The archæology and prehistoric annals of Scotland

by Sir Daniel Wilson

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.