Lindsay Allason-Jones, director of the Centre for Inter-Disciplinary Artefact Studies at Newcastle University, advised on the film and loved the screening. “The milecastle (there were mini-forts every Roman mile along the wall) is wonderful,” she says. “It’s all really scruffy, just as it would have been then. My only reservation is that I told them the Romans never used stirrups, but they said that without them the actors would fall off. I was hoping they might airbrush them out.”