The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (12 page)

The huge fort was being constructed in the territory of the Caledonians and, when the news came from Dacia, the native kings will have understood why the XX Legion had to depart immediately. With so much activity and the intensive contact with native communities that this implies, information will have flowed and the military intelligence amongst the Caledonians improved. The notion that Rome operated a separate, much more sophisticated world unintelligible to native elites is often too readily and thoughtlessly assumed. Southern Britain had been occupied for forty years, some northern kings had become subjects of Rome and knowledge of and contact with the Empire is likely to have been much more intense and regular than surviving records allow.

Rome was suddenly distracted by the flaring of invasion from Dacia but, after the slaughter at Mons Graupius, the kings of the north are unlikely to have entertained any notion of taking a military advantage. Nevertheless the abrupt abandonment of so much work is still striking. In order to bring stone from nearby quarries inconveniently sited at the top of rising ground, the Romans built a sophisticated road system. At a fork at the foot of the incline empty ox-drawn wagons were led up a steeper gradient while moving down the other, more gently sloping road were fully laden wagons. There was always a danger that beasts could be pushed by a great weight of building stone and crushed. It was an elegant solution. But one day the wagons stopped rolling, the roads were left empty and the stone stayed in the quarries. Once equipment had been loaded instead and the legion and its auxiliaries formed up in marching order and anything useful to an enemy which could not be carried away south had been set ablaze, the Empire moved south of the Tay. Then as now, soldiers were used to sudden changes of plan and, as the smoke plumed over the building site by the riverbank, few will have given all that useless work a backward glance

When archaeologists dug the site of Inchtuthil in 1950, they came across a remarkable find. In a deep pit, 750,000 iron nails had been carefully concealed. The commanders of the XX
Valeria Victrix knew the value of so much smelted iron to Caledonian blacksmiths and were unwilling to leave such handy war materials behind. Too heavy to carry away, all of those nails were needed for the new fortress, probably marked on Ptolemy’s map as ‘Victoria’. Perhaps the soldiers also thought that, one day, they might return but it would need to be soon if the location of the pit was not to be forgotten.

When the legion and their auxiliaries marched out of Inchtuthil in
AD
87, they probably did not really believe that they were leaving behind a serviceable military installation which would be of use to their enemies. While there is later evidence of native use of Roman forts along Hadrian’s Wall after its abandonment in the early fifth century, it was usually partial. These huge facilities were designed on a different scale, intended for use by an incoming occupying force and not suitable for people who already lived around them. When native kings or warlords occupied the sites at Birdoswald, Housesteads or South Shields, they used only the parts of the fortifications which had remained intact – gatehouses, corner towers and the like. It is very unlikely that the empty acres of Inchtuthil attracted new occupants after
AD
87 except perhaps in those places where sheep and cattle could be handily corralled.

Rome’s roads were more durable and useful. They were also very new and different. Before Agricola and other generals came north, native travellers who used long-range routes preferred good ground, avoided the marshlands by rivers and in valley bottoms or steep climbs and preferred a long way round if it was safer and they could remain dry-shod. In the south, native trackways followed the tops of gentle ridges where the drainage was good. Military imperatives and the availability of thousands of soldiers to work on them drove Roman roads through the landscape with what might have seemed like brutal directness. Cutting straight across farmland, dividing holdings and bringing traffic where there had been none before, their impact must initially have been startling.

Dere Street was no narrow artery. So that two, wheeled vehicles travelling in opposite directions could pass, it was 7.7
metres wide on average and the metalling or bottoming was usually more than 30 centimetres deep. The principles of road building had been refined by centuries of experience. The surface was not flat but had a pronounced crest in the middle; this road mound was known as the
agger
. Drains ran on either side collecting water running down from the road mound. Bad weather was the greatest enemy and once a puddle was established, wheels splashed the gravel out of it and, if not repaired, it grew ever larger. Archaeologists have discovered that where one puddle was not repaired quickly, cart wheels bounced out of it and created a series of potholes of decreasing but destructive size in a straight line after it. Roads were routinely repaired after the winter rains, otherwise they would soon have disintegrated beyond effective use. While Roman roads were well maintained, they were not universally excellent. At the fort of Vindolanda a letter dated around
AD
100 was found with a comment that travel was not advisable ‘
dum viae malae sunt
’, ‘while the roads are bad’.

