Roman Scotland

As a Roman scholar based in Scotland, I was naturally intrigued by a new-ish book entitled Beyond the Empire. A Guide to the Roman Remains in Scotland. It’s an attractive book, printed in colour on glossy paper, but it crossed my mind to wonder if the content lives up to the presentation. Are we sometimes too quick to judge a book by its cover?

The book claims to be “a complete listing of all 330 known Roman sites in Scotland”, with the proviso that “it does not pretend to offer a complete overview of Roman activity in the area” (so are there more than 330 “known” sites?), and the author even suggests that, in future, archaeologists will “perhaps find out that few sites are even Roman”. I’m not sure what he means to imply by this, but many of the “330 known Roman sites” turn out to be, at best, “possible” (e.g. Bridgeness fort, based on “pieces of possible Roman stone”; Ewes Door tower, based on an unexcavated mound “only 30m from an old road that might also be Roman”; Tarbat Ness fort, where “there is no trace of any features on the ground ... [and] there have been no Roman finds”).

The author divides the country into eight parts: the East of Scotland; Mid-Scotland; the West of Scotland; the Southwest of Scotland; the Southeast of Scotland; the North of Scotland; the Northeast of Scotland; and the Highlands of Scotland. This peculiar division means that the Antonine Wall sites are mostly (and logically) found in Mid-Scotland, in chapters headed “Falkirk”, “Dunbartonshire”, and “Glasgow”, but Croy Hill and Mollins thereby find themselves in the Southwest of Scotland, alongside far-off Bothwellhaugh, Castledykes and Little Clyde, in the chapter headed “Lanarkshire”. Since the Antonine Wall elsewhere receives three pages to itself (oddly, in the East of Scotland part), it might have been helpful to include a note in that place (pp. 43-45) indicating where the individual sites could be found.

Finding a site

Each part begins with a small location map on which the relevant sites are numbered in alphabetical order. In the subsequent text, the sites are listed alphabetically, but not numbered. This creates a double problem when trying to locate a given site, particularly on a busy map like Dumfries and Galloway; if the reader is trying to find Dalswinton, for instance, the text entry (page 106) has no number, so he or she must flick through pages 99 to 106, keeping a mental tally of the sites as they go past; then, equipped with the relevant number (in this case, 11), the reader must return to the map and scan it from top to bottom, trying to pick out the number 11. Consequently, it might have been wiser (a) to number the sites on each map geographically, perhaps from top left to bottom right, and (b) to number the text entries correspondingly.

Each text entry gives the site name (e.g. Dalswinton) followed by the installations to be found there (in this case, Bankfoot fort and camps, and Bankhead fort), along with their National Grid references, so that they can be located on an Ordnance Survey map. Most entries (but not all, by any means) are accompanied by a small road map showing the site location at larger scale. However, I found these difficult to read, partly because the site name is printed in white type with a thick black outline, and partly because all other text (labelling roads, farms, villages) is vanishingly small and appears to be composed of a matrix of dots. These maps, of course, are presumably aimed at armchair readers, since visitors are recommended to equip themselves with the relevant Ordnance Survey map.

Many text entries are accompanied by a colour photograph, which is certainly an attractive feature (again, for the armchair reader), though quite unnecessary (and occasionally irrelevant: p. 59, “Bridgeness, looking north towards the Forth. There may be a fort here somewhere”; p. 90, “Looking northwards, over the River Clyde and towards Argyle and Bute”, presumably from the fortlet at Lurg Moor, which is the subject of that page; p. 95, “Tron Place, Largs: Location of the first post office in the town and possibly the location where some Roman tiles were discovered in 1820”; p. 112, view of a large house through some trees, “There are a significant number of camps, as well as at least one fort, in the area around Glenlochar”).

Fact checking

And then there is the question of content. My usual guidebook, Lawrence Keppie’s The Legacy of Rome. Scotland’s Roman Remains, is now almost 20 years old, so an updated version is certainly to be welcomed, provided it is accurate. One site I have visited recently is the Bearsden bathhouse, which was located in an annexe on the east side of the (no longer visible) Antonine fort, so I am able to correct the text entry where it says that “the fort would have been on the other side of the road” (p. 74), as the road is, in fact, the fort’s via principalis, which ran through the middle. Nor is it clear what the author means when he writes that “the annexe was located where the praetorium (the commander’s house) itself had originally been located to the site [side?] of the original granary”, as the granary lies to the west of the principia, whereas the annexe lies to the east. Finally, given the long-running controversy over Antonine occupation periods, it might have been wiser to say that two phases were identified in the fort, rather than “two periods of Roman occupation”.

