Scotland: The Story of a Nation

Chapter 2 THE ROMANS IN SCOTLAND

A long time since, eighteen hundred years ago and more, there was a brave and warlike people, called the Romans, who undertook to conquer the whole world, and subdue all countries, so as to make their own city of Rome the head of all the nations upon the face of the earth. And after conquering far and near, at last they came to Britain, and made a great war upon the inhabitants, called the British, or Britons, whom they found living there. The Romans, who were a very brave people, and well armed, beat the British, and took possession of almost all the flat part of the island, which is now called England, and also of a part of the south of Scotland.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER I

From the road it looks like a genteel suburban garden, discreetly protected by freshly-painted black iron railings, with a small gate inviting access; but for those who take the trouble to stop and enter, it is a magic garden indeed. Inside is one of the most delightful little monuments in the care of Historic Scotland – the excavated remains of the Roman Bath-House at Bearsden, near Glasgow.

A weather-proof interpretive panel mounted on a solid stone pedestal provides a clear and graphic account of what the visitor can see among the manicured lawns: the walls, stone floors and hypocaust of an elaborate and well-appointed sauna for the small cavalry detachment which garrisoned one of the forts on the Antonine Wall.

The Antonine Wall was a solid and continuous barrier which stretched across the narrowest part of Scotland between the estuaries of the Forth and the Clyde – the Forth – Clyde isthmus. It ran for sixty kilometres (forty Roman miles) along the high ground bordering the southern edge of the central valley of Scotland, from Bridgeness at Bo’ness, west of Edinburgh on the south coast of the Firth of Forth, to Old Kilpatrick west of Glasgow on the north bank of the Clyde. It was started around the year AD 140 on the order of the Emperor Antoninus Pius. It took four years to build, and consisted of a massive stone-based rampart of turf, some 3.4 metres high, topped by a timber breastwork to protect the Roman sentries on patrol; the turf came from a wide and deep defensive ditch which was dug on the northern side of the wall. The wall was studded along its length with forts and beacon-platforms, linked by a road running behind the wall known as the Military Way. Because of its turf construction, and the sprawl of modern urban development, little of it has survived; but the remains of some of the forts, and a few short stretches of the wall, are still visible at places like Watling Lodge (ditch), Rough Castle and Seabegs Wood (rampart, ditch and Military Way), between Falkirk and Bonny-bridge.

In a sense the Antonine Wall was as much a customs barrier as a defensive wall; it was a means of controlling trade and traffic moving into and out of the Roman province, as well as a base for military patrols into the native territory to the north. One of those frontier posts was Bearsden.

The fort at Bearsden has long since been engulfed by the tide of neat housing of this douce suburb on the north of Glasgow; the houses now sitting on the site overlook the Bath-House which lay in a large annexe attached to the wall. The legionaries coming off sentry duty were able to choose between a plunge in the Cold Room and Bath (Frigidarium), or the Hot Dry Room (Sudatorium) with its graded Warm Rooms (Tepidaria). To one side lay a stone-built communal latrine housing a wooden bench with round holes cut in it for seating over the sewer channel.

The Bearsden Bath-House with its ‘mod cons’ presents a vivid picture of the advance of Roman civilisation into the wildlands of Scotland. It brings us from prehistory into history ‘proper’. But it also foreshadows the long struggle to settle a border between north and south, between Scotland and England.

Iain MacIvor, former Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments for Historic Scotland, says:

The first military works to divide north from south Britain were made by the Romans, and for a long time there was a fanciful link between the famous wall from the Tyne to the Solway [Hadrian’s Wall] and the border between Scotland and England. The Scots were to find a lasting source of national pride in the notion that, whereas the southern parts of Britannia had been taken over without too much difficulty by the mighty Roman army, their own ancestors had held out against the Roman Empire for centuries, and that this undaunted resistance forced the Romans to build one of the wonders of Europe to protect their province of Britannia – Hadrian’s Wall.

The location of the Roman frontier in the north varied considerably over the years. Julius Caesar claimed a ‘Conquest’ after his two invasions in 55 and 54 BC; but it was not until the massive invasion of AD 43 under the Emperor Claudius that the real conquest of southern Britain began. It took the Romans a full forty years of gradual advance and consolidation to become masters of their new province of Britannia. In the course of these four decades they suffered some severe setbacks, including the ferocious uprising of the Iceni tribe of Norfolk and Suffolk under their redoubtable warrior queen Boudica in AD 60–1. By AD 79, however, all England and Wales had been subdued. Now only the far north remained: the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland. These were terrae incognitae to the Romans: unreconnoitred badlands inhabited by (to them) unknown but ferociously barbarian tribes.

There seem to have been three tribes in the Lowlands at this time: the Votadini in the east with their capital Traprain Law in Lothian; the Novantae in the south-west (Dumfries and Galloway); and in between them the Selgovae, whose territory reached from Eskdale to the Cheviot Hills.

