The Ancients - Antonine Wall

Episode Date: July 12, 2020

In c.142 AD the Emperor Antoninus Pius ordered the construction of a new wall in Northern Britain. Situated between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde it stretched the neck of modern day central Scotland and was called the Antonine Wall. Although its ‘lifespan’ was relatively short-lived, this wall beyond ‘The Wall’ boasts a remarkable history. Archaeological discoveries continue to reveal more about this monumental structure and its accompanying features. From the terrible ‘lillia’ spike pits the Romans placed in front of the rampart to the Wall’s strong stone foundations.I was delighted to be joined by Andrew Tibbs to learn more about the Antonine Wall and why we must NOT call it the northernmost physical barrier of the Roman Empire. Andrew is the author of 'Beyond the Empire: A Guide to the Roman Remains in Scotland'.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hadrian's Wall is one of the most famous Roman sites in Britain, this physical frontier on a far-flung corner of the Roman Empire.

But it was not the only wall the Romans constructed in Britain. They built another, and this one even further north, that crossed the neck of Scotland between the Firth of Forth and the River Clyde. This was the Antonine Wall. To talk about this wall and its history I am chatting with Andrew Tibbs. Andrew has recently written a book all about the Romans in Scotland and no surprise the Antonine Wall forms a key part of that history. Enjoy. Andrew, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Now, first of all, the Antonine Wall in Roman Scotland, can we say that this wall is the northernmost physical barrier of the Roman Empire? most physical barrier of the Roman Empire? No, that would be very misleading. It's the northern most limit of the empire in the Antonine period, although they do fall back to Hadrian's Wall around about the time he dies. In the first century, we've got evidence of them going up

into Aberdeenshire. so just outside Inverness there are a couple of Roman camps there are some antiquarian accounts that indicate maybe they've gone even further than that and later when Septimius Severus becomes emperor he decides he's going to try and conquer Scotland it's a bit of a pattern with the emperors and he goes up now we don't know exactly how far he gets we know he's in Aberdeenshire we've got evidence of him setting up Roman camps up there we've got an account that says he stood on the edge of Britain and marveled at how the length and the days were completely different from back in Rome probably a a lot colder as well. We don't know where that is.

It's an account. It may be fabricated. I suspect he stood somewhere and said this. But that was also pushing the limit of the empire. And even in the Antonine period, the wall is this linear complex of a monument, complexes and has several components. But we do know they're further north.

So the Antonine Wall runs very roughly between Edinburgh and Glasgow, that sort of stretch of land. Up in Perth, at the fort there of Bertha, it's originally a first century fort. We have evidence from pottery that indicates it was reoccupied in the Antonine period. So in sort of Roman frontier studies, which is my field, the word frontier, limit of the empire, edge of the empire is a very fluid term. And that's it's not we mustn't get bogged down in this sort of linear thing so even Hadrian's wall is never the limit of the empire they they are occupying several forts north of Hadrian's

wall and we even have some evidence from Egypt that the limit of that frontier we've got soldiers that are posted a hundred odd miles beyond the frontier. So it's not a very big line in the sand for the Romans. So what examples of Roman conquest do we have? What examples do we have of the Romans in Scotland before the creation of the Antonine Wall? The first sort of invasion is in the Flavian period. We've got a great Roman text by a guy called Tastus and he writes about Agricola, who's a Roman general. He's the governor of Britain. He comes to effectively conquer the north. That's what he does. We have to be careful because it's a text. The archaeological evidence

sometimes doesn't lend itself to that. And indeed, beyond beyond this book we've only got two inscriptions that mention Agricola and those are both from St Albans and Chester but he comes north he builds a series of Roman camps and builds Roman forts we're told that he builds a series of fortifications between two estuaries scholars translate that as being the fourth and the clyde so there's a line of fortifications there the archaeological evidence isn't wholly supportive of that but it isn't wholly unsupportive of it and so he comes he builds all his roman troops appear to be withdrawn possibly because there's activity in germ Germany and they fall back to what is the the northernmost limits of the empire which is the Stain Gate and that's a Roman road that runs

more or less between almost between Newcastle and Bowness on Solway so Carlisle area we haven't uncovered all of that but that's that's the sort of limit there those fortifications withdraw from then hadrian comes along builds this big wall that a few people may have heard of there are a few outpost forts of that as i say um hadrian dies and then the next guy that comes along is um fulvius alias hadrianus antoninus augus Pius, so the Emperor Antonine. And he decides, probably because he's wanting a bit of military prestige, he's not got a huge military background, and he decides he's going to build a new frontier,

conquer Scotland, something that the great Augustus, sorry, the great Agricola, not Augustus, wrong period, the great Agricola didn't manage to do. So he starts reoccupying some of the southern fortifications, southern Scotland fortifications that Agricola had. And then he decides he's going to build a wall.

