No Stone Unturned: Hadrian's Wall
berfrois.com
berfrois.com
There is also the Antonine wall, which was intended to supersede Hadrian's, which I happened to grow up a few hundred feet from. The ruins of a Roman bathhouse are just sitting there, next to regular houses, and almost no one ever visits them. Worth a brief stop if you happen to be nearby. https://www.antoninewall.org/visiting-the-wall/things-to-see...
That is a tough first sentence. Took me several tries to parse.
I stopped reading at:
> Like most things Roman, the structure looks sturdy and lacks the immediate beauty of subtle craftsmanship. My mind initially obeys to the notion that beauty must be frail, needy of special care as if caution alone would naively prolong its lifetime.
Completely over-the-top florid, and I'm pretty sure that "obeys to the notion" is either not grammatically correct, or a very archaic usage of "obey". Either "obeys the notion" or "adheres to the notion" would read better.
And if a writer is going to be that over the top, I'm surprised that they didn't include the diaeresis in naïve, like a real fancy New Yorker article.
"His Mercator projection map, first completed in 1569, straightened the earth’s surface and opened a new era in cartography and maritime navigation." Well, it gave a flattened representation of the earth's surface, but what paper map doesn't? I also question the "new era" as far as maritime navigation. Yes, the Mercator projection shows compass courses as straight lines, but a lot of people, with or without compasses, had sailed a lot of places and back already. Magellan's expedition had been around the world by then.