FOOTNOTES:
[402] Sinclair's Statist. Acc. vol. xiii. p. 272.
[403] New Statist. Acc. vol. iv. p. 97.
[404] Hand-Book of Irish Antiquities, p. 166.
[405] The Antiquities of Ireland and Denmark, by J. J. A. Worsaae, Esq. Dublin, 1846. P. 14.
[406] Prichard's Natural History of Man.
CHAPTER II.
THE ROMAN INVASION.
The fashion of Scottish archæologists in dealing with our national antiquities has heretofore most frequently been to write a folio volume on the Anglo-Roman era, and huddle up in a closing chapter or appendix some few notices of such obdurate relics of primitive nationality as could in no way be forced into a Roman mould. Some valuable works have been the result of this exclusive devotion to one remarkable epoch; but since this has been so faithfully explored by Camden, Sibbald, Horsley, Gordon, Roy, Chalmers, and Stuart, there is good reason why we may be excused following the example of the Antiquary par excellence, and plunging, "nothing loth, into a sea of discussion concerning urns, vases, votive altars, Roman camps, and the rules of castrametation," with copious notations on the difference between the mode of entrenching castra stativa and castra æstiva, "things confounded by too many of our historians!"
To English archæologists the Anglo-Roman Period is one of the greatest importance; for the Romans conquered and colonized their country, taught its inhabitants their religion, sepulchral rites, arts, and laws, and, after occupying the soil for centuries, left them a totally different people than they had found them. There is something, moreover, in the very geological features of the south-eastern districts of England, which the Romans first and chiefly occupied, at once more readily susceptible and more in need of such external influences. It cannot, indeed, be overlooked, among the elements of ethnological science, that the geological features of countries and districts exercise no unimportant influence on the races that inhabit them. The intelligent traveller detects many indications besides the mere difference of building materials, when he passes from the British chalk and clay to the stone districts. To the Romans it can hardly be doubted that England owes the art of converting her clay into bricks and tiles; and that in all probability, the P. P. BRI. LON.—præfectus primæ [cohortis] Britonum Londinii?—stamped on recently discovered Roman tiles found on the site of modern London,[407] indicate some of the products of the kilns by which the inexhaustible bed of London clay was first converted to economical uses. The Roman mansion, with its hypocaust and sudatorium, its mosaic paving and painted walls, its sculptures, bronzes, and furnishings of all sorts, introduced the refinements of classic Italy into the social life of England; while the disciplined hardiness of legionary colonists tempered the excesses of Roman luxury. New wants were speedily created, and many dormant faculties excited into action among the intelligent native tribes. The older British pottery entirely disappeared, superseded by the skilful products of the Anglo-Roman kiln, or the more beautiful imported Samian ware. England might, and indeed did, greatly degenerate when deserted by her conquerors, but it was altogether impossible that she could return to her former state. The footmark of the Roman on the soil of England is indelible. It forms a great and most memorable epoch between two widely different periods, the influence of which has probably never since ceased to operate, and hence the important place which it still continues to occupy in English archæology.
The history of the Scoto-Roman invasion is altogether different from this. It is a mere episode which might be altogether omitted without very greatly marring the integrity and completeness of the national annals. It was, for the most part, little more than a temporary military occupation of a few fenced stations amid hostile tribes. Julius Cæsar effected his first landing on the shores of Britain in the year B.C. 55; but it was not till after a lapse of 135 years—as nearly as may now be guessed, in the summer of A.D. 80—that Agricola led the Roman army across the debatable land of the Scottish border, and began to hew a way through the Caledonian forests. Domitian succeeded to the throne of Titus in the following year, while the Roman legions were rearing their line of forts between the Forth and the Clyde; and the jealousy of the tyrant speedily wrested the government of our island from the conqueror of Galgacus. From that period till the accession of the Emperor Hadrian, in A.D. 117, the Roman historians are nearly silent about Britain; but we then learn that the Roman authority was maintained with difficulty in its island province; and when Hadrian visited Britain the chief memorial he left of the imperial presence was the vallum which bore his name, extending between the Solway and the Tyne. Up to this period, therefore, it is obvious that the Roman legions had established no permanent footing in Caledonia—using that term in its modern and most comprehensive sense; nor was it till the accession of Titus Antoninus Pius to the Imperial throne, and the appointment of Lollius Urbicus to the command in Britain, nearly two centuries after the first landing of Cæsar in England, that any portion of our northern kingdom acquired a claim to the title of Caledonia Romana. Lollius Urbicus, the legate of Antoninus Pius, fixed the northern limits of Roman empire on the line previously marked out by the forts of Agricola; and beyond that boundary, extending between the Forth and the Clyde, nearly the sole traces of the presence of the Romans are a few earth-works, with one or two exceptions, of doubtful import, and some chance discoveries of pottery and coins, mostly ascribable, it may be presumed, to the fruitless northern expedition of Agricola, after the victory of Mons Grampius, or to the still more ineffectual one of his successor, Severus. In this extra-mural region, indeed, lies the celebrated Roman military work, Ardoch Camp, within the area of which was discovered the sepulchral memorial of Ammonius Damionis, the only Roman inscription yet found north of the Forth. Such an exception is the strongest evidence that could be produced of the transitory nature of Roman occupation in the region beyond the boundaries fixed by Lollius Urbicus.
Here, then, we have the proprætor of Antoninus Pius established within the line of ramparts which bear the Emperor's name, A.D. 140. The Roman soldiers are busy building forts; raising each their thousand or two paces of the wall, and recording the feat on the legionary tablets which still attest the same; constructing roads and other military works; and establishing here and there coloniæ and oppida, with a view to permanent settlement. For a period of about twenty years, during which Lollius Urbicus remained governor of the province, peace appears to have prevailed; and to this brief epoch, when a Roman navy was stationed on the coasts of Britain, we may, with great probability, ascribe the rise of Inveresk, Cramond or Alaterva, and other maritime Roman colonial or municipal sites. With the death of the able Titus Antoninus, whom grateful Roman citizens surnamed Pius, all this was at an end. Calphurnius Agricola had to be despatched by the new emperor, Marcus Aurelius, to put down an insurrection of the British tribes. The reign of his successor Commodus was marked by a still more determined rising of the North. The Caledonian Britons again took to arms, assailed the legions with irresistible force, defeated them and slew their general, broke through the rampart of Antoninus, and penetrated unchecked into the most fertile districts of the Roman province of Valentia, as it was subsequently named, comprehending the whole district between the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus which at a later period became the Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Another legate, Ulpius Marcellus, had to hasten from Rome to arrest the Caledonian invaders, and a few more years of doubtful peace were secured to the northern province. Lucius Septimius Severus succeeded to the purple A.D. 197, learned that the Caledonian Britons were once more within the ineffectual ramparts; and after a few years of timid negotiation, rather than of determined opposition to these hardy northern tribes, Virius Lupus, the legate of Severus, was compelled to own that the occupation of Caledonia was hopeless. The aged emperor immediately commenced preparations for marching in person against the Caledonians. About A.D. 208 he effected his purpose, and entered Caledonia at the head of an overwhelming force; but it was in vain. He penetrated indeed as far, it is thought, as the Moray Frith, but only to return, with numbers greatly reduced, to fix once more the limits of Roman empire where they had been before marked out by the wall of Hadrian, between the Solway and the Tyne. It is possible, indeed, that the northern wall was not immediately abandoned. At Cramond have been found both coins and medals of Caracalla and Diocletian. The Roman tenure of the North, however, was manifestly insecure; and the successor of Severus was little likely to recover what that able emperor had been compelled to abandon.
A period of sixty-eight years is thus the utmost that can be assigned for this occupation of Caledonia as a Roman province, and the history of that brief era is amply sufficient to justify the oft-claimed title—whatever be its value—of the unconquered Caledonians. The tribes in the immediate vicinity of the garrisoned strongholds of the invaders might be overawed and forced into apparent submission; but the country was no more subdued and rendered a tributary province than when Edward made himself the arbiter between Baliol and the Bruce.
The successors of Severus were glad to secure the forbearance of the Caledonians on any terms; and for seventy-three years after the departure of his sons from Britain its name is scarcely mentioned by any Roman writer. In subsequent allusions to the restless inroads of the Caledonians on the southern province, they are mentioned for the first time in the beginning of the fourth century by the name of Picts; but it is not till the reign of the Emperor Valentinian, in the latter part of the fourth century, A.D. 367, that we find the Roman legions under Theodosius effectually coping with the northern invaders, and recovering the abandoned country between the walls of Antoninus and Severus. This was now at length converted into a Roman province, and received the name of Valentia, in honour of the emperor; and to this latter occupation should probably be ascribed the rise of most of the inland coloniæ, the traces of which are still recoverable. But its meagre history is that of a frontier province. The Picts were ever ready to sally forth from their mountain fastnesses on the slightest appearance of insecurity or intermitted watchfulness. Again and again they ravaged the southern provinces, and returned loaded with spoil; and it is chiefly to the notices of their inroads and repulsions that we owe the possession of any authentic history of North Britain in the fourth century. Early in the fifth century, about the year 422, a Roman legion made its appearance in Scotland for the last time. They succeeded in driving back the Picts beyond the northern wall, as a disciplined force must ever do when brought into direct collision with untrained barbarian tribes; but it was no longer possible to retain the province of Valentia. The legionary colonists and the Romanized Britons were advised to abandon it, and once more withdraw within the older limits fixed by Severus on the line of Hadrian's Wall. So ended the second and last Roman occupation of Scotland, extending over a period of about fifty years. It is to this latter era that we should probably assign the establishment of the Roman town near the Eildon Hills, as well as of other sites in the interior of the country, bearing traces of Roman occupation, which it has been customary to seek for among the stations mentioned by Ptolemy. Roy, for example, adhering to one of the names given by Ptolemy, while he rejects the locality which he assigned to it, fixes the site of Τριμοντιον, or Trimontium, in the neighbourhood of the Eildons, because "the aspect of the hills corresponds exactly with the name."[408] In this he has been implicitly followed by later writers. But Trimontium is a mere Latinized version of Ptolemy's Τριμοντιον, and does not necessarily signify Tres Montes, the supposed designation suggested by the triple summits of the Eildon Hills; unless, as is possible, the name is only a Greek rendering of the original Tres Montes, which has been anew transformed into the later Latin form. Still the mere resemblance of the name to certain features of an ascertained Roman site is very insufficient evidence in contradiction to the more precise information of the old geographer, as well as to the probability of the later origin of the Eildon town. We must therefore leave Trimontium where Ptolemy places it, in the district of the Selgovæ, not far from the military station at Birrens, although it will be shewn that very extensive Roman traces, unknown to General Roy, do exist in the neighbourhood of the Eildon Hills. The first period of the Roman presence in Scotland in the second century was obviously little more than an occupation of military posts; the second, in the latter end of the fourth century, was the precarious establishment of a Roman province on a frontier station, and within sight of a foe ever watching the opportunity for invasion and spoil.
