine that consistency was to go back to where it was formed.
    Some might think it absurd to reach back two thousand years in order to fully comprehend the temperament of a cultural piece of today’s America. And yet, many people are comfortable looking into the biblical Scriptures for evidence of how they should conduct their lives, and others argue firmly that the basis for Western ideals in government, philosophy, and even drama can be found in ancient Greece. Indeed, the Japanese people can trace the direct ancestry of their emperor and thus the movement of their culture through a line that begins before the time of Christ.
    For many centuries the ancestors of today’s Scots-Irish Americans carried on an oral rather than a written tradition. They were a warlike culture that indulged in little trade and left few tangible records, other than the observations from the more learned peoples who observed them. But strong cultures come together in the face of challenge and cannot help but leave their mark. To fully comprehend the forces that created the Scots-Irish mind-set of today, one must actually begin nearly two thousand years ago, and then trace a series of events that culminated in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. It is best to start from atop the ruins of an ancient structure built by Roman soldiers at the command of an emperor named Hadrian.
    The enduring character of the Scots-Irish people was formed first and foremost in Scotland. Geography shaped it, cultural traits related closely to survival were its grist, and a peculiar form of struggle hardened and refined it. At Hadrian’s Wall, one can consider the interplay of all of these. For along this wall, give or take a few miles, is where the Scottish nation took its physical shape. And it was the resistance of one people as well as the ebbing of another that drew its southern boundary.
    The wall stretched for seventy-three miles from sea to sea across the island’s narrow neck a few miles south of where modern-day England and Scotland share their border, from Carlisle in the west to the other side of Newcastle in the east. It took Rome’s soldiers six years to build it. Made principally of stone, it was in most places fifteen feet high and ten feet across. The wall was marked along the way by a series of signal towers—about eighty “mile castles” where small Roman garrisons manned outposts, and seventeen larger forts with gateways into and out of the northern “wilderness” that we now call Scotland. A thirty-foot-deep ditch ran in front of it, and another ditch was dug behind it.
    The wall’s ruins are not much to look at—mostly crumbling stones now set in overgrown fields, where it seems far more sheep pass their days than humans. But if one considers the energies that propelled the building of it and the cultural forces that thereafter stacked up behind each side of it, Hadrian’s Wall assumes a magic all its own. Indeed, it becomes a nesting place for remembering a tale of dissipating empires, and of new peoples emerging from the seeds of past defiance.
    Fifty-five years before the birth of Christ, Roman legions crossed what someday would be called the English Channel and invaded Britain. Behind them lay the societal wreckage and reassembly from their conquest of much of Central Europe and Gaul. The tribes that the Romans had defeated on this journey were largely Celtic. The Celts were a warlike but emotional people known for their flowing oratory as well as their mastery of metallurgy, both in personal adornments and in weaponry. 1 They had lost to the Romans because they were consistently hampered by one tragic flaw: they were adamantly tribal, gathering not as nations but instead following the lead of a long succession of warrior princes, and thus