My trip out west roughly parallelled the route of the Great Wall and each day I could glimpse it's remains at least once. I passed it leaving Beijing and criss-crossed it again between Baotou and Yulin. Here just ten minutes or so out of Yulin there is a restored fort and beacon tower called Zheng Bai Tai. It was quite an impressive structure, but essentially empty. Far more interesting were the remains of the Great Wall here that ran out from the fort on either side, so Gao Xiang and I set out to explore it.
The remains of the wall here are slight. The brick lining had long disappeared, probably robbed away for building material, and all that was left was the earthen core. Over the years this had been eroded away or indeed removed completely. Sometimes the best you could do was attempt to play join-the-dots with the watch-towers and walk from one isolated square tower to the next.
One tower we came to had had it's base cleared to expose the lower few courses of bricks and drainage channel that had been preserved under the fallen rubble and earth. All the spoil from this little excavation had been just pushed to the side and as I scrambled round past this my inner archaeologist was reawakened and I spotted something in the dirt. I reached down and pulled out a little piece of pottery with a nice little pattern on it. I looked around and found more. And then more, and more again. It was everywhere, along with bricks and plenty of animal bone. I was never a fantastic archaeologist, despite 4 years of trying, and in any case I was more at home with bits of bone than pottery but I could tell that some of this stuff was old. There were plenty of modern pieces but also some genuine archaeological material. I was very impressed. It was good fun too. Before anyone accuses me of archaeological rape, all the pieces were from the spoil and therefore completely out of context with the monument itself and as such relatively useless for proper archaeological analysis...probably.
We had quite a good collection in the end, and this photo is just part of it. They were too good to leave behind so with a pocketful of cultural relics, we went on. We were diverted away from the wall just then as a brickworks had been built across the site, completely erasing all traces of the wall at that point. You can see a watch-tower and some small remains of the wall just across the void that had been created for the works.
One cool thing about this diversion is that as we skirted the gap we discovered some cave houses in another small depression just next to it. They had been abandoned for some years and were missing doors and windows. Some had damage from subsidence and erosion but they were really interesting to have a look round. Just another part of the local cultural heritage that I was lucky enough to experience here.
From the cave-houses we made our way back to the wall and followed it for a little way more before returning back to the tower and catching a taxi back into town. Not bad for an afternoon!
My trip out west roughly parallelled the route of the Great Wall and each day I could glimpse it's remains at least once. I passed it leaving Beijing and criss-crossed it again between Baotou and Yulin. Here just ten minutes or so out of Yulin there is a restored fort and beacon tower called Zheng Bai Tai. It was quite an impressive structure, but essentially empty. Far more interesting were the remains of the Great Wall here that ran out from the fort on either side, so Gao Xiang and I set out to explore it.
The remains of the wall here are slight. The brick lining had long disappeared, probably robbed away for building material, and all that was left was the earthen core. Over the years this had been eroded away or indeed removed completely. Sometimes the best you could do was attempt to play join-the-dots with the watch-towers and walk from one isolated square tower to the next. 
One tower we came to had had it's base cleared to expose the lower few courses of bricks and drainage channel that had been preserved under the fallen rubble and earth. All the spoil from this little excavation had been just pushed to the side and as I scrambled round past this my inner archaeologist was reawakened and I spotted something in the dirt. I reached down and pulled out a little piece of pottery with a nice little pattern on it. I looked around and found more. And then more, and more again. It was everywhere, along with bricks and plenty of animal bone. I was never a fantastic archaeologist, despite 4 years of trying, and in any case I was more at home with bits of bone than pottery but I could tell that some of this stuff was old. There were plenty of modern pieces but also some genuine archaeological material. I was very impressed. It was good fun too. Before anyone accuses me of archaeological rape, all the pieces were from the spoil and therefore completely out of context with the monument itself and as such relatively useless for proper archaeological analysis...probably.
We had quite a good collection in the end, and this photo is just part of it. They were too good to leave behind so with a pocketful of cultural relics, we went on. We were diverted away from the wall just then as a brickworks had been built across the site, completely erasing all traces of the wall at that point. You can see a watch-tower and some small remains of the wall just across the void that had been created for the works. 
One cool thing about this diversion is that as we skirted the gap we discovered some cave houses in another small depression just next to it. They had been abandoned for some years and were missing doors and windows. Some had damage from subsidence and erosion but they were really interesting to have a look round. Just another part of the local cultural heritage that I was lucky enough to experience here.
From the cave-houses we made our way back to the wall and followed it for a little way more before returning back to the tower and catching a taxi back into town. Not bad for an afternoon!
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