Hence the paucity of Roman remains in Scotland, and the trifling influence exercised by Roman civilisation on its ancient arts. Roman pottery has been found in considerable quantities on the sites of well-known forts and stations, but no Roman kiln has yet been discovered in Scotland, such as suffices in England to shew how completely native arts were superseded by those of the Italian colonists. Few, indeed, of the memorials which the Romans have left of their presence in Scotland pertain to the practice of the peaceful arts. Their inscriptions, their altars, and their sepulchral tablets, all relate to the legionary, and shew by how precarious a tenure his footing was maintained beyond the Tyne. No evidence serves more completely to prove this transitory and exotic character of the occupation of the country than the traces of Roman masonry. Passing beyond the limits assigned by Hadrian to Roman dominion, the legions entered on a country the geological features of which are totally dissimilar to any part of Britain which they had previously acquired. Yet the ruins of their buildings, discovered in the very centre of the Lothians, shew that they brought with them the art of the brickmaker, and manufactured their building materials by the same laborious process above the fine sandstone strata of the Frith of Forth, as within the chalk and clay districts of England, where their earliest settlements were effected.
This evidence of the practice of exotic arts becomes still more noticeable on the sites of some of the wall-stations. At Castlehill, for example, the third station from the west end of the rampart of Antoninus, though the fort no longer exists, its materials have been employed in erecting the farm-offices and inclosures which now occupy its commanding site. Here, so recently as 1849, an inscribed tablet of the Twentieth Legion was discovered. On visiting the station the intelligent observer can hardly fail to be struck with the peculiar character of the stones built into the new walls, and lying about where they have been turned up by the plough. The legionary builders would seem to have found clay unattainable, or inconvenient to work, and were sufficiently remote from the Clyde to render importation unadvisable. They have accordingly been compelled to resort to stone; but true to the more familiar material, they have with perverse ingenuity hewn it into the shape and size of the common Roman brick, making in fact, as nearly as possible, bricks of stone. It is not improbable that similar relics may still exist at some places on the line of Hadrian's Wall; such, however, is not the case with its more substantial successor. When Severus abandoned the northern rampart and rebuilt a wall nearly on the line of that of Hadrian, the Anglo-Roman occupants of Northumbria were no longer strangers to the peculiar facilities of the district, and the wall of Severus accordingly exhibits many traces of substantial masonry, such as antiquaries familiar only with the Roman remains of the clay districts can scarcely persuade themselves are the work of the same builders who wrought with chalk and brick, or bonded even their stone walls in the south with courses of Roman tile.
Another conclusive proof of the temporary and mere military occupation of Scotland by the Romans, appears from the fact, that with a very few exceptions the Scoto-Roman remains have been brought to light on the line of the Antonine Wall. A very remarkable altar was found at Inveresk, near Edinburgh, so early as 1565, dedicated Apollini Granno, by Quintus Lusius Sabinianus, proconsul of Augustus, which possesses a singular interest to us from the fact that it attracted the special notice of Queen Mary of Scotland. In her treasurer's accounts appears the charge of twelve pence paid "to ane boy passand of Edinburgh with ane charge of the Queenis Grace, direct to the Baillies of Mussilburgh, charging thame to tak diligent heid and attendance that the monument of grit antiquitie, new fundin, be nocht demolisit nor broken down;" an evidence of archæological taste and reverence for monuments of idolatry, which probably did not in any degree tend to raise the queen in the estimation of the bailies of the burgh. The same ancient relic became an object of interest to Randolph and Cecil, the ambassador and minister of Queen Elizabeth,[409] and afterwards furnished Napier of Merchiston with an illustration of the idols of pagan Rome when writing his Commentary on the Apocalypse. This remarkable monument of the Roman colonists of Inveresk must have been preserved for some generations, as Sir Robert Sibbald mentions having seen it.[410] He died about the year 1712, and the Itinerarium Septentrionale of Gordon, in which no notice of it occurs, was published only fourteen years later. The remains of Roman villas with their hypocausti, flue-tiles, pottery, and other traces of Italian luxury, have been found at various times in the same neighbourhood, leaving no room to doubt that an important Roman town was once located on the spot. A few miles to the west, along the coast of the Forth, the little fishing village of Cramond is believed to occupy the site of the chief Roman sea-port on the east of Scotland. There also altars, inscribed tablets, coins, and other relics, attest the importance of the ancient Alaterva. Newstead, near the Eildons, has also furnished one altar, and Birrens, the old Blatum Bulgium, several inscriptions and sculptures. But even these are nearly all military relics, chiefly of the first and second Tungrian cohorts; and if to them are added some few fragments of sculpture and pottery, and examples of bronze culinary vessels, we have a summary of nearly the whole Roman remains found in Scotland, apart from the stations on the wall of Antoninus, and the celebrated Arthur's Oon, the supposed Templum Termini, of which so much has been written to so little purpose. The earliest writer who notices this remarkable architectural relic is Nennius, abbot of Bangor, as is believed, in the early years of the seventh century. His own era, however, is matter of dispute, and his account sufficiently confused and contradictory. Its masonry appears to have differed entirely from any authentic remains of Roman building found in Scotland, and, indeed, to have had no very close parallel anywhere; though its form very closely coincided with the round or bee-hive houses of Ireland, and its masonry was not greatly dissimilar to that of the Scottish round towers of the same builders, by whom it was more probably erected. The total absence of cement must at least be sufficient with most English antiquaries, to throw no little doubt on its Roman origin. The modern archæologist may be pardoned if he smile at the enthusiasm of elder antiquaries, who discovered in this little sacellum, or stone bee-hive, of twenty-eight feet in diameter and twenty-two feet in height, a fac-simile of "the famous Pantheon at Rome, before the noble portico was added to it by Marcus Agrippa," to which Gordon—the ever-memorable Sandy Gordon of the Antiquary—resolved not to be outdone by Dr. Stukely, adds, "The Pantheon, however, being only built of brick, whereas Arthur's Oven is made of regular courses of hewn stone!" Sir John Clerk, writing to Mr. Gale, shortly after the destruction of the Oon, remarks,—"In pulling these stones asunder, it appeared there had never been any cement between them, though there is limestone and coal in abundance very near it. Another thing very remarkable is, that each stone had a hole in it which appeared to have been made for the better raising them to a height by a kind of forceps of iron, and bringing them so much the easier to their several beds and courses."[411] These facts we owe to the barbarian cupidity of Sir Michael Bruce, on whose estate of Stonehouse this remarkable and indeed unique relic stood. The same zealous Scottish antiquary, quoted above, writing from Edinburgh to his English correspondent in June 1743, remarks with quaint severity,—"He has pulled it down, and made use of all the stones for a mill-dam, and yet without any intention of preserving his fame to posterity, as the destroyer of the Temple of Diana had. No other motive had this Gothic knight but to procure as many stones as he could have purchased in his own quarries for five shillings!... We all curse him with bell, book, and candle,"—an excommunicatory service not yet fallen wholly into disuse. Of this unique architectural relic sufficiently minute drawings and descriptions have been preserved to render it no difficult matter to reconstruct, in fancy, its miniature cupola and concentric courses of stone; but it still remains an archæological enigma, which the magic term Roman seems by no means satisfactorily to solve.
The course of Antoninus's rampart and military road lay through a part of the country since repeatedly selected by later engineers from its presenting the same facilities which first attracted the experienced eye of Agricola, and afterwards of Lollius Urbicus, as the most suitable ground for the chief Roman work in Scotland. Gordon, it is understood, acquired his chief knowledge of the Roman remains of this district while examining the ground with a view to the formation of a projected Forth and Clyde Canal.[412] General Roy again surveyed the same ground, through which at length the Canal, and still more recently the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway, have been carried; in each case leading to interesting discoveries of Roman remains.
The most remarkable of these disclosures took place at Auchindavy during the construction of the Forth and Clyde Canal, when a pit was discovered within the area of the Roman fort, containing five altars, a mutilated statue, and two ponderous iron hammers. Four of the altars, and probably the fifth, had been erected by one individual, M. Cocceius Firmus, a centurion in the Second Legion, Augusta. Their position, thus hastily thrown together and covered up on the spot where they were destined to lie undiscovered for so many centuries, seems to tell, in no unmistakable language, of the precipitate retreat of the Roman garrison from the fort of Auchindavy, which had been committed to the charge of the devout centurion who was thus compelled to abandon his desecrated aræ. All these, as well as most of the other relics found from time to time along the line of the Roman wall, have been deposited in the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow. They mark most emphatically the dawn of a totally new era in Scottish archæology. Definite historic annals henceforth come to the aid of induction. Dates take the place of periods, and individuals that of races. Unhappily also, with the definiteness of written records, we come in contact with doubts far more difficult to solve than many of those which have to be unravelled from the unwritten primeval records, since it is no longer the accuracy of the induction, but the veracity of the annalist, that has most anxiously to be looked to. Such, however, is not the case with the inscribed evidences of the presence of the Roman legions.
Fortunately for the Scottish antiquary the builders of the Caledonian Wall appear to have taken a peculiar and unprecedented pleasure in recording their share in this great work, actuated thereto, in part perhaps, by the reverence with which the name of Titus Antoninus was regarded alike by Roman soldiers and citizens. These legionary inscriptions, peculiar to the Scottish wall, indicating the several portions of it erected by the different legions and cohorts, are most frequently dedications of the fruit of their labours to the Emperor, Father of his Country. They are objects of just interest and historical value, supplying definite records of the legions by whom the country was held during the brief period of Roman occupation, and meting out to the modern investigator a measure of information more suited to his desires than he could hope to recover of so remote and poor a province of the Roman empire, from the notices of any contemporary author.