The hill-fort of the Votadini on Traprain Law (152 metres) had earthen ramparts (now almost invisible) enclosing sixteen hectares. It was more than just a stronghold or a refuge: it housed a permanent settlement and the administration of the district – an embryo town or burgh, in effect. The Votadini would later shift their capital from Traprain Law to Edinburgh (Din Eidyn), probably to the Castle Rock, and would be known in heroic legend as the Gododdin (see Chapter 3).

Around the Firth of Clyde were the Damnonii. Above that were the mountainous lands of many Highland tribes, collectively called the Caledonii (Caledonians) by Tacitus.

In AD 78 the newly-appointed Governor of the Province of Britannia, Julius Agricola, embarked on a vigorous policy of subduing the native tribes still beyond Roman control in Wales and the north of England. Then he turned his mind to an invasion of Scotland. With him was his son-in-law, the historian Tacitus, who would write (in AD 98) an account of the campaigns in Scotland in his Life of Agricola. In AD 80 Agricola launched his blitzkrieg with a pincer movement. He sent his Ninth Legion up through the territory of the Votadini on the east side of Scotland, following the line of today’s A68 through Lauderdale and north over the Lammermuirs at Soutra to Lothian and the Firth of Forth. Meanwhile the Twentieth Legion moved up the west side through Annandale, along the line of today’s M74 to Clydesdale and the Firth of Clyde. Then the two legions joined forces and marched up to the Firth of Tay. By AD 82 Agricola had subdued the Novantae in the south-west and secured the occupation of Scotland below the Central Belt. He made treaties and alliances with the native peoples where he could, and consolidated his grip by building several garrison forts, the most substantial of which was at Newstead, next to the Eildon peaks near Melrose. He also built a string of small forts (without a continuous barrier) which superintended a line between the Clyde and Forth, with a network of roads to secure the territory to the south.

What was the impact of the Roman incursion into the Lowlands of Scotland? Anna Ritchie, freelance archaeologist and prolific writer on the archaeology and history of early Scotland, says:

At the time the impact must really have been remarkable, because the tribesmen would never have seen anything like the Roman military machine which marched into Scotland.

And there was also an immense economic effect. Once the Roman army was established in the Lowlands of Scotland, there was an impact on agriculture because the army had to be fed. They needed immense quantities of grain, and that grain had to be obtained locally once the supplies they brought with them were finished. You can see that archaeologically, in fact, in these great souterrains, or earth houses: underground storage chambers, some of which are so large that they cannot just have been for the needs of the little settlements in which they lie; they can only be that size because they were storing the grain for the occupying army.

Another area of impact would have been the transport network they needed for military mobility, for provisioning the army and for sending messages between battalions. That must have been quite stunning in the eyes of the local peoples, because there had been nothing more than tracks until that time. The roads and the great forts with their ramparts and huge wooden gateways would have been a glimpse of a totally alien world.

Agricola’s ambitions did not stop at the Clyde – Forth isthmus. His ultimate aim was the conquest of the whole of northern Britain. In AD 83 he started his march north, with a powerful fleet in support. He had a formidable army under his command: three full legions of crack Roman infantrymen supported by cavalry and squadrons of battle-hardened auxiliaries. He wintered on the Tay, and next spring continued his advance northwards up the coastal plain, taking out any native settlements on the way and building a series of temporary marching camps. Meanwhile the Caledonians, according to Tacitus, ‘turned to armed resistance on a large scale’.

Agricola’s strategy was to bring the Caledonians, under their leader Calgacus, to pitched battle. In the late summer of AD 84 the strategy succeeded. The locations of Agricola’s marching camps suggest that he cut across country from Stonehaven into Morayshire along the line of the modern A96 to Inverurie and Huntly; and there, somewhere in the north-east, at a place which Tacitus called Mons Graupius (the ‘Graupian Mountain’), the two sides met for the final battle.

More than thirty thousand of the Caledonian tribesmen had gathered in close-packed tiers on the slope of a hill. In the valley between the two armies the Caledonian charioteers careered back and forth, taunting the Romans and displaying their skills, daring them to advance. And advance they did; under the personal command of Agricola, the auxiliary squadrons moved forward in a disciplined frontal attack while the cavalry engaged the charioteers. The Caledonians fought with reckless courage, but gradually they were outflanked and outfought at close quarters. By the end of the day they had been comprehensively routed amid fearful slaughter: ten thousand tribesmen were said by Tacitus to have perished, at a cost of only 360 Roman dead. The survivors scattered and fled ‘far into the trackless wilds’.

The location of ‘Mons Graupius’ has never been positively identified and has been the source of endless debate among archaeologists and historians. Some think the battle took place near Huntly on the slopes of a hill named Bennachie; others opt for somewhere closer to Stonehaven. The apparent similarity between ‘Graupius’ and ‘Grampian’ is intriguing, if inconclusive. It is also tempting to think that it may have been somewhere near Inverness – such as Culloden? – where in 1746, more than 1600 years later, another retreating ‘Caledonian’ army would be brought to battle and shattered by the superior firepower and discipline of a military machine from the south (see Chapter 28). There, as at Mons Graupius, it was the last strategic point where a native leader could hold an army of Highland tribesmen together before they melted away to their winter straths and glens; there, as at Mons Graupius, defeat would leave what Tacitus called ‘a grim silence on every side, the hills deserted, homes smoking to heaven’.