So we've got a bit of activity going on before Antonine comes along and starts building his wall. So now this wall is very different to Hadrian's wall in its construction. How is, what do we know, what has archaeology told us about how this wall was constructed? Yeah so like I said before wall is a bit misleading because it's a lot more complicated than that. So on the southern side, so in the sort of Roman zone, you have a road, the Military Way. That's the name that we've given to it. Then you have the rampart.

So that's the wall part. Then you have a slight rise, which is called the berm. And then you have a ditch. Now, that's the bit that's fundamentally sort of different from Hadrian's wall because it has a ditch in front but it also has the vallum behind and the vallum is a wide it's very difficult to describe it's a very very wide ditch with a flat bottom we don't really know the purpose of it we've not done huge analysis the Antonine wall doesn't have that it just has the ditch in front.

When they're building the ditch all that content is put on the front. That's to create what's called the outer mound. That is quite a rough and fairly inconsistent feature that we found. And then within that we have these pits which we call lilia. And these are sort of oval-shaped pits that would have had spikes in it, possibly covered over with leaves. So if you're the enemy, you're coming from the north, you're running ahead, you see a bit of boggy ground

or what looks like some rotting leaves, put your foot in it, and you go through thorns or massive spikes, giving the Romans a bit of time to chase, throw things at you and attack then you go over into the ditch the ditch has um this this nasty little feature romans are really great at uh incapacitating the the attacking enemy they've got these this little slot in the ground at the bottom of the ditch which we call an ankle breaker and basically it was so

steep you just went in and would have gone over and broken your ankle and then you're going up the mound while you've got Romans that are towering five six seven meters above you throwing things down on you so that that's what the Antonine wall is the rampart that the wall itself it differs from most of Hadrian's wall because Hadrian's Wall is built out of stone. It's very impressive. It may have had lime mortar on the front. It would have looked very intimidating to anybody approaching it. The Antonine Wall is built of turf, so it's a very different construction.

It's on a stone foundation. We know this. We've excavated this. You can still see's on a stone foundation. We know this, we've excavated this, you can still see bits of the stone foundation. In certain places they have little culverts, drainage ditches built through them so the water can flow through. And then it's turf slabs and they're just layered on top of each other and it would have been up probably to about a height, well the stone base itself is about 4.3 meters wide so it gives you an idea this is quite a big structure and then the height would have probably been around three meters now of course none of it survives for anything beyond

about 1.8 meters uh in places today but the the archaeologists that looked all this estimate around three meters now if you're also putting a walkway on top, we have no evidence for that and if you ask the archaeologists that deal with Hadrian's Wall was there a walkway on top, you get into hours and hours of debate on this because there's not evidence but then

if you're looking down on the enemy and you've got all these defensive features you must have been able to attack them somehow anyway, if there was a walkway, it would have taken the height up to probably around five meters so bearing in mind you've got a ditch and in places that's 12 meters wide some places it drops down to nine or six but you've got a depth of about three and a half to four meters in that so if you're down there you're about two meters high you're looking up at what's that five six and eight eight meters above you plus a roman that

would have been probably slightly under two meters tall so you know this is a very different beast from hadrian's wall hadrian's wall is i think it's the monument where they've had a bit more time to make it look a bit more intimidating, a bit more time to dig out the stone to do that. The Antonine Wall is very different. It was made of turf. It was probably thrown up a lot quicker. Perhaps stone wasn't as accessible as Hadrian's Wall, but you are talking a very different wall than that.