Only one of all the Roman historians, Julius Capitolinus, the biographer of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, makes any allusion to the erection of the Caledonian Wall; and on his sole authority, for fully fourteen centuries, rested the statement that the imperial legate, Lollius Urbicus, reared the vallum which still in its ruins perpetuates the name of the Emperor, and preserves, as a visible link between the present and the past, the northern limit of the Roman world. The very site of the several British walls was accordingly matter of dispute, when fortunately, towards the close of the seventeenth century, a rude and very imperfect fragment of an inscribed tablet was discovered at or near the fort of Bemulie,[413] which in point of historical value surpasses any Roman relic yet found in Scotland. The inscription is such a mutilated fragment that the farmer might have turned it up with his plough and flung it from the furrow, or the mason broken it up to build into his fence, without either of them dreaming that it differed in value from any other stone, though its few roughly inscribed letters supply a fact indispensable to the integrity of Scottish history. Gordon pronounces it "the most invaluable jewel of antiquity that ever was found in the island of Britain since the time of the Romans." It is the fragment of a votive tablet, so imperfect that it is doubtful whether it be a dedication by the Second Legion in honour of the Imperial Legate, or by the latter in honour of the Emperor. It contains, however, the names of both, and establishes the only essential fact, that the wall between the Forth and the Clyde is the work referred to by Julius Capitolinus. The stone, which now forms one of the treasures of the Hunterian Museum, measures seventeen by ten inches, and bears the abbreviated and mutilated inscription:—
P · LEG · II · A ·
Q · LOLLIO · VR
LEG · AVG · PR · PR
No great error can be committed in thus extending it as a votive tablet in honour of the Legate, rather than of the Emperor: POSUIT LEGIO SECUNDA AUGUSTA QUINTO LOLLIO URBICO LEGATO AUGUSTI PROPRÆTORI. The ordinary legionary inscriptions include the name and distinctive titles of the legion, cohort, or vexillation, by whom the number of paces of the wall recorded on them have been erected; and dedicate the work in honour of the emperor. The larger tablets are generally adorned with sculptured decorations, and frequently bear the device of the legion; that of the Twentieth Legion being the Boar; and probably that of the Second Legion, surnamed Augusta, the Sea-Goat. One singular sculptured legionary tablet, however, found at Castlehill, the site of the third station on the wall, seems to leave little room for doubt that this fanciful hybrid of the goat and seal was also employed as the emblematical symbol of Caledonia, and may have been adopted by the Second Legion to commemorate their victories over the hardy race whom it not inaptly symbolized. It is a tablet recording with less abbreviation than usual the completion of 4666 paces of the wall by the Second Legion, Augusta:
IMP · CAES · TITO · AELIO ·
HADRIANO · ANTONINO ·
AVG · PIO · P · P · LEG · II
AVG · PER · M · P · IIII · DC
LXVI · S
On one side of this inscription appears a literal representation of imperial triumph:—captives stripped and bound, above them a mounted Roman armed and in full career, and over all a female figure, supposed to bear a wreath emblematic of Victory. On the other side is the Roman eagle perched on the prostrate sea-goat, the manifest counterpart of the literal exhibition of the conquered Caledonians. The origin of the singular emblem, however, is still open to question. It may be doubted if it was a Roman emblematic device, though familiar to them as the most usual form of Capricornus, for the imperial conquerors more generally adopted the most characteristic literal representations of the vanquished. It occurs on a rare coin figured by Gough, and now ascribed to Comius, about B.C. 45; but it may also be seen as the zodiacal sign, on a very remarkable calendar cut in marble, which was found in a ruined villa of Pompeii.
The Roman fort at Castlehill, where the above tablet was dug up, was one of the inferior class; its small dimensions arising, in part at least, perhaps, from the natural advantages of its position. The discoveries on its site, however, are possessed of greater interest than those yet known belonging to some of the largest stations on the wall. In the year 1826, a votive altar was brought to light on the same locality, dedicated, as Mr. Stuart renders it,[414] to the Eternal Field-Deities of Britain—CAMPESTRIBUS ET BRITANNI—by Quintus Pisentius Justus, prefect of the fourth cohort of Gaulish auxiliaries; a cohort which we learn from another altar discovered in Cumberland was afterwards stationed on the wall of Severus.
There are altogether in the Hunterian Museum six altars, twelve legionary inscriptions, and several centurial stones, all found along the line of the Caledonian Wall, besides a few more of each known to be in private hands. But nearly the whole of these have been so frequently described and engraved, that it would be superfluous to repeat their inscriptions here. One interesting discovery, however, made at Castlehill, since the publication of the Caledonia Romana, deserves to be noted. It was found during the spring of 1847, by the plough striking against it, where it lay imbedded in the soil with its edge upward, as if it had been purposely buried at some former period, in the shady ravine called the Peel Glen: a dark and eerie recess, where the Campestres Æterni Britanniæ, the fairies of Scottish folk-lore, have not yet entirely ceased to claim the haunt accorded to them by immemorial popular belief. The Roman relic discovered here is a square slab, considerably injured at the one end, but with the inscription fortunately so slightly mutilated that little difficulty can be felt in supplying the blank. The stone measures two feet six inches in greatest length, and two feet four inches in breadth. A cable-pattern border surrounds it, within which is the inscription.
Roman tablet, Castlehill.
This sculptured tablet is nearly the exact counterpart of another legionary inscription found about one hundred and fifty years since in the neighbourhood of Duntocher. In the latter the number of paces is defaced in the inscription, and unfortunately the duplicate recently discovered, which should have supplied the deficiency, is also mutilated, the break passing through where probably the additional mark of the fourth thousand originally stood. Both Horsley and Stuart guessed from the smallness of the space left for the figures in the former, that it must have been a round number, either III. or IIII. This argument is equally conclusive in regard to the inscription recently found, and little doubt can be entertained that the reading should be four thousand paces. It will doubtless appear to most men of this nineteenth century a matter of sufficient indifference, now that the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway occupies the line of the Roman vallum, whether the vexillation of the Twentieth Legion dedicated three or four thousand paces of their long obliterated wall to the Emperor whose name it bore. This tablet, however, establishes an additional fact suggested by some previous discoveries, that the legionaries were wont to erect these stones in pairs at the beginning and the end of their labours, thereby the more distinctly defining the extent of the work dedicated by them to the favourite emperor. The inscriptions heretofore found at the Castlehill Station, furnish no evidence of the presence of the Twentieth Legion as the garrison of that fort. At one time it appears to have been held by a detachment of the Second Legion, Augusta—the sculptors of the curious emblematic relievo of Caledonian defeat; and at another by the fourth cohort of Gaulish auxiliaries, as we learn from the votive altar of their prefect. The former were doubtless the contemporaries of the Twentieth Legion who, located at Duntocher, reared there the Roman fort, and constructed the vallum eastward till it joined the work of the Second Legion at Castlehill. This is confirmed by the diversity of the sculpture on the two slabs. Underneath each inscription is the wild boar, the symbol almost invariably figured on the works of the Twentieth Legion. They are disposed, however, in opposite directions, so that when the slabs were placed on the southern or Roman side of the wall, where they would be seen from the adjacent military road, the boars of the twin legionary stones would be facing each other.[415] Still more recent agricultural operations on the Castlehill farm have brought to light during the autumn of the present year, 1850, extensive indications of the remains of buildings in the immediate vicinity of the Peel Glen, where the tablet of the Twentieth Legion was discovered. The most remarkable feature hitherto exposed by these later operations is the singularly sculptured base of a column figured here; but these chance discoveries leave little room to doubt that a systematic trenching of the area of the fort would amply repay the antiquary for his labour.
Thus minute and circumstantial is the information still recoverable at this distance of time regarding the Roman colonists of Britain. Every century yields up some further additional records, and were we in possession of all the inscriptions graven on votive altars or set up on tablets and centurial stones, we would possess more ample and authentic elements for the history of the Roman occupation of Scotland than all that classic historians supply. Sufficient, however, has been preserved to furnish a very remarkable contrast between the relics of the Roman invasion and every other class of the archæological records of primitive Scottish history.
The whole of the legionary inscriptions and nearly all the altars and other remarkable Roman remains found on the line of the ancient vallum, have been discovered at its western end. No railway or other great public work has traversed its eastern course. The sites of its forts are uncertain or altogether unknown, and its famous Benval is not yet so entirely settled as to preclude all controversy, should antiquaries think the theme worthy of further contest. From time to time some new discovery adds to our materials for the history of the Roman occupation of Scotland, and many records of the builders of the ineffectual rampart of Antoninus probably still lie imbedded beneath its ruined course. It is more important for our present purpose to observe that the discoveries which have been made on some single Anglo-Roman sites greatly exceed all that has ever been brought to light in Scotland truly traceable to the Roman occupancy. No archæological relics can surpass in interest or value the legionary inscriptions peculiar to our Scottish wall, so precise and definitely minute in the information they have hoarded for behoof of later ages. But they are purely military records, the monuments, in reality, of Roman defeat; while of the evidences of Roman colonization and the introduction of their arts and social habits, it is far short of the truth to say, that more numerous and valuable Anglo-Roman antiquities have been brought to light within the last few years at York, Colchester, or Cirencester, than all the Roman remains brought together from every public and private museum of Scotland could equal.
"How profitless the relics that we cull,
Troubling the last holds of ambitious Rome,
Unless they chasten fancies that presume
Too high, or idle agitations lull!
. . . . . . . Our wishes what are they?
Our fond regrets tenacious in their grasp?
The sage's theory? the poet's lay?—
Mere fibulæ, without a robe to clasp;
Obsolete lamps, whose light no time recalls;
Urns without ashes, tearless lachrymals!"[416]
It is of importance to our future progress that this should be thoroughly understood. English archæologists, we may be permitted to think, have devoted their attention somewhat too exclusively to the remains of a period on which information was less needed than on most other sections of archæological inquiry. Still the field of Anglo-Roman antiquities is an ample one, and therefore well-merited to be explored. But when Scottish archæologists, following their example, fall to discussing the weary battle of Mons Grampius—the site of Agricola's Victoria, founded at Abernethy, or elsewhere—and the like threadbare questions, they are but thrashing straw from which the very chaff has long since been gleaned to the last husk, and can only bring well-deserved ridicule on their pursuits.
In the present brief glance at the indications of Roman occupation of Scotland little more is needed for fulfilling the plan of the work than to note a few of the most interesting Scoto-Roman relics, including such as have either been discovered since the publication of the "Caledonia Romana," or have escaped the notice of its industrious and observant author. It is surprising, however, that under the latter class has to be mentioned the most beautiful specimen of Roman sculpture existing in Scotland. In the front of an old house in the Nether-Bow of Edinburgh there have stood, since the early part of last century—and how much longer it is now vain to inquire—two fine profile heads in high relief, the size of life, which, from the close resemblance traceable to those on the coins of Severus, there can be no hesitation in pronouncing to be designed as representations of the Emperor Septimius Severus and his Empress Julia. They were first noticed by Gordon in 1727, and are described by Maitland about twenty years later, in a sufficiently confused manner, but with the additional local tradition that they had formerly occupied the wall of a house on the opposite side of the street. A medieval inscription, corresponding in reading as well as in the probable date of its characters, to the Mentz Bible, printed about the year 1455, has been intercalated between the heads of the emperor and empress, and seems, as it were, to furnish an earlier witness from the fifteenth century, to say that the Roman sculpture is still in situ.
