I. THE INTRODUCTION OF IRON
The changes consequent on the introduction of Iron, to a people already familiar with the smelting of tin and copper ores and the fabrication of weapons and implements of bronze, were not necessarily of a radical character, and undoubtedly were first experienced in the gradual acquirement of the new metal from foreign sources. Had bronze been obtainable in sufficient quantities to admit of its application to the numerous purposes for which iron has since been used, there was nothing to prevent the accomplishment of nearly all to which European civilisation has since attained, without the knowledge of the new metal. The opposite, however, was the case. The metal was costly and scarce, and hence one of the most obvious sources of the lengthened period over which we have seen reason to believe that the Archaic era extended. Throughout that whole period metal in every form was a rare and valued luxury, and it was as such that iron, the most widely diffused, the most abundant and most useful of all the metals, was first introduced into the British Isles. This is sufficiently accounted for from the fact, that iron rarely, if ever, occurs in nature in a metallic state; and that it requires great labour and a most intense heat to fuse it.
The age of iron was introduced by a transition-period, occupying possibly as long a time as that which marked the gradual introduction of the era of bronze; but it was not characterized by results of the same direct value. So long as the knowledge of the new metal merely extended to the substitution, by barter or other means, of iron for bronze weapons or implements, its influence could be little more noteworthy than may be the substitution of percussion-caps for flints in our British standing army, to some archæologist or historian of the year 1950. But even such traffic, no doubt, tended through time to make metals more abundant, and metallic weapons and implements more readily attainable, so that the artisan and fabricator were at length enabled to dispense entirely with the primeval stone-hammer and hatchet, and greatly to extend the application of the new and useful material.
It was only when iron had become thus plentiful that it could be productive of any effective change on the characteristics of the races by whom it was used. But though iron is the most abundant of all the metals, and was the latest to be introduced into use, it is at the same time the most perishable, rapidly oxidizing, unless preserved by the most favourable circumstances. Accordingly, very few iron relics, properly pertaining to the closing Pagan era, have been found in such a state of preservation as to enable us to make the use of them, in judging of the skill of their fabricators, which has already been done with those of the Bronze Period. The new and more useful metal, however, did not supersede the gold and bronze in their application to purposes of personal adornment; neither did it put a stop to the manufacture of pottery, to the use of bronze in the construction of vessels for sacred or domestic purposes, nor to those sepulchral rites by which so many evidences of primitive arts and manners have been chronicled for our instruction. It rather increased all these, superadding the additional material of silver, wherewith to multiply the personal ornaments which extending civilisation and refinement more largely demanded. The superior fitness of the new metal for the construction of weapons of war would, no doubt, be first discovered and turned to account. The absence of the guard on all the swords of the Bronze Period, to which attention has been directed, no doubt originated mainly in the mode of using the weapon, which its own capabilities rendered indispensable. The fence and clash of weapons consequent on modern swordsmanship, in which the sword is made to supply both offensive and defensive arms, was altogether incompatible with weapons of cast bronze, liable to shiver like glass at a violent blow. Experience would soon teach the old swordsman the true use of his weapon; and so long as he had only to contend with neighbouring tribes equally armed, he would deem his graceful leaf-shaped sword and his massy spear of bronze the perfect models of a warrior's arms. But while the changes which we have aimed at tracing out in the previous section were progressing slowly but effectively within our sea-girt isle, very remarkable occurrences were affecting the continent of Europe, and extending their influences towards its remotest limits. Carthage had risen from a Tyrian colony, planted on the site of an older Phœnician settlement on the African coast, to be one of the chief commercial and maritime states of the world. The younger builders on the banks of the Tiber had founded the capital destined twice to form the centre of universal empire. Rome and Carthage had