But still, these sound like absolutely formidable defenses for anyone trying to attack the wall to get past well do you think these defenses are they unanimous throughout along the whole stretch of the wall would they have been similar all the way along from west to east generally speaking yes from what, now, it's a turf wall that's eroded, it's been built on. You're talking about the industrial heartland of Scotland. It's where the Industrial Revolution kicks off in Scotland and certain parts of the wall. And a lot of it's destroyed because of this. But for the pockets of excavation we've done, it generally seems to be similar.

Now, this outer mound seems to vary in places we have these lilia pits now we've got great examples from a place called rough castle it's more or less the center of the wall and we've got one or two other examples um that recently come to light on hadrian uh sorry, on the Antonine Wall. And we've also got some examples from Hadrian's Wall down near Segedunum, which is at the eastern end of Hadrian's Wall. We've come across this.

Now, as I say, a lot of the wall has been developed and that gives us very limited insights into what's lying underneath all the modern development. Perhaps things like the Lilia exist more consistently. us as very limited insights into what's lying underneath all the modern development perhaps things like the lilia exist more consistently we've just not looked for them we've just not found them quite often excavations of the wall haven't gone that far in front of the wall it's just been little snapshots the military way as well that's another curious feature you would expect that to run the length of the wall but again we have pockets of it existing and other pockets of the road not existing so there was a

guy daryl roll from durham university he was looking for bits of the wall at kinneal which is in the eastern end on the fourth and he did geophysical survey and couldn't find any traces of what he thought the road was but again you're talking there about a medieval tower house that's developed had formal gardens it could be that all this has been eroded sections of the road the military way they're not what you traditionally view a roman road they're not quite cobbled and metaled and very formal and very nice looking that we we kind of see around the place it's slightly rougher than that so it could be a case of uh mistaken identity or as i say it's been eroded or we just haven't found it yet a lot again a lot of excavations don't go that far back

when they're they're digging bits of the wall they're not necessarily looking for the whole complex i mean you mentioned the military road just then so let's talk about let's dive into the logistics of the wall and how it was created do we know anything about how the romans would have maintained communications with forts along the length of the wall or and also i guess with communications with the legion stationed further south yeah i mean you've got the traditional sort of roman post where they would have sent messages back and forth on horseback and presumably that's part of the function of the military way um there's also some signaling now there's been a lot of extensive work by david wooliscroft on different frontiers,

and he's looked at the Antonine Wall. One of the problems with doing that sort of modelling on a site, the wall, the monument, is that it's, as I say, all this urban development. So it's not quite so easy to do signalling modelling because you don't necessarily know the topography and what other Roman sites towers would have featured as part of that. What we do know about the Antonine Wall and again similar to Hadrian's Wall is that there are outer fortifications that aren't attached to the wall and there were 17 forts located along the line of the wall. There's probably one or two more that are missing.

But beyond the wall, we've got a number of forts as well. So in the east, we've got Carradine. It's a small fort site. We've known about it since, I think, the 17th century. It's one of the only ones that we know has a name. We found an altar stone that names what is presumably the settlement outside it. But we think that's probably part of the whole wall complex because it's showing Antonine material. Going further east into the outskirts of Edinburgh, there's Cramond, which is a Roman fort.

It's got a village on it now, but pockets of excavation have indicated an Antonine date for that site it's right on the coast there's there's incredibly limited evidence of a harbour there but again a lot of it has been developed in the 1690s a man called Robert Sybald reported that there was part of a harbour that was believed to be Roman there so he'd found some cement mortar, lime mortar and other bits and pieces. Further east from that, on the other side of Edinburgh, is another Roman fort, a place called Inveresque. It's another river site that's on the Forth and on a river itself. Again, evidence has shown that's Antonine in date, but there's no evidence of a harbour there, although what a harbour would have looked like, whether wooden structures would survive to the modern period,

given the underwater conditions, we don't quite know. So that's on the eastern side. We've got several fortifications, probably part of a supply chain heading down the coast, probably towards South Shield, somewhere like that. On the other side of Scotland, over the Glasgow end, you have the River Clyde. That's a very important river.