It admits of serious doubt whether the discovery at Copenhagen, in the last century, of the work of Richard of Cirencester ought to be viewed as any great benefit conferred on British archæology. The compilation of a monk of the fourteenth century, even as supplementary to the geographical details of Ptolemy, can hardly be received with too great caution, but used as it has been almost entirely to supersede the elder authority, it has in many instances, and especially in relation to our northern Roman geography, proved a source of endless confusion and error. Without, however, aiming at reconstructing the Ptolemaic map of Caledonia, we have abundant evidence that various important Coloniæ were established, which have received no notice, either in Ptolemy's geography or the "De Situ Britanniæ" of the monk of Westminster, whom antiquaries may be pardoned suspecting to have assumed the cowl for the purpose of disguise, being in truth a monk not of the fourteenth but of the eighteenth century.[417] Attracted by the supposed correspondence of the triple heights of the Eildon Hills to the designation of Ptolemy's Trimontium, General Roy sought in their neighbourhood for the evidences of a Roman station, and though less successful than he desired, he found sufficient indications of the convergence of the great military roads towards this point, to induce him to conclude "that the ancient Trimontium of the Romans was situated somewhere near these three remarkable hills, at the village of Eildon, Old Melros, or perhaps about Newstead, where the Watling Street hath passed the Tweed."[418] Though the propriety of assuming this as the site of Trimontium is questioned, the sagacious conclusions as to a Roman site detected by the practical eye of General Roy, have since been amply confirmed by the discovery of undoubted traces of a Roman town at the base of the Eildon Hills. Stuart has engraved an altar dedicated to the forest deity Silvanus, by Carrius Domitianus, a centurion of the Twentieth Legion, which he describes as "a few years since discovered, not far from the village of Eildon."[419] As this discovery is of considerable value as a clue to the true site of this central Roman town within the province of Valentia, it is worthy of note that it was found on the 15th of January 1830, in digging a drain, about three feet below the surface, in a field called the Red Abbey Stead, near Newstead, a village to the north of Eildon, and directly east of Melrose.
More recently the Hawick Railway has been carried through the vale of Melrose, and in its progress has added further evidence of the presence of the Roman colonists on the site, while the ordinary course of agricultural operations has exposed numerous foundations of buildings, Roman medals and coins, and a regular causewayed road, undoubtedly the ancient Watling Street. This road was laid bare only a year or two before, in the progress of draining a field called the "Well Meadow," immediately to the west of the Red Abbey Stead. It was about twenty feet broad, and was entirely excavated by the tenant, in order to employ its materials for constructing a neighbouring fence. In the course of removing it the foundations of various houses were exposed, and a sculptured stone was discovered, considerably mutilated, but still bearing on it, in high relief, the wild boar, the well-known device of the Twentieth Legion. As this corresponds with the inscription on the altar previously discovered, there can be little question that the roadway and other military works of this important station, were executed by the same legion. Another sculptured portion of an inscribed tablet, found in the same field, evidently of Roman workmanship, retains only the fragmentary letters CVI. Among the numerous foundations of ancient buildings much Roman pottery has been dug up, including the fine red Samian ware, the black, and the coarser yellowish or grey fragments of mortaria and other common domestic utensils. It is not improbable, indeed, that the name of Red Abbey Stead has been conferred on the site of the Roman colonia, owing to the colour of the soil and the characteristics of the remains of ancient building so frequently exposed, arising from the presence of numerous fragments of Roman brick and pottery. By the same means the course of the Antonine Wall may frequently be traced in the new ploughed fields on its site, where all other indications have disappeared. There is no evidence of any abbey having ever existed on the site; but surrounded as the district is with Newstead and New and Old Melrose, the seats of ancient ecclesiastical establishments, the discovery of the brick foundations of extensive buildings would very naturally suggest the local name of the Red Abbey. It was in the immediate neighbourhood of this Roman site that one of those curious subterranean structures was discovered, which has been referred to in an earlier chapter.[420]
Towards the close of 1846, during the excavations for the Hawick branch of the North British Railway, several circular pits or shafts were laid open a little to the east of the village of Newstead, and nearly on the line of the Roman road, an additional portion of which was exposed by the railway-cutting. Two of these shafts were regularly built round the sides with stones, apparently gathered from the bed of the river, and measured each two feet six inches in diameter, and about twenty feet deep. The others greatly varied both in width and depth, and were filled with a black fetid matter, mixed with earth, and containing numerous fragments of pottery, oyster shells, antlers of the red deer, and bones and skulls of cattle, apparently the Bos Longifrons: the skulls being broken on the frontal bone as if with the blow of a pole-axe, or possibly of the sacrificial securis. A piece of a skull discovered in the same place seems to have been that of a small-sized horse. In one of the pits the skeleton of a man was found standing erect with a spear beside him, and accompanied with mortaria and other undoubted remains of Roman pottery. The spear-head, which measures fourteen inches in length, and only one and a quarter in greatest breadth of blade, is figured here. The skull has been already described and compared with the crania of the Scottish tumuli in a previous chapter;[421] and the weapon represented here, as well as various mortaria, urns, coins, and other relics from the same locality, are now in the possession of John Miller, Esq., C.E., under whose direction the railway was constructed. A bronze kettle, lachrymatories, bricks, clay tubes, stones cut with the cable-pattern and the like familiar classic mouldings, and numerous other Roman remains, all attest the important character of the Roman town on this site. Coins from the same locality are also in the possession of Thomas Tod, Esq., of Drygrange, and Dr. J. A. Smith. In so far as these are to be received in evidence of the length of time during which the Eildon station was occupied, they extend over a longer period than we have any reason to believe the Roman colonists possessed the province of Valentia; including those of Vespasian, Domitian, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Severus, as well as of Diocletian, Maximianus, Carausius, Constantius Chlorus, and Constantine. It is to be borne in remembrance, however, that among the Britons of that early period a coin was money whose ever image or superscription it bore, and doubtless the Roman mintage continued to circulate long after the last of the military colonists had abandoned the province of Valentia.
Directly to the north, on the line of the road discovered in the Well Meadow, there existed, in the memory of some few village patriarchs, the foundations of a bridge on the banks of the Tweed, which also may be assumed as the work of the Twentieth Legion. It appears to have attracted the notice of General Roy, as he speaks of the Watling Street having crossed the Tweed about Newstead. Continuing our course northward along this ascertained Roman route, we are once more left to the guidance of the recent interpreters of Ptolemy and the believers in Richard of Cirencester, though it is possible with the aid both of new and old evidence to fix another portion of the route which has heretofore been misplaced. The assigned old Roman Iter proceeds from Eildon to the supposed Curio or Curia, near Borthwick—a site still requiring confirmation—and thence directly to the Roman port of Cramond or Alaterva.
Bronze Lamp found at Currie.
The southern shores of the Bodotria Æstuarium, or Frith of Forth, bear more abundant traces than almost any other Scottish district of continuous occupation by Roman colonists; doubtless owing, in part at least, to the frequent presence of the fleet in the neighbouring estuary. If Alaterva, to whose Deæ Matres one of its altars was dedicated, be indeed the ancient name of Cramond, no such epithet is to be found in the old itineraries, nor has a classic name been suggested for the no less important Roman town at Inveresk; unless that one zealous local antiquary[422] has recently conceived the possibility of establishing its claims to be the true Curia, hitherto located elsewhere on very slender and inconclusive evidence.
Following the course of the assigned Roman route from the supposed Curia at Currie, near Borthwick, it is carried by Roy, in his revised map, by a westerly sweep towards Cramond, leaving the rocky heights of Edinburgh some two miles to the east of it, and joining Inveresk, in the maps of Chalmers and Stuart, by imaginary crossroads, sufficiently satisfactory on paper. A totally different arrangement may, however, be shewn to have been followed in laying down the Roman military roads of this district. Earlier writers were not so ready to exclude the Scottish capital from Roman honours: e.g.,—"The town of Eaden," says Camden, "commonly called Edenborow, the same undoubtedly with Ptolemy's Στρατοπεδον Πτερωτον, i.e., Castrum Alatum."[423] Sir Robert Sibbald was one of the first of our Scottish authors to place a Roman colonia at Edinburgh, but without advancing any satisfactory grounds for such a conclusion.[424] "Some," says he, "think Edinburgh the Caer-Eden mentioned in the ancient authors." Others, equally bent on maintaining the honour of the Scottish metropolis, found in it the Alauna of Ptolemy, and in the neighbouring Water of Leith the Alauna Fluvius—a discovery perhaps not unworthy to match with that of Richie Moniplies when he sneered down the Thames with ineffable contempt in comparison with the same favourite stream! Such arguments, like those for too many other Romano-Scottish sites, were mere theories, unsupported by evidence, and little more can be advanced in favour of the supposed Castrum Alatum.[425] Later writers on the Roman antiquities of Scotland have accordingly excluded Edinburgh from the list of classic localities. There are not wanting, however, satisfactory traces of Roman remains on the site of the Scottish capital, a due attention to which may help to furnish materials for a revised map of the Roman Iter.
There passes across the most ancient districts of Edinburgh, and skirting the line of its oldest fortifications, a road leading through the Pleasance,—so called from an old convent once dedicated to S. Maria de Placentia,—St. Mary's Wynd,—another conventual memorial,—Leith Wynd, St. Ninian's Row, Broughton, and Canonmills, right onward in the direction of the ancient port of Alaterva. Probably more than fourteen hundred years have elapsed since Curia and Alaterva were finally abandoned by their Roman occupants, and the dwellings of the Eildon colony were left to crumble into ruins; yet the traces of the Romans' footsteps have not been so utterly obliterated but that we can still recover them along the line of this old road, so deeply imprinted with the tread of later generations.
