FROM Brocolitia, wild moorland dips and rises like an ocean, towards the edge of eternity. Once, some 19 centuries ago, the area would have rung with Latin military orders, and the presenting of arms. Today, there is just an exposed car park, and a bus stop where the AD122 service (named from the date of the foundation of Hadrian’s Wall) drops off visitors to a sacred landmark. Just below the ridge line, in a hollow out of the wind, is the low stone plan of the Temple of Mithras, Carrawburgh.

This was the military chapel for a garrison of 500, guarding the northern edge of an empire connecting Roman Britain to the Palestine of Jeshua, a Roman crucifixion victim and Messiah. While the Romans did march further north, to build the Antonine Wall between the Clyde and the Forth, they did not stay among the Pictish tribes. Hadrian’s Wall marks their most enduring northern boundary. The temple is tiny for such a potential congregation: barely ten strides long by three or four wide. Worshippers entered from the south, passing pits about six feet deep, associated with endurance or initiation rituals, and sat facing each other across a narrow aisle. Altars focused their devotion at the north end.

The Romans brought gods with them along 1200 miles of their javelin-straight military roads. Mithras was a soldiers’ deity, victor of a bloody combat with a wild bull in a cave that his temple aims to replicate. Records at major camps, like Chesters, Housesteads, and Vindolanda, provide details of regiments and dedications, but at Brocolitia only rumpled mounds indicate the garrison, and nothing resembling temple liturgy seems to have survived.

Instead, visitors are left with questions. How is the holy still defined here? What impels visitors to leave offerings — small change, a boiled sweet, a fag end, or a bunch of roses — in the rainwater on the replica altars? How does veneration of the pagan sit with contemporary Christian attitudes towards “New Age” spirituality, or other faiths that would dispute the salvation supremacy of the Christian Christ?

THE elastic moorlands of “Hadrian’s Wall Country” release the imagination. So, could early Christians have been among troops here, mainly from present-day France and Spain, who obeyed orders alongside those venerating Mithras? A clue might lurk in St Luke’s Gospel (3.14), which records John the Baptiser addressing soldiers among those enquiring about implications of following this new Way. Maps of Christian foundations in this part of northern England usually follow the missionary monks from Lindisfarne along the Tyne Valley in the early-medieval period, but perhaps here on the Roman Wall were also some who brought this different faith during the almost four centuries of Roman rule?

Each spring brings resurrection to the high moors, summoned by the trailing cry of the curlew, symbol of the Northumberland National Park. We do not know the season when the Romans left in 410, and yet something stays on in this temple area: a reaching out into the continuing search for anchorage and meaning.

Dr Martyn Halsall is a poet and journalist, living near Hadrian’s Wall.