You can get quite far inland with that. It's what made Glasgow the second city of the Empire. It's such a major waterway. The Antonine Wall runs slightly to the north of that, but on the opposite side from the end of the wall so the wall ends at a place called Old Kilpatrick the fort there is now covered by a bus depot over the opposite side of the river is another Antonine Fort

we've not really done much work on it it's called White Moss a place called Bishopton and then you've got the land sort of curves round and heads southwards above the Clyde there we've got a number of fortlets one called Lurgmoor

and another called Outerwards they're connected by roads they indicate an Antonine date of origin for those sites and they probably were acting partly as signal stations so that someone's coming up the coast can be seen quite far from there because you're talking about being on the hills above the river Clyde, the Firth of Clyde and the Irish Sea and you've also got a tower

that would have been about 10 meters high on those sites so you've got great signaling capacity. We've not done huge amounts of work on that. We've not done modern modelling on that. But they would have been the sort of outer limits of the Antonine Wall. And it's very similar to Hadrian's Wall on the eastern coast, because you've got all the Cumbrian forts, Hard Knot and the other ones to the north, that lead up to the end of Hadrian's Wall. And you've also got a series of towers that were probably used for signalling that go down the coast there.

We don't really know the extent of Roman activity in the east of Scotland when you get out to the coast. There are some very old antiquarian accounts, so 300 or 400 years old, of Roman material coming up in a place called Largs. And it appears that this road going over the moors heads towards Largs and then further down the coast we've got some evidence from another place called Ardrossan but of course these have now got settlements on them and very little comes

out but there was some pottery found I think in the 1960s from Largs found on the beach which is only recently in a couple of past couple of years been dated to the Antonine period so it's a good indication there may be something going on but we need to do a heck of a lot more work. I look forward to seeing that work in due time That was remarkable what you were saying

though, it sounds like a lot of the Antonine forts, especially near the coast, were situated along rivers Yeah, I mean the whole lot of the Antonine forts, especially near the coast, were situated along rivers. Yeah, I mean, the whole construction of the Antonine Wall, it's on the narrowest bit of land between the east and west coasts of Scotland. So you've got in the east, so the Edinburgh side and Bowness is where we think the wall ends. And there's a modern town there. But there's indication that's probably the terminus of that,

that end of the wall. That's on the south shore of the Forth. The Forth comes inland and then it heads northwards and it connects with some of the first century fortifications. And then on the other coast, you've got the Clyde, which comes in, heads south by Glasgow, and that heads quite far south into Scotland and then between those two you've got the River Kelvin now this

is the industrial heartland of Scotland as I said we've got the fourth Clyde canal which runs between the fourth more or less near Bowness and then we have the canal going over to Old Kilpatrick where the wall ends so a lot of this has changed river levels it's damaged the environment the canal itself cuts through the Antonine wall three or four times and that so a lot of what we've got we have to piece together it's a lot different from Hadrian's Wall which is a sort of straight line of big wall that you can't really miss and even when it's disappeared you roughly know where it's heading but a lot of the fortifications are built more or less respecting the topography so you've got hills to the south the wall kind of follows that line then you have the valley which is the fourth and the Clyde valleys and then you go into the sort of hillier line then you have the valley which is the fourth and the clyde valleys

and then you go into the sort of hillier territory as you sort of head towards the highlands and the geological fault line and that but they're built in the best place rather than respecting the rivers completely although the big rivers are being used presumably for supply troop movement that sort of thing okay so built more as in for the best place i guess against people further north and so these people who are stationed on the wall for this purpose who were the roman soldiers who were stationed on the antonine wall like anywhere else in the empire you're talking about people that that came from across the the empire um probably beyond and that we haven't really found any cemeteries on the antonine wall so we don't really know about the individuals too much um we've got a couple of gravestones here and there a couple of altars

um we also have things like the distance slab so they're quite useful so these are markers that individual cohorts groups of soldiers would build a section of the wall and then have a commemorative stone placed on it saying that we, whoever they are, built X number of miles or feet of Roman wall so we have little insights like that what we really need to do is find a cemetery and do a whole scale excavation because the dating you can tell from not just the objects and the materials but also from the the bones and

the remains themselves tell you a whole amount about where people came from what their diet was whether they were eating things locally or bringing food in. But you mentioned they're coming from all across the Empire. Does that suggest that these were auxiliaries serving on this frontier rather than the hard-hitting legionaries? We know the legionaries were constructing the wall. We've got evidence of that from the distance labs. We've also got evidence, as I say, from people coming in in that.