In the year 1782 a coin of the Emperor Vespasian was found in a garden in the Pleasance, and presented by Dr. John Aitken to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland,—the first recent recovery, so far as is known, of any indications of the Roman presence on the highway which it is now sought to retrace to a Roman origin. Much more conclusive evidence has, however, since been brought to light. In digging in St. Ninian's Row, on the west side of the Calton Hill, in 1815, for the foundations of the Regent Bridge, a quantity of fine red Samian ware, of the usual embossed character, was discovered. It was secured by Thomas Sivright, Esq. of Southhouse, and remained in his valuable collection of antiquities till the whole was sold and dispersed after his death.[426] In 1822, when enlarging the drain by which the old bed of the North Loch, at the base of Edinburgh Castle, is kept dry, portions of an ancient causeway were discovered fully four feet below the modern level of the road. Some evidence of its antiquity was furnished on the demolition, in 1845, of the Trinity Hospital, formerly part of the prebendal buildings of the collegiate foundation of Queen Mary of Gueldres, founded in 1462, when it was discovered that the foundations rested on part of the same ancient causeway;[427] and on the demolition of the venerable collegiate church an opportunity was afforded me of examining another portion of it above which the apsis of the choir and part of the north aisle had been founded. The conclusion which its appearance and construction immediately suggested, was that which further investigation so strongly confirms, that these various remains indicate the course of a Roman road. It was composed of irregular rounded stones, closely rammed together, and below them was a firm bed of forced soil coloured with fragments of brick, bearing a very close resemblance to the more southern portions of the same Roman military way recently exposed to view in the vale of Melrose. The portions of it discovered in 1822 included a branch extending a considerable way eastward along the North Back of Canongate, in a direct line towards the well-known Roman road in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, popularly styled "The Fishwives' Causeway."[428] Here, therefore, we recover the traces of the Roman way in its course from Eildon to Alaterva, with a diverging road to the important town and harbour at Inveresk, shewing beyond doubt that Edinburgh had formed an intermediate link between these several Roman sites. The direction of the road, as still visible in the neighbourhood of Cramond in the early part of the eighteenth century, completely coincided with the additional portion of it thus recovered. "From this same station of Cramond," says Gordon, "runs a noble military way towards Castrum Alatum, or Edinburgh; but as it comes near that city, it is wholly levelled and lost among the ploughed lands."[429]
Within a few yards of the point where this ancient Roman road crosses the brow of the hill on which the ancient Scottish capital is built, are the beautiful bas-reliefs above referred to, the heads of the Emperor Septimius Severus and his wife Julia. I have already suggested elsewhere[430] that these sculptures, which in Maitland's time, 1750, were said to have been removed from a house on the opposite side of the street, have probably been discovered in digging the foundations of that building. This idea has received striking confirmation during the present year, (1850.) In the progress of laying a new and larger set of pipes for conveying water to the palace of Holyrood, the whole line of the High Street has been opened up, the workmen in many places digging into natural soil, and even through the solid rock. In the immediate neighbourhood of the site of the old "Heart of Mid-Lothian," several coins were found, including one of Henry IV. of France, bearing the date 1596; and lower down the street, two silver denarii of the Emperor Septimius Severus were discovered, in good preservation, not many feet from the locality of the Roman sculptures. The reverse of the one represents a soldier armed, and bearing the figure of victory in his right hand—legend, AVGG · VICT., and of the other a female figure in flowing drapery, bearing in the right hand a wreath, and in the left a cornucopia—the legend illegible. The prejudices of a strong local partiality induce me to look upon these traces of Roman presence on a spot which formed the battle-ground of Scotland during the "Douglas Wars," as well as in older struggles, with an interest which I cannot hope to communicate to archæologists in general, but which to many of them may perhaps seem a pardonable excess. The visit of the Emperor Septimius Severus, and still more, of his Empress,[431] to this distant corner of the Roman world, were incidents of a sufficiently unusual occurrence to be commemorated by those who have left records of every few thousand paces of an earthen vallum which they erected. If we suppose the road which has been traced out in continuation of the Watling Street to have been the route by which the Emperor journeyed northward—as there is good probability that it must have been—we may imagine him pausing on the brow of the hill, just above the steep slope occupied by Leith Wynd, and catching the first view of the Bodotrian Frith, with the Roman galleys gliding along its shores, or urged with sail and oar towards the busy sea-port of Alaterva, now the humble fishing village of Cramond. On this spot it seems probable that some important memorial of this distinguished Emperor's visit had been erected, of which the beautiful sculptures still remaining there formed a prominent feature. Overthrown amid the wreck of Roman empire, they may have lain interred for many centuries; for within a very short distance of their present site, recent discoveries have brought to light medieval sculptures and remains of buildings many feet below the foundations of those of the sixteenth century.[432]
These, however, are not the sole evidences of the occupation of Edinburgh by the Romans. In the Reliquiæ Galeanæ, of date March 1742, Sir John Clerk thus describes "a Roman arch discovered at Edinborough,"—"Just about the time that your structure at York was pulled down, we had one at Edinborough which met with the same fate. It was an old arch that nobody ever imagined to be Roman, and yet it seems it was, by an urn discovered in it, with a good many silver coins, all of them common, except one of Faustina Minor, which I had not. It represents her bust on one side, and on the reverse a lectisternium with this inscription, SÆCULI FELICITAS."[433] It is much to be regretted that this information is not more precise, both about the other coins and the arch in which so remarkable a deposit was found. Such as it is, however, it is of great value. To these traces of the Roman presence there remain to be added the sculptured heads which formerly adorned the old Cross of Edinburgh, demolished in 1756, and described by Arnot as apparently of the Lower Empire—an opinion to be received with some doubt. In digging the foundation of a large reservoir erecting on the Castlehill, during the present season, among various very remarkable discoveries, to be afterwards noticed, there was found another relic of the Lower Empire, a single copper coin, in excellent preservation, struck under Constantine the Great.
Pennant describes in his Second Tour, "certain curiosities in a small but select private cabinet," found in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, which had escaped his notice on his former visit. Notwithstanding their very great local value they have experienced the usual fate of private collections, and are no longer known. "Among other antiquities in the cabinet of Mr. John Macgouan, discovered near this city, is an elegant brass image of a beautiful Naiad, with a little satyr in one arm. On her head is a wine-vat or some such vessel, to denote her an attendant on Bacchus; and beneath one foot a subverted vase, expressive of her character as a nymph of the fountains." If this beautiful group still exists the description must render it easily identified. Other relics in the same private collection, and it may be assumed, from the connexion, included in Pennant's description as discovered in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, are a bronze vessel with a perforated top, possibly designed for incense, and an iron scourge or flagrum, one of the dreadful instruments of torture used by the Romans, chiefly for the discipline of slaves, but afterwards employed in the persecutions of the primitive Christians. Lastly, it is not unworthy of note, in passing, that in the foundations of the ancient Chapel of St. Margaret, in the Castle, an early Romanesque work, there are bricks which may possibly be only fragments of medieval floor-tiles, but which more readily suggest the idea of their being traces of older Roman buildings, similar to those which remained in the contemporary Church of St. Michael at Inveresk, until its recent demolition, and are still recognised amid the later masonry of Dumbarton Castle, the Theodosia of Richard of Cirencester. Independently of this, however, evidence enough has, I think, been adduced to establish the fact that a Roman colonia existed on the site of Edinburgh. Yet it was not without reason that this was assumed as probable by older Scottish antiquaries in the absence of such proof, since the admirable military positions presented by the locality are too obvious to have escaped the practised eyes of the Roman engineers established on the neighbouring coast; especially as they had previously been occupied by the native Britons, as is manifest by the discoveries of their cists and cinerary urns, as well as of their primitive weapons, in the immediate vicinity. Taking these latter arguments into consideration, the mere fact of the Roman roads from Newstead—and perhaps Curia—from Cramond and Inveresk, all meeting in the valley between the Calton and the Castle Hills, is of itself good presumptive evidence in favour of a Roman post having occupied the site.
It need not excite surprise that traces of Roman occupation should be found in localities unnoted in the pages of Ptolemy. We may rather wonder that history should furnish the amount of information it does regarding the brief presence of the legions in a country from which they returned with such dubious accounts of triumph. Among the Romano-British relics in the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, are a circular bronze ornament, an elegant foot of a bronze tripod in form of a horse's leg and hoof, and a small figure of Minerva on a pedestal of brass gilt, measuring nearly three inches high, all found at different times in East-Lothian. The last relic is not to be compared, however, to another bronze in the same collection, a figure of the goddess Pallas Armata, five inches in height, dug up in the neighbourhood of the Kirkintilloch station on the Roman wall, and presented to the Society in 1786. It is a beautiful work of art; but the most remarkable feature about it is the spear which the goddess holds in her hand, bearing an exact resemblance to the tilting-spear of the middle ages.
In the same collection are also preserved a bronze stamp, discovered near the village of Carrington, Mid-Lothian, bearing the inscription, which is reversed, in bold relief, TVLLIAE TACITAE; and a bronze key of undoubted Roman workmanship, found within a camp-kettle, in a moss near North-Berwick Law,—probably the same locality where a quantity of bronze vessels were recently dug up, as already described. In addition to these must be noted the exceedingly beautiful bronze lamp four and three-fifth inches in length, figured on a previous page, found along with a small and rudely executed bronze eagle, at Currie, Mid-Lothian. These remarkable Roman relics will probably be considered sufficient to establish the fact, that the Roman road had passed through that line of country. They will add, however, only a very slight addition to the unsatisfactory evidence on which the last named place has been assumed to be the site of the Roman Curia—heretofore on little better authority than the correspondence between the ancient and modern names. Gordon describes another "most curious Roman lamp of brass, adorned with a variety of engravings," found at Castlecary.[434]
"As you very well notice," writes Sir John Clerk to his friend and correspondent Mr. Roger Gale, "Ptolemy mistook several Latin names when he rendered them into Greek. Of this kind, as I suspect, is his Πτερωτον Στρατοπεδον, Castrum Alatum, which our antiquarians have applied to Edinburgh. I rather believe that the place designed by Ptolemy is an old Roman station on the sea-coast, which we call Cramond, and that it was anciently called, not Castra Alata but Alatervum, or Castra Alaterva." To this Mr. Gale replies, with equally cogent arguments for restoring the Castra Alata to the winged heights of Edinburgh, on which we need not enter here, having already sufficiently discussed the question of the latter's claims as a Roman site. While, however, Edinburgh has undergone the ceaseless changes which centuries bring round to a densely populated locality, Cramond was in all probability abandoned to solitude, or at most occupied by a few fishermen's huts when deserted by its Roman founders. Hence the traces of its ancient colonists have been discovered in great abundance in recent times. An almost incredible number of coins and medals, in gold, silver, and bronze, have been found at different periods, of which Gordon mentions between forty and fifty of special note which he examined in Sir John Clerk's possession. Sibbald, Horsley, and Wood, all refer in similar terms to the valuable numismatic treasures gathered on this Roman site, including an almost unbroken series of imperial coins from Augustus to Diocletian; and thereby proving that the ancient Alaterva had not been abandoned to utter solitude on the retreat of Severus. Some rare and valuable medals have also been discovered among its ruins, including one of the Emperor Septimius Severus, inscribed on the reverse, FVNDATOR PACIS, and supposed to have been struck to give the character of a triumph to the doubtful peace effected by him with the Caledonians.[435] Three altars have been found at Cramond; one sacred to Jove, one to the Deæ Matres of Alaterva, and the third, figured by Horsley, and assigned by him, as well as by later writers, to the favourite forest deity Silvanus. The obvious resemblance, however, of the sculpture on the last altar to an Anglo-Roman mosaic, now in the British Museum, representing the sea-god Neptune with horns of lobster's claws, and dolphins proceeding from his mouth, leaves little room for doubt that the colonists of the chief Roman port on the Bodotrian Frith had more appropriately dedicated their altar to the ruler of the waves.[436] The large altar found at Cramond, dedicated to the Supreme Jove, formerly in the Advocates' Library, and now deposited in the Scottish Antiquarian Museum, has been frequently engraved. It is thus inscribed,—
I O M
COH · V · GALL ·
CVI · PRÆEST
IMINE · HONVIS
TERTVLLVS
PRAEF · V · SL
L · M
Its well-known inscription is repeated here, in order to associate it with another relic found at Cramond, probably prior to the discovery of this altar, which attests the presence of the same Roman Prefect, Imineus Honorius Tertullus, at the station of Alaterva. Among the numerous Roman remains acquired by Sir John Clerk from this interesting locality, and now preserved at Penicuick House, is a bronze stamp, measuring two and three-eighths by one and a half inches. It is surmounted by a crescent, and bears the words, in raised letters of half an inch in height, TERTVLL. PROVINC. The inscription is reversed, having evidently been designed for use as a stamp, and on the back is a ring handle in form of a bay leaf. A centurial inscription of the Second Legion, Augusta, a sculptured figure of the imperial eagle grasping the lightning in its talons, with numerous carved stones, bricks, flue-tiles, and pottery, have from time to time been recovered on the same Roman site. To these may be added another inscription, derived from the Morton MS., presented in 1827 to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, by Susan, Countess-Dowager of Morton.