The visual impact was also striking. Not only were the straight roads a new and unnatural colour in the landscape, they took up a great deal of space. On either side lay open pits where road stone had been quarried (and where road menders could find more if needed) and, beyond them, the scrub and woodland had been cut back where possible. Roman commanders worried about ambush. In the upper Clyde Valley, near the small fort at Crawford, not far from the modern A74, the old road avoids the flat ground by the banks of the river and instead climbs up a hill to the north. The reason for all the additional labour – and making the soldiers sweat – was fear of ambush. The route by the Clyde was flat but it passed through a narrow valley and native warriors could easily have surprised a Roman column from the higher ground.

There are more than 400 miles of Roman roads in Scotland and they helped shape history long after the fall of the Western Empire. Armies continued to march on them in both directions. When Edward II of England came north before his fateful encounter with Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn, he led his soldiers along Dere Street. As the road climbed up through the
Cheviot Hills and the English army slowed, it was said that it was strung out for more than twenty miles.

The old road had more peaceful uses and the section from Melrose to Edinburgh was known as ‘the Malcolmisrode’ after the medieval Scottish kings of that name. Also recorded as ‘the Via Regis’, it carried a good deal of mercantile traffic and was kept in decent condition. Up on the windblown wastes of Soutra Hill, about a mile west of the modern A68, a long run of Dere Street is still clearly visible. What brings it out of the heather and bracken are the dead straight lines of the ditching on either side.

There are also hints that Dere Street acted as a political boundary for one of the more shadowy kingdoms of the Dark Ages. Calchvynydd was said to be based at Roxburgh Castle near Kelso in the sixth century and its territory extended westwards between the Tweed and the Teviot as far as the line of the road.

Once Lollius Urbicus had refortified Trimontium, he led his army north to the Firth of Forth. Antoninus Pius needed a blaze of glory, something triumphant to give the city of Rome and all of its factions and interests the sense that not only was he capable as a commander-in-chief but he could also expand the empire. Hadrian had made himself deeply unpopular with his policy of retrenchment. ‘What could not be held would be given up’ made good military sense but was bad politics. Rome’s ruling class of senatorial families and those who aspired to it had grown wealthy on the expansion of the empire and, in the defeat and subjugation of barbarians, there had been prestige as well as profit. When, at the beginning of his reign, Hadrian had ordered the murder of four alleged plotters – senators and men of consular rank – he had alienated the Roman elite and never been forgiven for it. It was one compelling reason for him to spend eleven years of his long reign out of the city, touring the provinces and the imperial frontier. Antoninus Pius was determined on a different course and so Lollius Urbicus was ordered north to resume conquest, what had been seen as Rome’s divine mission.

Hadrian’s Wall was abandoned and replaced with what has become known as the Antonine Wall. Much shorter, it ran for
thirty-nine miles from Old Kilpatrick on the Clyde to Bo’ness on the Firth of Forth. Work appears to have begun in the east, probably in the spring of 142. Less elaborate than the wall a hundred miles to the south, it took only two years to complete.

Once surveyors had pegged out the line, making sure the wall took the commanding ground at every opportunity, soldiers dug out shallow foundations. Having laid a stone footing with kerbs on either side to prevent spreading, they then built it up to height with turfs. These were large and Trajan’s Column shows men carrying them on wooden backpacks. After it had been topped with a wooden palisade and the turf had dried and settled, the wall stood at thirteen feet high. A ditch was dug on the northern side to make it seem more massive and, to the south, a military road ran behind. Beyond the ditch
lilia
were hidden. Small pits filled with sharpened stakes and covered over with brush, these vicious traps show that the wall was certainly seen as a defensive rampart expecting trouble from the north. With seventeen forts and about forty fortlets built along its length, the wall amounted to a densely packed and formidable garrison. The Romans did not often waste resources and some of their more peaceful frontiers could be very thinly manned. Lollius Urbicus packed the Antonine Wall with soldiers because beyond it, and also perhaps behind it, lay substantial threats.