And it was traditionally an empire to bring people from different parts. So we know that Batasians were serving on the wall. I think there were Syrian archers. There's evidence of those from the gravestones. So I think auxiliaries and legionaries would have been serving on the wall. Just looking at that and the actual archaeological evidence, if you want to find evidence of those individuals, you know, the belongings of individuals, we don't have much of that on the wall. It's not like Vindolanda where you've gone through

12 different phases of fortification. It's waterlogged. You've got a lot of preservation. The Antonine Wall tends to be a lot of rescue archaeology in different forms and that. And we find out great things from those, but it's not always a sort of very more relaxed pace that you would have at somewhere like Vindolanda where you target this area and you keep going for several years

and we just aren't getting that on the Antonine Wall. Does the archaeology that's been uncovered does any of it suggest that the wall was ever under serious attack during its occupation? It's a good question and it's not something that shows up necessarily in the archaeology. You're looking for either human remains in and around the wall, maybe from a cemetery, which we haven't excavated. We haven't got any of those located. So you're looking for those sort of remains

that would imply there has been some sort of attack or people have been injured. The wall being breached, because it doesn't survive in its original form, its original height anywhere, we haven't really got much evidence of anything like that. Now, it seems logical to suggest that that's a very strong possibility, but you have to bear in mind this wall was only occupied

for maybe 30, 40 years, if that. It's not like Hadrian's wall which is more or less continuously occupied for large parts of the Roman period for Hadrian's wall we've got a lot of evidence textual evidence that indicates the wall was breached in that we don't really have that in the Antonine wall I think there are one or two accounts that imply a wall was breached but more likely to be Hadrian's Wall because the Antonine Wall we think wasn't being occupied at those times. So I guess that goes on to the question as you say 40 years after its construction it is abandoned as like a Roman generation as it were. Do we know, once again, sorry, a very difficult

question with the archaeology, but do we know why the wall really was abandoned? No, we don't. I don't think there's anything in the textual evidence that really indicates. There's a lot of theory that, again, trouble elsewhere, troops withdrawn meant a fallback. that again, trouble elsewhere, troops withdrawn, meant a fallback. So we know the Antonine Wall was built around 142 AD. So a couple of years after Antoninus Pius comes to the throne, we know that around 158 AD, Hadrian's Wall is beginning to be refurbished.

The fortification has been redone. We have some epigraphic evidence, some inscriptions that say, so-and-so rebuilt this, tidied this up, that sort of thing. We believe, generally, that the Antonine Wall was probably abandoned around 163 to 165

AD. Slightly controversial numbers there. It's a couple of years after Antoninus Pius dies. But we also have some evidence that the wall was reoccupied again later in the period. So it's occupied about 142 to 155. But certain pockets of forts also indicate a reoccupation around 158 so at the time Hadrian's Wall is being sort of refurbished and that but again we've not done huge amounts of modern excavation a lot of our dating is limited a lot of it is based on samian ware and coins which is great but that's not necessarily

given added weight from rigorous scientific testing from dendrochronology or radiocarbon dating and that's really because again there's been a lot of urban urban led development and that when that's caused us to excavate the sites i mean it's a remarkable amount of land just the size of it you know to retreat from the antonine wall all the way back to hadrian's wall is that like sacrificing most of modern day scotland southern scotland southern scotland yes it would be and bearing in mind that there is some evidence of activity in some of the forts beyond the Antonine Wall, so Perth, the fort at Bertha up there. Again, a lot of this dating is based on pottery and you can say the pottery was in use in these periods. It doesn't necessarily mean that there were people

occupying it there. They may have been there longer. It may have been someone later, someone indigenous coming and settling on a site that finds moves the pottery around so are datings not as precise as as we would like because regarding pottery in the i guess the civilian population we know on hadrian's wall that there were a lot of civilian settlements which spring up around the forts dot along that frontier yeah and you mentioned that there's one on the eastern side of the Antonine Wall. I mean, how much evidence do we have for civilian settlements emerging on the Antonine Wall alongside the forts?