It is indorsed, "Ancient inscriptions on stones found in Scotland," and is supposed to have been written by James, Earl of Morton, president of the Royal Society, who died in 1786. Some of the inscriptions appear to have been derived from Camden and other well-known authorities; but others, including the following imperfect relic, are probably nowhere else preserved. Even in its extremely mutilated and fragmentary state, it is, perhaps, not altogether unworthy of preservation. It is thus described,—"This inscription is on a stone on the east end of the church of Cramond, in West-Lothian, [Mid-Lothian,] being three foot long, and one foot and a half broad, having four lyons drawn on it, all being almost worn out,"
. . . . G PVBLIVS CR. . .
. . . IN POMPONIAN . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
. PAT · P · D · D . . . .
This inscription escaped the notice of Wood when preparing his history of the parish, or was perhaps thought to be too imperfect to be worth recording, and it now no longer exists.
Another Scottish stream bearing the name of the Almond forms a tributary of the Tay, and is also associated, by the remarkable discoveries on its banks, with the memory of the legionary invaders. A Roman camp, once in good preservation, has been nearly obliterated by the encroachment of the stream on its banks; but the changes which destroyed its entrenchments have brought to light still more satisfactory traces of their constructors. The most interesting of these is a bar of lead of 73 lbs. weight, marked thus—
(X J XXXXII,
beside which lay the remains of a helmet and spear, nearly consumed by rust. Another stamped pig of lead was found at Kirkintilloch, on the line of the wall; and examples from various English localities, inscribed with the names and titles of Roman Emperors, are preserved in the British Museum, and in private collections. One of these, marked IMP. ADRIANI. AVG, supplies a new argument relative to ancient British metallurgy. It was found near the lead mines of Mr. More of Linley Hall, county Salop, where an old drift, distinguished from those of modern date by various evidences of imperfect mining, is still designated the Roman Vein. Ancient mining tools have been found in it, and Sir R. I. Murchison states his opinion that the block of lead is the product of the neighbouring British mine.[437] Another pig of lead, with its Roman inscription partially defaced by oxidation, was recently dug up at Chester, and is figured in the Journal of the Archæological Association,[438] along with one found at Broughton Brook, Hants, and still preserved at Bossington Park. The latter is inscribed NERONIS. AVG. EX. KIAN. IIII. COS. BRIT., and supplies a remarkably interesting example of the historical value frequently pertaining to such relics. The inscription refers to the Cangi or Kiangi, immediately prior to the reverses experienced by the Romans from the courage and skill of the heroic Boadicea. The precise date is furnished, Nero having been consul for the fourth time only the year before; and it is suggested, with great probability, that this block of lead was on its way for exportation, composing part of the tribute, the harsh exaction of which contributed to incite the Britons to resistance.
Among minuter relics belonging to the same period, the dentated bronze ring figured here, from the original in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries, is worthy of some note from the rarity of such objects in Britain. It was discovered near Merlsford, on the river Eden, Fifeshire, and closely corresponds to another example found in Suffolk, and figured in the Archæological Journal, where it is remarked that objects of this kind are frequently met with in Continental collections, but have rarely, if ever, been found in this country.[439] They occur with one, two, and three rows of teeth. Sir Samuel Meyrick describes them as dentated rings, the form apparently suggested by the Murex shell, and supposes them to have been attached to the whirling arm of a military flail.
But by far the most remarkable of the recently discovered remains of the Roman occupants of Scotland is a medicine stamp, acquired by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, along with a very valuable collection of antiquities, bequeathed to them by E. W. A. Drummond Hay, Esq., formerly one of the secretaries of the Society. From his notes it appears that it was found in the immediate vicinity of Tranent Church, East-Lothian, in a quantity of debris, broken tiles, and brick-dust, which may not improbably have once formed the residence and laboratory of Lucius Vallatinus, the Roman oculist, whose name this curious relic supplies. It consists of a small cube of pale green stone, two and three-fifth inches in length, and engraved on two sides as in the annexed woodcut; the letters being reversed for the purpose of stamping the unguents or other medicaments retailed by its original possessor.
The inscriptions admit of being extended thus on the one side: L. VALLATINI EVODES AD CICATRICES ET ASPRITUDINES, which may be rendered—The evodes of Lucius Vallatinus for cicatrices and granulations. The reverse, though in part somewhat more obscure, reads: L. VALLATINI A PALO CROCODES AD DIATHESES—The crocodes, or preparation of saffron, of L. Vallatinus of the Palatine School,(?) for affections of the eyes.[440] Both the Euodes and the Crocodes are prescriptions given by Galen, and occur on other medicine stamps. Several examples have been found in England, and many in France and Germany, supplying the names of their owners and the terms of their preparations. Many of the latter indicate their chief use for diseases of the eye, and hence they have most commonly received the name of Roman oculists' stamps. No example, however, except the one figured here, has ever occurred in Scotland; and amid legionary inscriptions, military votive altars, and sepulchral tablets, it is peculiarly interesting to stumble on this intelligent memento, restoring to us the name of the old Roman physician who ministered to the colonists of the Lothians the skill, and perchance also the charlatanry, of the healing art.
A remarkable gold relic of a semicircular form was found in 1787 in a moss on the borders of Moffat parish, Annandale, near the track of the Roman way. It measured from three to four inches in length, but was evidently imperfect, and had on the exterior edge an ornamental raised rim, inscribed in characters perforated through the gold: IOVI. AVG. VOT. XX. An exceedingly beautiful bronze flagon, twelve inches in height, plated with gold, and of undoubted Roman workmanship, discovered in the bottom of a small burn, on the edge of an extensive moss, in the parish of Lesmahagow, Lanarkshire, is now in the Hunterian Museum, and has been engraved in the Archæologia.[441] A pair of patellæ, found near Frier's Carse, Dumfriesshire, in 1790, one of them inscribed on the handle ANSIEPHARR, are also engraved and described in the Archæologia.[442] Two others are noticed by Ure, which were found in a chambered tumulus, in the parish of Rutherglen, and stamped with the name of CONGALLUS. The handle of another of the same type, the name on which is too indistinct to be deciphered, was found at a depth of five feet in the Moss of Ballat, Stirlingshire, in 1849, and is now in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries. In addition to these, among the MSS. in the library of the Society, is a sketch of what appears to be justly described as "one of the most elegant Roman cups ever discovered in Britain, of the finest Corinthian brass, beautifully embellished with a dance of the Bacchantæ in the centre, a wreath of vine leaves tastefully encircling the neck in alto relievo, the whole highly finished. It was found about nine feet under the surface of Lochar Moss, Dumfriesshire, and long preserved in the family of a gentleman in that county, but has now been lost sight of for some years." The drawing, which is by Mr. W. S. Irvine, was forwarded to the Society through the present Sir David Brewster in 1815, along with sketches of Roman altars and other antiquities, and proposals for publishing a work on the antiquities of what the author calls Regnum Cambrense. The drawings are slight, and sadly out of perspective, but they furnish some interesting materials relative to the Scottish Roman invasion, which have escaped the notice of Stuart—the only writer who has treated of the subject since their discovery. The vessel above described is an exceedingly beautiful vase, with floriated handles, curving up into birds' heads where they are attached at the lower ends to the vase. Its dimensions are not given, and the sketch is unfortunately too imperfect to be engraved.