Either before or after completion of the huge building project, the peoples of the Clyde Valley were subdued. Coins commemorating a Roman victory were minted in 142 or 143. On Ptolemy’s map the Damnonii, sometimes Dumnonii, are marked as the kindred controlling the Clyde Valley and the lands around the shores of the Firth. One of their principal strongholds was on the summit of the remarkable Alt Clut (Dumbarton Rock) which rises almost sheer on the north-western coast of the estuary.

The Damnonii share their name with Dumnonia, a Celtic kingdom of the south-west of England. Its likely derivation might have arisen out of the geology of both areas. Damnonii probably means ‘the Deepeners’ – those who deepen the earth, miners. Coal could be dug from heughs or outcrops in several
places along the Clyde and in Devon and Cornwall tin was mined and a lucrative trade created around its production.

No record of a campaign against the Damnonii survives, only the conquest of their territory. Their dramatic acropolis at Dumbarton Rock is immensely old and it has the longest documented history of any stronghold in Britain. Its modern name derives from Dun Breatainn, Atlantic Celtic for ‘the Fort of the Britons’, while the older name of Altcluit is a Continental Celtic form for ‘the Rock of the Clyde’. By 144 and the completion of the great wall which reached the Clyde only three miles to the east, the ancient fortress was one of the northernmost bastions of the Empire.

The effect of the Antonine Wall must have been dramatic, jaw-dropping. Warfare between the kindreds had certainly had political effects and no doubt been destructive and bloody but the defeat of one war band by another had not altered the landscape in the way the legions had. Landward movement between north and south was severely restricted and tightly controlled, as was any unauthorised activity in the military zone along its length. Since its location depended on strategic imperatives and these ignored everything else, many farms were either destroyed or made very difficult to manage. Pastoral societies must have the ability to move flocks and herds around and relieve grazing from too much pressure.

But it was not destined to last. After only twenty years, the Antonine Wall was abandoned as the imperial frontier retreated south to Hadrian’s Wall. Under the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, retrenchment once again became Roman policy. It is likely that the more vulnerable turf wall was cast down by those who were affronted by it and resented its presence and who wished to move freely again. But what remained, and is still the most obvious relic of the Antonine Wall, was the defensive ditch in front of the rampart. At Rough Castle and at Watling Lodge and Callendar Park in Falkirk, there are stretches where it is very impressive. Apart from historians, few knew it as the Antonine Wall until present times. The ditch appears to have conferred its
earlier name.
Greim
is Atlantic Celtic for ‘a bite’ and the wall became known as ‘the Grimsdyke’ as though men with mattocks and shovels had taken a bite out of the ground. Sometimes written as Graham’s Dyke, this version probably came from Greumaich, the Gaelic equivalent of ‘Graham’.

Although Scotland south of the Forth–Clyde line was part of the Empire for only twenty years, this brief period of Romanisation may have had more than a passing effect. With so much left behind, so much military architecture obvious in the landscape – two walls as boundaries, thirty forts and other substantial installations and long stretches of roads – there is a growing sense that the kings of this part of the north saw themselves differently.

No record of the diplomacy undertaken by Lollius Urbicus and his officers survives but, if Antoninus Pius intended southern Scotland to become part of the empire, discussions and negotiations with native kings and their counsellors must have taken place. Rome was always anxious to avoid the waste of men and materials if accommodations could be found. Peace was cheaper and examples from all over the empire illustrate Roman willingness to absorb new peoples by treaty and agreement. On Traprain Law in East Lothian, one of the power centres of Votadinian kings, significant finds of second-century Roman artefacts have turned up. These may well have been gifts, encouragements to the kindreds of the south-east to remain friendly.