The Wall...

In the first few centuries of the Common Era, valley the Stone Caravan was part of a Demilitarised Zone - the Northernmost border of the Roman Empire.

Hadrian's famous Wall is several miles to the South, Antonine's less well known embankment to the North, and this must have been a comfortable and prosperous place to live. The garrisons of the Wall needed cattle and sheep and corn - and wood for those heated bathhouses, all of which could be sourced from the communities north and south of the wall. A little town that grew up around the fort of Vindolanda, (home of the birthday invitation ) could boast glass for its windows and wine and oil and garlic for its dinner parties. The legions might have called the locals "Brittunculi" ("nasty little brits"), but they also housed British allies and their familes within the camp walls in times of unrest.)

It's from this time that the earliest remains at the Stone Caravan seem to date - a tumble of rocks among the oaks mark the site of a Romano-British settlement, as far as I am aware, unexcavated. (Don't tell Tony Robinson - it's nice and quiet up here, and I suspect the merest pulse from "Geo-Phys" would bring the woodshed down right now!)

The legions on the wall were not Italian (although most of their senior officers were). They were Gauls and Dacians(?) and Belgians*, and when their service was up they were given strips of land in the area, and settled down, mixing their genes happily with those of the horrid little brits.
When the legions were withdrawn from the Border to defend Rome from Vandals and Goths and other ASBO youth cults of the 4th Century, the descendents of those retired squaddies stayed behind. So at least some of neighbours are the result of early EU labour migration - (and the BNP can stuff its repulsive rhetoric anti-immigration rhetoric up its own lardy arse!)

*Sorry - I was asked for stories of Roman Belgian Waffles, and I couldn't find any - but here is a recipe for Roman pancakes in honey:

I haven't been updating this for a few weeks - there are many reasons, and they all seem to have taken up residence in my upper respiratory tract. In short, what started as a nasty head cold turned into Sinusitus, which feels like an unholy cross between migraine, neuraligia, headsche and flu. With the added bonus of pints of lurid green bleurgh to dispose off.
Lets just say that a stone caravan, even a cosy firelit one, is not the ideal crawl space for a woman with a colony of bugs, so I have been tucked up under duvets at my sisters place, gobbling up brufen and antibiotics.
One good thing about fever - great technicolour dreams and you can turn down the heating 3 notches.