Again, very little. Partly because we've not done the excavation. Some sites we have surveyed, like Carradine, which is the site we were talking about and we've done quite a bit of survey there we've not done huge amounts of excavation but there's definite evidence of a settlement there. Further eastwards at Crammond which isn't on the fort but dates to that period there is a settlement there we've done a lot of work on that and Inveresk which is the next site further east

which is also Antonine we've got what looks like quite a complicated uh several periods of activity I think there are two periods of Antonine activity there and it's a settlement that expands and grows on the wall itself we've got very little but that's more probably because we've not been looking for it, we've not found it, we've not accidentally dug it up and excavated, but we have quite a lot of altars that appear on the wall. And whilst the military has a lot, you do have some concentrations, places like Croy Hill has quite an impressive collection of Roman altars.

Some of those are military. Equally, some of those could apply to a civilian settlement that are living nearby. So I think there's a lot more to be discovered, but we haven't got much there. But as we see with Hadrian's Wall and other forts and other periods, there is a supply chain of goods and drinking dens and all the things that go with that,

entertainment, that follow the military. It's where the money is. These soldiers have their pay, they need to spend it, and people come along and provide those services. Interestingly, though, if you go back to the first century, the Flavian period in Scotland, we have no evidence of any civilian settlements outside the fort, so no strong evidence and that they are

likely to be there again we've been a bit limited in our roman studies in scotland that we tend to stick to the forts i'm not much beyond those um which is big weakness it's something we're trying to address in research agendas but we're just lacking again anybody outside those forts but you come across there's one site i don't think it's been published yet but one site i've worked on where we've been finding bits of pottery outside we find uh shapes in the geophysics it looks like there's a settlement but we need to excavate it before we can say this is a roman period settlement as contemporary with the fort and yeah there's material evidence coming up that suggests there's a civilian population there so the roman archaeology in scotland today you said it's been focused quite a bit on the forts and of course the crisis at the moment kind of

quite a bit on the standstill but so what's the future direction that you and the Scottish archaeology team are looking at at the moment? Well, we're moving. We've had something called SCARF, which is the Scottish Archaeological Research Framework. It came out, I think, just over a decade, maybe 15 years ago. Brilliant document.

It kind of went through all the periods of history in scotland and looked at the strengths and weaknesses and what we need to be looking at we are now moving or we have been moving um i think things are probably a bit on hold at the moment uh to more regional frameworks so what's happening on a more local level and that's a great thing that empowers local communities reflects what people want to to be aware of in the local area and it works a lot closer with local groups and societies and museums than the original research framework did a lot of scottish archaeology certainly in the roman period is now worked on by archaeological units because it is developer led developer funded historic environment scotland do research there's some great roman

romanists in there scotland plays we're lucky enough to have so many experts people like rebecca jones and david breeze and law Kepi. Lawrence has done a lot of the work on the wall. We're lucky to have these people at the forefront of archaeological research. We do a lot of cooperation in Scotland. We work on the frontiers. Roman frontier studies, we're trying to get more global in that. We're trying to look beyond the Scottish boundary or Hadrian's Wall or Britain. So we're trying to expand those areas, but with it being developer-led, you're very much limited to what the developers are working on

that they find out. There's very limited Scottish Roman archaeological research done in Scotland. There are very, very few people doing it at universities in scotland i'm at durham university newcastle do some stuff edinburgh do one or two bits i think glasgow do one or two bits it's not brilliant we need to be doing a lot more of that but the units the archaeological units the developer funded archaeology is coming up with some great stuff at the moment so we found um in the past four or five years in aberdeen um they've been building a new bypass they've discovered a

new roman camp because it's been discovered in the past 20 years and it's been excavated they're doing a lot of radiocarbon dating dates to the first century this site it's one of the curious roman camps and because it doesn't have any ramparts so it doesn't appear to have any defenses um it's a site called mill timber um the other end of the country in ayrshire and east scotland they've been building new school buildings and they found another roman camp that dates to the first century and as i said earlier on we don't know much about what's happening in the east of Scotland and any of the Roman periods. So those are coming out with some great stuff.

But moving forward, we need to be looking at trying to fill in some of the gaps, some of our knowledge and that. So what are they doing with rivers? How are they coming into Scotland? How long are they actually staying? We need to revisit a lot of the dating for the sites. We have over 150 Roman camps in Scotland. It's the greatest concentration in anywhere in the empire.

