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.
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]