The account by Tacitus of the battle of Mons Graupius makes compelling reading – particularly the noble rhetoric he put into the mouth of Calgacus (his name may be associated with the Gaelic calgath and mean ‘swordsman’) in his pre-battle speech, a ringing denunciation of Rome and its supposed civilisation, and the first recorded despairing cry of ‘Freedom!’ which would echo through the Highlands and Lowlands for centuries to come:

Former battles in which Rome was resisted left behind them hopes of help in us, because we, the noblest souls in all Britain, the dwellers in its inmost shrine, had never seen the shores of slavery and had preserved our very eyes from the desecration and the contamination of tyranny: here at the world’s end, on its last inch of liberty, we have lived unmolested to this day, in this sequestered nook of story.

But today the farthest bounds of Britain lie open; there are no other peoples beyond us; nothing but seas and cliffs and, more deadly even than these, the Romans, whose arrogance you shun in vain by obedience and self-restraint. Harriers of the world, when the earth has nothing left for their ever-plundering hands, they scour even the sea; if their enemy has wealth, they have greed; if he be poor, they are ambitious; neither East nor West can glut their appetite; alone of people on earth they passionately covet wealth and want alike.

To plunder, butcher, steal – these things they misname ‘empire’: they make a desert, and they call it peace.

The defeat was a crushing blow to the Caledonians and their northern neighbours, and a significant victory for the Romans; although beaten, however, the tribes were not broken. Agricola sent a reconnaissance fleet round the north coast to confirm that Britain was, indeed, an island. He may have felt the terrain so inhospitable as not to be worth the effort of military conquest; besides, he had already exceeded the normal five-year period as Governor. He contented himself with ordering the completion of a massive legionary fortress at Inchtuthil on the Tay, seven miles east of Dunkeld, with satellite forts blocking the way into the northern mountains. The following year he was recalled to Rome.

There was to be no Roman subjugation of the Highlands. The fortress at Inchtuthil did not last long. The Empire was in a constant state of flux, with troops required in hot-spots which would flare up here and there on the Continent. In AD 87, before it was even completed, the fortress was abandoned and systematically dismantled, its stores removed and its defences slighted. The Romans were in retreat, withdrawing gradually from all their forts and bases in Scotland. The native tribespeople helped them on their way with constant harassment. By 105 the Romans had withdrawn to a line between the Solway and the Tyne.

The tide turned again with the accession of Hadrian as Roman Emperor in 117. He visited Britain more than once, and in 122 he decided to consolidate the northern frontier with that great barrier, Hadrian’s Wall, across the isthmus between the Solway and the Tyne. The Lowland tribes of Scotland were left in peace for a time – until 139, when a new Roman Governor (Quintus Lollius Urbicus) marched north from the wall in strength to reoccupy the territory Agricola had seized nearly fifty years earlier. It was then that he decided to consolidate his gains by building the Antonine Wall.

The Antonine Wall did not last very long either – only twenty years or so. After it was abandoned around 161 it was reoccupied, but only for a very short time, and by about 180 the Romans seem to have decided to pull back towards Hadrian’s Wall. There were occasional uprisings in the Lowlands, followed by severe punitive campaigns. But by 214 the Romans had finally withdrawn from Scotland, leaving Hadrian’s Wall as the ultimate frontier – the most impressive and enduring legacy of Roman rule in Britain. Scotland and its restless tribes were left to their own devices, held in check only by their domestic preoccupations and the Roman soldiery still garrisoning the fortlets of Hadrian’s Wall.

By now, however, the graffiti were really on the wall. And in 297, one of the most famous names of the north appears in the documentary record – the Picti, the warlike painted people who are still considered one of the great enigmas of early Scotland, with a kingdom which stretched from north of the Firth of Forth to the Moray Firth and beyond (see Chapter 3).

They are mentioned as playing a key part in the great ‘Barbarian Conspiracy’ which, through accident or design, attacked Roman Britannia simultaneously from all sides in 367; the Angles and Saxons overwhelmed the coastal forts of the south and east, the Gaelic-speaking Scoti from Ireland came sweeping in across the Irish Sea, and the Picti overran Hadrian’s Wall from the north. From then on, the Roman hold on Britannia became more and more tenuous. They appointed three generals in quick succession in an attempt to save the province, and the defences were patched up again. But it was to no lasting avail. The Roman Empire was crumbling, and by 410 the last of the Roman army, along with the Roman administrators, had left Britain’s shores.

A century before they left, however, the Romans had given this enduring name to their main enemies in the north of Scotland: in the year 297 a Roman poet had referred to them as Picti (‘painted ones’). The name stuck, and ‘Picts’ became a generic term for the many ‘Caledonian’ tribes who lived north of the Forth – Clyde line and who thwarted the imperial ambitions of the Romans at their ultimate frontier.