They came, they saw and they clambered on the ramparts – in numbers not seen on Hadrian's Wall since the Romans called it a day and pulled out their legions 1,600 years ago.
Drawn by the first-ever lighting of the 70-mile monument from end to end, thousands of visitors filled every local car park, lay-by and footpath, while helicopters and a Nasa satellite recorded the necklace of beacons from above.
The airborne had the best overall view, but crowds who shrugged off the chill after sunset and clustered round each flare were rewarded with an awesome sense of the past. Flickering into life on the Whin Sill crags, above the twilit forest and marsh to the north, the 500 lights recreated the ancient border between civilisation and the barbarians.
"It's magnificent," said Matthias Fabian, from Nijwiller in the Netherlands, striding about in the red cloak of a Roman cohort sergeant, plus plumed helmet which made drinking his tea difficult. "How better to get the sense of what life was really like in those far-away days?"
None of the romance was dimmed by the 21st century's inevitable contribution – a far brighter river of car headlights on the sightseer-jammed B6318, the old military road that flanks the frontier. Likewise, the streetlamp glow from the wall's two bookends, Carlisle and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, failed to outshine excitement at beacons on urban fragments of the wall.
"It's just a brilliant idea, literally," said Norma Cooney, as she watched her grandchildren Brad and Brooke play about on what they call "the rocks" - the hundred yards of wall that survive between Denton housing estate and the A186 dual carriageway on the edge of Newcastle.
The effect was most dramatic above the lonely hamlet of Once Brewed, where the wall snakes unbroken, and up to six feet high, past Housesteads fort, Cuddy Crags and Sewingshields farm. The milecastles and turrets, full of people watching as the flares lit in sequence, looked as busy as in 122AD when building began.
Designed as a symbol of Hadrian's contemporary-sounding policy of "peace through strength", the wall marked the northern frontier of the Roman empire. Appropriately, the modern military joined in the illumination, with some of the beacons lit by servicemen from the RAF's electronic warfare centre in Spadeadam forest.
Once used for secret trials of the UK's aborted Blue Streak rocket, the base now tests pilots before sorties in Afghanistan, the world's latest theatre for Hadrian's theory.
The chain of lights, manned by 1,200 people drawn from an avalanche of applicants, was designed to draw world attention and give an early spring to tourism as Britain struggles out of recession. It looks to have succeeded, with helicopter film released to the internet and Nasa's pictures expected to show the complete chain of light through the evening's patchy cloud. Visitors at Steel Rigg, such as the Meadows family from Leicester who were weekending specially to see the light-up, called for future spectaculars.
"Maybe they could rebuild it," said 10-year-old Nicky Meadows, who also wanted to see the whole monument floodlit next time.
Organisers were contemplating such events, but were more immediately concerned with thanking the thousands of people who got involved. As the nearest of the beacons – which were spaced 250 metres apart – flared into life, Linda Tuttiett, chief executive of Hadrian's Wall Heritage, said: "This is our wall. It belongs to everybody, and especially to the people in the communities across the north of England who have worked so hard to let us share it, spectacularly, with the world."
