The archæology and prehistoric annals of Scotland

by Sir Daniel Wilson

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.