But a lot of those we haven't dated. And a lot of them are being lost because Roman camps generally aren't as well preserved because they tend to be a turf rampart in a field and they get ploughed out with time. So we need to be surveying these sites. We need to be using modern techniques. We do geophysics, certainly when we're doing developer-led stuff,

but for all these other sites that aren't developer-led that are being eroded by natural erosion and agriculture, we need to be getting out and surveying those we need to be recording what they are as i sort of said earlier a lot of these were found 50 60 years ago they've never been revisited um things like lidar that the laser scanning we need to do a lot more of that and it's a lot more affordable and a lot more achievable now because you can shove lidar equipment on a drone uh shove it up and you've done it in half an hour of course what you just mentioned now and with scotland being this unstable frontier of the roman empire the military archaeology of the roman period is it sounds like it is abundant, but it's just finding it. Yeah, I mean, as we know, we've got over 300 Roman sites in Scotland.

Some of those are probable, they seem quite likely, but we need to excavate. Some of those we definitely know about, and others are a bit sketchy, but we need to rule them out. out and others are a bit sketchy but we need to rule them out. The archaeology is there. Roman camps have traditionally shown very little in the archaeological record. You've got your defences and then it would have been tents inside so it's very difficult to show that. You know, tent posts don't tend to show up in the archaeological record because they're only occupied for a brief period. They're not leaving around a lot of material cultures. Only if they break a pot, they shove it in the ditch

and then we find it later if we're targeting that area. But the archaeology is there. We just need to do a lot more of it. We excavated a site called Kintore in Aberdeenshire. It's a Roman camp and it was on a little village and it was being subjected to a lot of development so we excavated some like 75% of that site

it's the most thoroughly excavated Roman camp in the world we found out so much from that because it's taking place in recent years we've been able to do radiocarbon dating so we know it's occupied in the first century there's indications that severus comes back and he camps there or in the vicinity

so it's there but it's finding the time the money which is the important thing they always tell you if you go to vindalanda every shoe they find costs them something like 200 pound to conserve that so you know you've got to have the money in the backup to be able to excavate these big things which is why developer-led funding is is the way we're going in scotland um but research excavation we need to be targeting sites we need to revisit as i say all theseodd Roman camps and get them surveyed, then we need to think about targeted excavation. Antonine Wall, we're quite lucky because it was visited by antiquarians, so we've got a lot of old 200-300-old accounts

of what it looked like. You don't tend to get that in many other parts of Scotland. You mentioned his name just there, Severus, and it would be amiss of me not to mention him or us to talk about him even briefly. With the Antonine Wall, now because the Antonine Wall, we said it's abandoned near the end of the second century,

but that is definitely not the end of Roman Scotland, is it? No, you've got Antonine Wall abandoned, Hadrian's Wall reoccupied. It probably still has a footprint in southern Scotland. And then you get Timius Severus, who comes over... He's emperor around 180-something, I think. I can't quite remember.

But around 208, he comes over to Britain and decides, I've got these two sons. They're going to both inherit the empire they need to do a military campaign let's go take Scotland it must be easy to do because no one's ever achieved it and he bases himself at York which is the big legendary fortress with some indication that when he's in York they do some expanding of the buildings, develop it, and then the whole army moves forward north. We have a lot of large, I think it's around 65 acre, 55 to 65 acre camps in Scotland. And we believe those date to that period because he's bringing such a big force.

We have a camp in the borders called St. Leonard's. It used to be the biggest known roman camp in the world um it's now the second biggest because there's a bigger one in romania apparently by about half an acre or something but they they march northwards as i say um we know he stands at the end of britain and and talks about how how much difference in light there is from Rome. We can plot, we think from the camp sizes, sometimes artefacts we can date size, but they're going up to Aberdeenshire at least.

And then he gets, well, he's quite ill and infirm when he's campaigning. He's carried about the place on a sort of set and chair thing. Returns to York and he drops dead. I think if you go into York Minster underneath, there's a little plaque on the wall where he's believed to have dropped dead.

So he drops dead and then the sons start a civil war and everybody leaves Scotland. And that is where you think it would end. We've got a couple of accounts that imply there may have been later campaigns. Now, we don't have anything in the archaeological record, but then no one's ever really been looking for this later material.