Apart from the stations on the Antonine Wall and the fertile regions of the Lothians, no district of Scotland has been so fruitful in remains of Roman art and military skill as the country of the Selgovæ, and especially Birrens, the supposed Blatum Bulgium of Antoninus. To the materials for the Scoto-Roman history of this province I am fortunately able to make additions from various sources. The following tablet, thus oddly located in the Morton MS., belongs to the district of the Selgovæ,—"This inscription is in a house of Jockie Graham's in Eskdale, fixed in a wall, set up, as appears by the Legio Augusta Secunda, in memorial of the Emperor Hadrian;"
IMP · CÆS · TRA · HAD
RIANO · AVG ·
LEG II · AVG · F ·
The successor of Trajan, we know, visited our island soon after his accession to the purple, but he was hastily summoned away to quell an insurrection at another extremity of his unwieldy empire on the banks of the Nile, and was glad to abandon the line where Agricola had reared his forts for that finally adopted by Septimius Severus as the northern limit of imperial sway. Camden mentions an inscription, the counterpart of this, dug up at Netherby,[443] and Pennant describes another nearly similar, (possibly indeed the Eskdale tablet,) which he examined among the antiquities at Hoddam Castle, Dumfriesshire.[444] All the inscriptions, however, transcribed by the latter at Hoddam Castle, are understood, where not otherwise specified, to be from the neighbouring station of Birrens, in which case the Eskdale tablet forms an important addition to the traces of the Roman Emperor's presence in Scotland. It is curious that neither Pennant, nor Stuart in his more elaborate Caledonia Romana,[445] makes any comment on the singular discovery of a legionary dedication to the elder Emperor Hadrian, found thus far within the transmural province of Valentia. The legionary tablets of the Scottish Wall are its most interesting relics. Notwithstanding the very great number of altars and other Anglo-Roman inscriptions found along the line of the southern wall, only two or three have borne the name of either of the Emperors by whom it was erected, and none of them exactly correspond to the Scottish legionary stones. So rare indeed are memorials of Septimius Severus, even in the south, that Gordon characterizes the discovery by Roger Gale of one bearing the name of that Emperor, in the foundation of Hexham Church, Northumberland, as "a very precious jewel of antiquity."[446]
Leaving Eskdale for Annandale, we find ourselves within the interesting locality which includes both the stations of Birrens and Birrenswork Hill. Here have been discovered hypocausti, granaries, altars; a ruined temple, with the full figure, as is supposed, of the goddess Brigantia, inscribed with the name of AMANDUS the architect, who erected it in obedience to Imperial commands; the pedestal and torso of a colossal statue of the god Mercury; a mutilated statue of Fortune, the fruit of a vow in gratitude for restored health, performed by a Prefect of one of the Tungrian cohorts; a sepulchral tablet, dedicated by her mother to the shade of Pervica, a Roman maiden who faded under our bleak northern skies; with numerous other evidences of an important Roman colonia. A few of the Birrens inscriptions and other antiquities belong to the earlier years of the Roman presence in Scotland, but the greater number appear to be clearly referrible to the later era of the province of Valentia, subsequent to the retreat of the Emperor Septimius Severus. This is proved by the debased style of art which stamps nearly all the provincial Roman works of the third and fourth centuries. Confining any detailed accounts, however, to such relics as have not been previously described: in 1810 a beautiful altar, dedicated to Minerva, was dug up at Birrens by Mr. Clow of Laud, and is described in Mr. W. S. Irvine's MS. as serving (in 1815) as the pedestal to a sun-dial in the garden of George Irving, Esq., at his seat of Burnfoot, near Ecclefechan. It measures fifty inches in height by twenty-two inches in breadth, and about nine inches in thickness, the back being as usual roughly cut for standing against the wall. It presents an unusual display of ornament, being decorated with vine leaves, birds, fishes, and various architectural details. The inscription, which is in the highest state of preservation, is—
DEAE
MINERVAE
COH II TVN
GRORVM
MIL EQ C L
CVI PRÆEST CS L
AVSPEX PRÆF
which may be rendered: DEÆ MINERVÆ, COHORTIS SECUNDÆ TUNGRORUM, MILITIA EQUESTRIS CONSTANTINI LEGIONIS, CUI PRÆEST CAIUS LUCIUS AUSPEX PRÆFECTUS. This altar remained a few years since, and I believe still exists, as here described. But it is no solitary addition to the relics of this second cohort of the Tungrians, whose memorials are even more abundant than those of the Second Legion, Augusta, on the wall of Antoninus. The Tungrians were among the first Roman legions to enter Scotland, and appear to have been long stationed at Blatum Bulgium. It was indeed to two Tungrian and three Batavian cohorts that Agricola was principally indebted for his victory over Galgacus. The valuable collection of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharp, Esq., includes three other altars, found about the year 1812 at Birrens, all of them the fruits of pious vows by the same Tungrian cohort. The largest of these is a beautiful altar, in the very finest state of preservation, of which the woodcut conveys a good idea. It measures fifty-five and a half inches in height by thirty inches in greatest breadth at top, and twenty and a quarter inches across the inscribed front. The inscription may be thus rendered: MARTI ET VICTORIÆ AUGUSTÆ CENTURIÆ TIRONUM MILITUM IN COHORTE SECUNDA TUNGRORUM, CUI PRÆEST SILVIUS AUSPEX, PRÆFECTUS. VOTUM SOLVERUNT LUBENTES MERITO.
The second of these altars found at Birrens is a small but neat one, measuring thirty-six inches high, by fourteen and five-eighth inches in greatest breadth, thus inscribed:—
DIB · DE
AB · Q
OMNB
FRVMENT
IVS MIL COH II
TVNGR ·
It may be read: DIIS DEABUSQUE OMNIBUS FRUMENTIUS MILES COHORTIS SECUNDÆ TUNGRORUM. The third altar, which is of simpler and ruder workmanship, measures forty-three and three-quarter inches in height, by twenty-three and three-quarter inches in greatest breadth. It appears to be dedicated by Pagus Vellaus to one of those obscure local deities, apparently provincial names with Latin terminations, which are more familiar than intelligible to the antiquary. It belongs to a class of Romano-British relics peculiarly interesting, notwithstanding the obscurity of their dedications, as the transition-link between the Roman and British mythology. These altars of the adopted native deities are generally rude and inferior in design, as if indicative of their having their origin in the piety of some provincial legionary subaltern. In the obscure gods and goddesses thus commemorated, we most probably recognise the names of favourite local divinities of the Romanized Britons, originating for the most part from the adoption into the tolerant Pantheon of Rome of the older objects of native superstitious reverence. Another altar found at Birrens is sacred to the goddess Harimella; but the most comprehensive, as well, perhaps, as the most interesting inscription of the whole class, is that on one of the altars of Marcus Cocceius Firmus, found at Auchindavy, and dedicated GENIO TERRAE BRITANNICAE. With the exception of the name, which adds a new one to our list of local divinities, the inscription on the altar now referred to presents no unwonted difficulties. It pertains, like the other Birrens altars, to the second Tungrian cohort, and is thus inscribed:—
DEAE RICAGM
BEDAE PAGVS
VELLAVS MILIT
COH II TVNG
V S L M
Besides these interesting memorials of the Tungrians, Mr. Sharp possesses a fourth altar from the same locality, which, though seen by Pennant at Hoddam Castle, has been so inaccurately transcribed by him, that it deserves a place among the unnoted Roman remains. The inaccuracies, though great literally, are not of very essential importance, except in the name assumed by the cohort, which he renders NERVIORUM MILLE. It measures forty-eight inches in height, by twenty-two and three-eighth inches in breadth at top, and is thus dedicated to the fickle goddess:—
FORTVNAE
COH I
NERVANA
GERMANOR
EQ
By means of the Irvine MS. in the Scottish Antiquaries' Library, another altar pertaining to the same cohort is recovered, dedicated to the Father of Olympus. It is a plain squared stone, measuring four feet in height, two feet in breadth, and thirteen inches in thickness, without any ornament or moulding to relieve its bald form. It is stated by Mr. Irvine to have been taken out of the heart of the wall of the old church at Hoddam, when demolished, in 1815. The inscription is complete, and clearly legible; the mark ∞ is by no means of rare occurrence, signifying a thousand. Several of the letters in this, as well as in some of the previous examples, are joined for the purpose of abbreviation, but without affecting the reading.
I O M
COH · I · NERVANA
GERMANOR · ∞ · EQ
CVI PRÆEST L FANI
VS FELIX TRIB
To these altars there only remains to be added another dedicated to Jove, derived from the same MS. It was dug up in 1814, in what Mr. Irvine describes as a small vicinal camp on the banks of the Kirtle, near Springkell, the elegant mansion of Sir J. H. Maxwell, Bart. It is of simple form, being relieved only by a small moulding a little way from the top. But the thuribulum is very carefully executed, and on the right side is a præfericulum sculptured in relief. The inscription is slightly mutilated: I.O.M ...NINVS..I FECIT.PP.
But besides these relics of Pagan worship, another sepulchral tablet preserves a contemporary memorial of fraternal affection such as pertains exclusively to no creed or time. It is figured on a note of Mr. Irvine's, which appears to have accompanied the drawing of the altar of Minerva, found at Birrens, and may therefore be presumed, like that dedicated to the shade of Pervica, to have formed another of the numerous Roman remains which attest the importance of the station of Blatum Bulgium. It is thus dedicated to the manes of Constantia, the infant daughter of Philus Magnius, who died at the age of one year, eight months, and nine days,—apparently by her brother: assuming that the letters on the pediment should be read, Frater fieri curavit.
These examples, while they serve to illustrate the traces of the Roman invasion which are found in Scotland, furnish additional materials for its history. The circumstances under which some of them have been discovered, and the fact that so many unedited inscriptions should remain to be described, after the very recent researches of the author of the Caledonia Romana, may suffice to shew how many more such relics must have disappeared from time to time, without an opportunity being afforded to the archæologist of noting their pregnant records.
To these may be added the following meagre list of Potters' Stamps,—all that I have been able to recover pertaining to Roman Scotland. This, however, arises from no paucity of materials. Mr. C. K. Sharp informs me that in his early years he remembers to have seen large accumulations of broken Samian ware and other Roman pottery dug up at Birrenswork. The same is also known to have occurred both at Inveresk and Cramond; and during the progress of construction of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway in 1841, a mass of debris about twelve feet deep was cut through on the site of the Castlecary Fort, which led to the exposure of a quantity of broken pottery, including some very fine fragments of embossed Samian ware, now in the possession of the Earl of Zetland, the owner of the ground. Had the person entrusted by the noble proprietor to take care of any relics that might be discovered, been sufficiently aware of the interest now attached to the potters' stamps, a large addition to the Scottish list would probably have been the result. As it was, however, he only served effectually to prevent this being accomplished. My friend, Mr. John Buchanan, a zealous Scottish antiquary, who visited Castlecary for the purpose, was prohibited from touching anything within the charmed circle; and, accordingly, these evidences of Roman art are mostly buried below the railway embankment, for rediscovery by other generations, when railway viaducts shall be as obsolete relics as Roman vallums now are. Within the area of the station a neatly cut centurial inscription was discovered, and is now preserved by the Earl of Zetland. It bears the inscription,—COHORTIS SEXTÆ CENTURIA ANTONII ARATI, thus abbreviated:
CHO VI
Ↄ ANTO
ARATI.
It is only very recently, even in England, that the names of the potters stamped on Roman fictile ware, have attracted much attention or been carefully recorded. Through the exertions of Mr. Charles Roach Smith and other zealous archæologists, we are now in possession of ample means for comparing new discoveries with the potters' stamps of London, Colchester, and York; but no collection of Scoto-Roman pottery exists, so far as I am aware, with the exception of the few specimens in the Museum of Scottish Antiquaries. The following apology for a Scottish list must therefore meanwhile suffice. It may perhaps form the nucleus of a more ample one at a subsequent period, by which to enable us to test the question of native or foreign manufacture, and to trace out the sources from whence the Roman colonists of Britain imported their finer fictile wares. The Scottish Museum furnishes a few curious specimens from Castlecary, some of which are given here in fac-simile. The first occurs on fine black ware, and looks like the imperfect attempt of some native or provincial potter to imitate a Roman stamp which he probably could not read. The second and third may be most fitly described as cuneiform. The larger of the two is on thin unglazed red ware. The fourth is on a patera of fine glazed Samian ware, and furnishes a good example of the mode of joining the letters together, with which English antiquaries are familiar, not only on the pottery, but also on the altars and inscribed tablets of the Anglo-Roman period. All these impressions are clear and distinct, so that their peculiarities are designed. Two of the other Castlecary stamps are furnished me by Mr. Buchanan, and the remainder are in my own possession, having been picked up in the neighbourhood of the railway embankment since its completion. For those from Newstead I am chiefly indebted to Dr. J. A. Smith.
| Castlecary. | |
| PATIRATI OF | SACIRAPO |
| VNFO IO (?)[447] | AESTIV M |
| IΛIV | PRISCVS F |
| LIBER IM | Λ · I · BIN · I · M |
| IRSECΛ | AHIM |
| WILIIVI | [ΛEST][V]M |
- Falkirk—On a Terra Cotta Lamp.
