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no Roman kiln has yet been discovered in Scotland, such as suffices in England to shew how completely native arts were superseded by those of the Italian colonists.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: