RORY’S DOCUMENTARY “BORDER COUNTRY: THE STORY OF BRITAIN’S LOST MIDDLELAND” TO AIR ON BBC TV
Rory Stewart, MP for Penrith and the Border, will present a BBC television documentary exploring the history of Britain’s lost ‘Middleland’, the story of the region that at one point stretched from the Firth of Forth in the North to the Humber in the South and incorporated modern-day Cumbria. The two-part documentary will be broadcast at 8pm on BBC2 on Sunday, 30th March, with the second part being shown on Sunday, 6th April. Rory, who considers the building of Hadrian’s Wall to be one of the single-most important events in Britain’s history, will investigate the issues of identity and culture in a region divided by a fabricated border.
Drawing on memories from his experience in war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan, and from the years spent walking the lands either side of Hadrian’s Wall, Rory hopes to shed some light on the region before the Roman soldiers divided families and communities, the impact of the Roman occupation on the region, and how the area changed once they had left. Rory suggests that the Middleland – sometimes completely autonomous, sometimes ignored, and sometimes a lawless debatable land – was transformed from a meeting point between different cultures into a borderland.
More information about the programme can be found at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/
