Any impressively long wall is bound to cause us to recall the midfield dynamo and philosopher John Trewick. In 1978 Big Ron Atkinson took his bubble-permed West Bromwich Albion team to China on some sort of goodwill tour. The lads’ diplomacy evidently rested in their feet, for when Trewick was asked by the BBC crew documenting the tour what he thought of the Great Wall, he replied: ‘When you’ve seen one wall you’ve seen them all.’ Good try, John, but not quite accurate.
He would, however, have been on the money had he alluded to the common state of mind among men who commission immense walls (paranoiac) and to the loss of life that is, without exception, occasioned by the construction of the things (considerable). In these regards all walls are, indeed, one wall — whatever form they take. For much of its history the Great Wall was not continuous but a series of manned fortifications.
The last major land defences built on British soil, whose greatest concentration is on Portsdown Hill and the Gosport peninsula, were separate from each other, and garrisoned.
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