There's been no scientific dating of these sites. But we've got, I think it's over 100 roman camps in scotland which are undated so we need to again as i say do more work on those camps because we might be able to match up these later incursions into scotland but we don't know anything other than they went to scotland sort of thing so we've nothing showing up in the archaeological record but But Scotland seems to have been quite an attractive place for them to keep coming and campaigning. We've got three major campaigns and other periods when they're coming in. Yes, because isn't it possible that Constantine the Great

actually campaigned in Scotland just before he was crowned emperor? There's a couple of activities, I think, in the third and fourth centuries that imply that. There's one or two other people as well that's indicated they come north. The thing we've got to remember is Scotland is a geopolitical entity that's created in the medieval period. The Roman texts generally say Britannannia and at that period Britannia well after the first century Britannia grows shrinks and grows and shrinks and chopped up in various different ways so when they say they're heading north we're never quite sure where north is usually it's beyond a wall they say we're never quite sure which wall they're talking about. And this last question, you mentioned there the antiquarians

the records that they have of the Antonine Wall. What legacy does the Antonine Wall leave on Northern Britain, what now is the central part of Scotland? And you said we have written records from a few centuries in the Middle Ages and the Age of Revolution.

Yeah, I mean the Antonine Wall, like Hadrian's Wall, it continues after. It stops being a Roman monument and it becomes this sort of localised entity and of course in Scotland it divides the country in half. So much so, when they come to start building

the canals in the Industrial Period they're following the line of the wall. So we're lucky, again, like Hadrian's Wall, we've got these antiquarians which decide they're off to go walkies along the wall and chart it. We have Robert Sybald, who he's around 1690s.

He starts charting it. We've got Horsley, who I think's the early 18th century. Alexander Gordon, he's 1720s. We've got Horsley, who I think is the early 18th century. Alexander Gordon, he's 1720s. We've got quite a few. We've got William Roy. He goes on to found what becomes the Ordnance Survey. He's a military surveyor. He's sent into Scotland after the first Jacobite uprising.

Sorry, it's the second Jacobite uprising. He comes into Scotland to start building roads and he surveys a lot of the Roman monuments various letters where there are accounts taken so it's hugely important that

we've got these accounts because as I say the industrial revolution really starts you've got George Stevenson doing testing at Coneil early railway testing in the centre you've got near Falkirk a place called Cairn that's where the ironworks build and develop and that's next to the wall

it may have been a Roman harbour at one point we've got a monument called Arthur's Oon, which I won't go into, but that's situated in that location. That gets destroyed because of the Industrial Revolution, where they take the stone to build a dam. We've got

all this going on, so a lot of it disappears at that time. We've also got a lot of agricultural works that happen around the times of the napoleonic wars they start bringing in more drainage becoming more efficient at farming and agriculture is the big agricultural revolution taking place and a lot of that damages the monuments they start plowing the sites out and things like that so it's a huge period in this part of scotland Going back earlier than that,

we have various accounts from... Bede mentions the Wall, so the Venerable Bede, he's around the 5th century, I think. Sorry, he's not 5th century, he's 730s from Historia Ecclesiastica. We've got other accounts coming later. We have Nennius,

who is a biographer of one of the saints. He talks about different aspects of the wall. Scotland has historian John of Ford Dunn. He comes around in the 1300s. He starts recording about the wall, does a proper history of it. So this monument features in Scotland all the time it never really becomes

a geopolitical boundary. Hadrian's Wall does and even today people still think it's the Scottish English border which is more or less rubbish there's few places where it comes close near Carlisle

but people see that as a boundary Queen Elizabeth I wants to rebuild and reoccupy Hadrian's Wall you come into, even in the Independence referendum a couple of years ago you've got newspaper cartoons doing that is the limit

of Scotland and England so the Antonine wall never really becomes that and i suspect that's because it's a turf monument and by the time you're getting into the medieval period it's eroding the river boundaries are more important in the medieval period than the antonine wall but but it still plays a huge part in life and then, the antiquarians from 1690s really onwards start looking at it as this wondrous Roman monument and trying to understand it, trying to understand who built it and things like that. Fascinating.

Andrew, the book is called? It is Beyond the Empire, Guide to the Roman Remains of Scotland. Fantastic. Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Thank you.