- MARCI
- Duntocher.
- BRVSC F[448]
- Cramond.
- CARVS F
- ADIECTI
- OF VΛLO
- OF IVCVN
- Birrens.
- SAC · EROR
- Newstead, near Eildon.
- W · SEC · V · F · O
- DVRIVS · F
- OXMII
- RVRFI · MA
- OIVSCI[448]
- CIVs[448]
- M · I · M[447]
A handle of a Scoto-Roman amphora in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries, the exact locality of the discovery of which is unknown, is stamped with the letters M. P. F. The Roman fictilia in the same collection also include terra cotta lamps from several Scottish localities. One of singular type, in the form of a broad leaf, with the veins strongly marked in relief, was found at Chester Knowes, near Chirnside, Berwickshire, the site as is believed of a temporary camp. Another is from Castlecary, and a third from Birrens. Besides these, various urns, lachrymatories, fragments of mortaria, amphoræ, and Samian, and other wares, all suffice to shew the correspondence of the Roman fictile ware of Scotland and England.
Such are some of the traces of the Roman occupation of Scotland. If we believe the direct statements of the few classic historians who have thought our northern region worthy of notice, the natives were in a state of extreme degradation and barbarism. Yet from the same authors we are able to discover that these barbarians fought in chariots, were armed with swords, lances, bucklers, and poniards, and were capable of offering the most formidable resistance to the veteran legions. Still more, we find that the Caledonians never settled down either in contented peace or in passive despair under the Roman yoke. Experience of the legions did not intimidate them; and at length Septimius Severus, one of the ablest of the Roman emperors, was compelled to employ the arts of the diplomatist rather than of the soldier ere he abandoned them once more to their wild freedom. We may indeed question if this remote region could be worth the labour of conquest; but when once occupied we see in the remains of Roman works abundant reasons why the conquerors should wish to retain it. Our chief inquiry however is, to what extent did this brief and partial Roman occupation affect the native manners and arts? The answer, I think, must be, that its influence was slight, partial, and transitory. Like an unwonted tide, the flood of Roman invasion swept beyond its natural limits, disturbing and unsettling many things long unaffected by change. But the tide ebbed as rapidly as it had flowed, and at most only helped to prepare the soil for a new growth. Neither the manners, the faith, nor the social habits of these foreign occupants of the country could be at all acceptable to the natives, though their superior arts and military skill would not fail to be appreciated, and must have been turned to good account. As, however, we have traced earlier arts and discoveries passing onward from the south to the tribes of the north, and effectually revolutionizing all their primitive habits: so, too, the increasing civilisation of the Anglo-Roman provinces must have extended its fruits beyond the wall of Severus, and effected a more immediate and rapid change than the influence of the same Roman civilisation is seen to have done on Ireland or Denmark, where no legionary invaders ever constructed their intrenchments or established their colonies.
By far the most remarkable native structure which appears to be traceable to the influence and example of Roman arts is the "Deil's Dike," a vast rampart of earth and stone strengthened by a fosse, which passes across many miles of country, through Galloway and Nithsdale. This singular British vallum has excited much less attention than its magnitude and great extent seem to demand. It has been traced through a much larger district of country than the whole length of the Antonine Wall; and though it lacks the historic interest of that structure, and the valuable legionary inscriptions found along its line, it is nevertheless a remarkable evidence of combined action and primitive engineering skill. Mr. Joseph Train remarks of it,—"As it passes from Torregan to Dranandow, it runs through a bog, and is only perceptible by the heather growing long and close on the top of it; whereas, on each side the soil only produces rushes and moss. Near the centre of the bog I caused the peat to be cleared away close to the dike, and thereby found the foundation to be several feet below the surface, which appeared to me a sure indication of its great antiquity." This ancient wall measures eight feet broad at the base, and is mostly built of rough unhewn blocks of moorstone or trap. In districts where stone is more inaccessible it is constructed of stones mixed with earth and clay, and at some few points it is entirely of earth. It has been strengthened at intervals with fortified stations, like the Roman walls from which its model is supposed to be derived. One of these, on the height above Glendochart, is a circular fort 190 yards in diameter. Another fort is situated on a well-chosen, commanding height, called the Hill of Ochiltree, on the east side of Loch Maberrie. The fosse, which is still traceable along a great part of the wall, is on its north side, from whence we are justified in inferring that the vallum was reared by the natives of the southern districts. It is, of course, impossible to assign the age or the builders of this ancient structure with absolute certainty. History is utterly silent on the subject; and it is a fact well worthy of note, in reference to previous remarks on the possibility of many noteworthy deeds having passed unchronicled to oblivion, that everything connected with this defensive erection is involved in the darkest obscurity. The very name which ascribes its origin to the Master Fiend shews how completely tradition has lost every clue to its builders. Yet the civilisation which led to such combined exertion as was needed both for the erection and defence of such an extent of wall must have been considerable. History has doubtless burdened itself with the charge of many meaner themes. The correspondence of the general design to the two Roman walls seems very clearly to point to its erection by the southern Britons after the departure of the Romans, when we know that they frequently suffered from inroads of the northern tribes. The circular forts along the line of the Deil's Dike also furnish a curious link connecting it at once with the older Roman and native military works, while they present a striking contrast to the camps and wall stations of the Roman legionaries.
Cæsar refers to the Britons in his time as using imported bronze. But he had no personal knowledge of the south-western districts of England, where copper and tin had been wrought for ages prior to the Roman invasion. Whether iron was manufactured in Britain before the Roman Invasion it is now perhaps impossible to ascertain, but the familiarity of the Romans with the mineral wealth of England at an early period gives some probability to the supposition that they found native workings of iron and lead as well as of tin and copper. Tacitus refers in general terms to the metallic wealth of Britain; Pliny alludes to the smelting of iron; and Solinus speaks of its use in the manufacture of weapons and agricultural implements. But whether the Romans originated, or only followed up the native workings, in mining for lead and iron, it is unquestionable that they gave a new impetus to the application of the metals to economic purposes. Roman pottery and glass, coins of Nero, Vespasian, and Diocletian, and other undoubted evidences of a Roman origin, have been discovered among the accumulated beds of scoriæ and other refuse of ancient forges in Sussex. Similar traces of iron-foundries accompanied with Roman coins have been observed near the wall of Hadrian, in Yorkshire and other counties. Two altars found at different times, the last at Benwell, in Northumberland, dedicated to Jupiter Dolichenus, the protector of iron-works, add still further evidence of the extent to which this useful metal was wrought during the Anglo-Roman period.[449]
The forest of Dean also is familiar to English archæologists for its extensive mines and shafts, its beds of scoriæ, and other remains of ancient forges, among which have been found unquestionable traces of the Roman presence. Similar works are not to be looked for in Scotland, where no indisputable traces have yet been detected even of the working of the superficial clay. Many remains of ancient forges are, however, known in various districts both to the north and south of the Antonine Wall, though generally unaccompanied by relics which can enable us to assign them unhesitatingly to any precise period. The traces of an extensive iron forge are still obvious on the "Fir Isle," a peninsular promontory on the Carlinwark Loch, Kirkcudbrightshire, a locality peculiarly rich in its stores of archæological relics, including even the rude primitive canoes and other records of the primeval era. During the construction of the great military road through the same district, a large mound was levelled at a place called "Buchan's Croft, near the three thorns of the Carlinwark," which proved to be a mass of scoriæ and cinders, such as are generally left from a forge. This the ancient traditions of Galloway assign to a comparatively recent date, marking it as the spot where the famed Scottish cannon Mons Meg was manufactured in the fifteenth century.[450] Similar remains in the Roman districts of Lanarkshire are unhesitatingly attributed, in the Old Statistical Account of the parish of Dalziel, to operations of the Roman colonists:—"The great Roman highway, commonly called Watling Street, went along the summit of this parish from east to west, but its course is now much defaced by modern improvements. In one place, however, near the centre of that parish, it has been preserved entire, so as to point out the line to after times; the cross stone, the emblem of the baron's jurisdiction, being placed upon it, and that fenced by a large clump of trees planted around. At this place lies a large heap of the cinders of the Roman forges still untouched."[451]
In many of the uncultivated districts of Scotland iron ore occurs in the forms already noted as the most easily adapted for conversion into metal; and it is by no means improbable that such sources may have supplied it to the Celtic metallurgists, long before they had learned the difficult processes requisite for converting the native iron-stone into metal. Whencesoever the art was derived, numerous Highland traditions and even the names of particular localities point to the excellency of the ancient Celtic smiths. In Blair-Atholl, for example, a district abounding with cairns and other primitive memorials, is Dail-na-Cardoch—the dale of the smith's shop, or rather of the iron work; and Dail-na-mein—the dale of the mineral. "Near these," says the old Statist of the parish of Blair-Atholl, "and along the side of the hill, down to Blair, are still to be seen the holes wherein they smelted the iron ore." Similar pits scattered over the northern moors are described as the kilns in which peats were charred for smelting. "There is still to be seen in Glenturret," says Logan in his Scottish Gael, "a shieling called Renna Cardick—the smith's dwelling—with the ruins of houses, heaps of ashes, and other indications of an iron manufactory. Old poems mention it as a work where the metal, of which swords and other arms were made some miles lower down the valley, was prepared. In Sutherland also are distinct marks of the smelting and working of iron with fires of wood."[452] In Islay is still shewn the spot where stood the forge of its once celebrated smiths, and the rocks from whence the iron was dug which they fabricated into the renowned "Lann-Ila," or Islay blades.[453] In the Sean Dana le Oisian also occurs the elaborated poetic description of the ancient bow and quiver, concluding 'S ceann o'n cheard Mac Pheidearain; i.e., and the head of the arrow from the smith MacPhedran. Among the curious relics preserved in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries is the rude pair of iron forge-tongs figured above. They measure thirty and a half inches in length in their present imperfect state, and are described in the minutes of the Society as having been discovered buried under the steep bank of a river in Glenorchy, thirty feet below the surface. It is farther added, in the neighbourhood of the spot great quantities of charcoal were found, and other indications that anciently there had been a smelting work there, though no trace of it now exists in the history or traditions of the country.
Iron Forge-Tongs.