I found some of the entries to be rather sparse and uninformative. For example, under Carpow, we are told that the fort “is sometimes referred to as a fortress” (it would be helpful to know why) and that “artefactual evidence indicates an occupation date of the early 3rd century, with some speculation that the site was under construction in AD 210” (speculation based on what?). It would have been helpful to point out, firstly, that, at 11 hectares, this is a very large fort (readers are nowhere informed that forts normally cover around 2 hectares and seldom exceed 5 hectares), and secondly, that large quantities of roofing tiles of the Sixth Legion have been found here, on which the legion has the epithet Britannica (“conqueror of the Britons”) (RIB 2460.71-74), probably echoing Septimius Severus’ title Britannicus, which he took in AD 210. Furthermore, coins of Severus (down to AD 207, presumably the year when they were shipped in bulk from Rome to pay the army) were found during the excavation of the site, which was demolished before it was fully occupied, hence the attribution to Severus’ northern campaigns of AD 208-211. Given the length of some other site entries, it’s disappointing that some of this evidence could not have been included.

Additional content

Supplementary material has been added here and there. The book opens with a “Brief Timeline of Roman Scotland”, which for some unknown reason chooses to specify Flavian governors but no others; Lollius Urbicus, for example, is absent. Agricola, we are told, “becomes governor, 77/78-83/84”, presumably hedging bets between an arrival in AD 77 and one in the following year, yet “Agricola secures Scotland as far north as the River Tay, AD 80”; according to Tacitus, this was Agricola’s third season, so, to maintain consistency, ought to be ‘AD 79/80’ here. The Battle of Mons Graupius is placed in AD 83/84 (so naturally, my book Mons Graupius AD 83 does not appear in the bibliography).

There are four pages on “Roman Fortifications and Structures” (note that, on the sketch plan of a typical fort, the left and right gates have been switched), and three pages on “Archaeological Techniques”, accompanied by a peculiar negative image of a section of Trajan’s Column, on which nothing whatsoever is discernible.

I found one or two minor matters irritating. The author consistently refers to Caledoni as the inhabitants of Caledonia, whereas ancient authors very clearly named them Caledones or Kalêdonioi, which would be Latinized as “Caledonii”. References are universally omitted, which makes fact-checking rather difficult. In the “Timeline”, we read that “An anonymous Roman text refers to both the Caledoni and the Picts, AD 310”; this must refer to the Panegyric of the Emperor Constantine (Pan. Lat. Vet. VI, 7.2), in which the writer recounts the achievements of the emperor’s father, Constantius Chlorus, vowing that “I shall not speak of the forests and swamps of the Caledones and the other Picts”, implying that, by this date, the Caledones were Picts. Other inaccuracies include the fact that the Chester lead pipe naming Agricola (RIB 2434.1) does not read “This lead pipe was made when Vespasian and Titus were Consuls for the ninth and seventh times respectively, and when Gnaeus Julius Agricola was governor of Britain”, but simply states the consular date and the fact that this was when Agricola was governor. And it is incorrect to say, of the well-known Verulamium inscription (RIB 3123), that “having analysed the use of certain words, epigraphy experts have dated the inscription to around AD 79”; in fact, it is so extremely fragmentary that, owing to gaps in Vespasian’s imperial titulature, it may refer either to AD 79 or to AD 81. Strangely, the emperor Antoninus Pius is consistently referred to as “Fulvius Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus”, which is an eccentric amalgam of his original name (Titus Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus) prior to adoption by Hadrian, with the one he held as emperor (Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Pius). Elsewhere, the via principalis is not “the street that leads from the porta praetoria to the principia”; strictly speaking, the titulus is not “a small bank of earth placed in front of the entrance to a camp”, but a ditch dug in this same position; and claviculae is not a singular noun (as on pp. 104-5). Finally, it is unusual to find Waterfield’s Oxford World’s Classics translation of Polybius listed as one of the two “key classical texts [that] inform archaeologists about Roman activity in Scotland” (the other is Rives’ revision of Mattingly’s Penguin translation of the Agricola).