Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
cargo – the first Loch Tay ferry, perhaps! They presumably had canoes as well.
A visit to the Crannog Centre at Kenmore is a rewarding experience. One comes away more impressed than ever by the evidence of the intelligence and creative skills of these early Scots who pioneered the land-uses and methods of land-management with which we are familiar today. There was nothing ‘primitive’ about our early and Iron Age ancestors.1
Sir Walter Scott made no reference to these early ancestors in his Tales of a Grandfather; they were pre-history. For him, history only began with the coming of the Romans to Scotland.
It was the Roman incursion which caused the first armed collision with the forces from the south, through England.
1 Edinburgh-born James Hutton (1726–97) is now universally recognised as the ‘father of modern geology’. He was the first person to grasp the nature of the immense age of geological time and the concept of sequences within that time-scale; until that time, it was widely believed that the earth was precisely 4,004 years old. His book, Theory of the Earth (1788), long predated Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), and ranks alongside it as one of the greatest scientific contributions of all time.
2 Sir Charles Lyell (1797–1875) was the prophet of the theory of ‘continental drift’ (plate tectonics) which would later be refined by the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener in 1915. Lyell had been struck by the evidence of massive changes in climate indicated by the rock records. In the year of his death he stated: ‘Continents, therefore, although permanent for whole geological epochs, shift their positions entirely in the course of ages.’
1 Archaeology is simply architecture after it has collapsed. I cherish Patrick Ashmore’s description of how he was planning to re-erect the stone: ‘And then we’ll lower it down and twiddle it a bit, so that it will fit in precisely.’ It sums up neatly the modus operandi of dealing with our heritage of crumbling ancient monuments which want nothing better than to fall down.
1 I am indebted to American-born Barrie Andrian, director of the Crannog Centre, for an illuminating tour of the Centre, which was opened in 1997. ‘The reconstruction crannog’, which was started as an archaeological experiment to try out the technique of driving alder-wood piles to a depth of two metres into the soft bed of the loch, using local materials and ancient methods, took two years to build. Crannog research has been conducted by Nicholas Dixon of Edinburgh University for more than twenty years.
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