The archæology and prehistoric annals of Scotland

by Sir Daniel Wilson

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.