come into collision, as was inevitable, according to the notions of these elder times, which held it impossible that two ambitious republics should exist as neighbours. The Punic wars followed, and for upwards of a century--till 147 B.C. when the African capital was razed to the ground--the seat of war was far removed from the British Isles. The second Punic war carried the arms of the rival republics into Spain, and then possibly some faint rumour of it may have reached the Cassiterides, stimulating for a time the trade of their ports, and checking it again, as disasters thickened around the devoted African kingdom. Spain still continued the seat of war after the total annihilation of the Carthaginian power; and during the intestine struggles which followed in the Jugurthan war, there appeared for the first time on the northern frontiers of Italy, hosts of the Teutones, Cimbri, and other northern barbarians. By these several Roman armies were defeated, and the growing power threatened with annihilation from this unexpected source, at the very time when it seemed to be without a rival. From an incidental notice of Polybius we learn the important fact that these northern tribes were already familiar with iron, and possessed of weapons of that metal, though apparently ignorant of the art of converting it into steel. One of the earliest European sources of iron, of which we know anything definite, was the country of the Norici, a tribe occupying a considerable region to the south of the Danube, the exact boundaries of which are only imperfectly known. The invention of the art of converting iron into steel is ascribed to this Celtic race. Noricum was conquered by Augustus, and, in his time, the Noric swords were as celebrated at Rome as the Damascus blades or Andrea Ferraras in more recent times. To this source, therefore, we should probably look for the earliest supplies of iron weapons. Polybius also refers to the country of the Norici as abounding in gold; so that they appear to have excelled in all the metallurgic arts, and may be supposed to have supplied the arms with which the Teutones and the Cimbri invaded the Roman frontiers. The latter, indeed, advanced through Noricum, and bore perhaps from thence the sword which the haughty Gaul flung into the balance of the Capitol when Quintus Sulpicius purchased the safety of Rome, not with iron but gold.
The argument deduced from the apparently independent origin of the oldest European names of the metals, confirms the evidence derived from other sources in proof of the ignorance of the Arian nomades of the working of metals on their first settlement in Europe. The same line of argument, however, adds strong confirmation to the conclusion suggested here, that the Celtæ had obtained considerable mastery of the metallurgic arts at the time when they were brought into direct intercourse and collision with the growing power of Rome, and renders it probable that the Romans derived both the names of some at least of the metals, and their knowledge of their economic uses from this older race. The Saxon gold differs not more essentially from the Greek χρυσος, than that from the Latin aurum; or iron, from σιδηρος, or ferrum; but when we come to examine the Celtic names of the metals it is otherwise. The Celtic terms are:--Gold--Gael. or; golden, orail; Welsh, aur; Lat. aurum. Silver--Gael. airgiod; made of silver, airgiodach; Welsh, ariant; Lat. argentum, derived in the Celtic from arg, white or milk, like the Greek αργος, whence they also formed their αργυρος. Nor is it improbable that the Latin ferrum and the English iron spring indirectly from the same Celtic root:--Gael. iarunn; Welsh, haiarn; Sax. iren; Dan. iern; Span. hierro, which last furnishes no remote approximation to ferrum. Nor with the older metals is it greatly different: as bronze--Gael. umha or prais; Welsh, pres, whence our English brass--a name bearing no very indistinct resemblance to the Roman æs. Lead in like manner has its peculiar Gaelic name, luaidhe, like the Saxon læd, while the Welsh, plwm, closely approximates to the Latin, plumbum. It may undoubtedly be argued that the Latin is the root instead of the offshoot of these Celtic names, but the entire archæological proofs are opposed to this idea; and the direct historic evidence of the early Noric arts, and of the arms of the barbarian invaders of Italy who dictated terms to Quintus Sulpicius in the Roman Capitol, prove that the Celtic and Teutonic races of the north of Europe preceded the Romans in their mastery of the art of working in metals. To this period, (circa B.C. 113-100,) or probably a little earlier, while Rome was preoccupied with the struggle for existence, we may refer the close of the isolated state of the British Isles, and the irruption of newer races among the original occupants of the country. This it is, and not the mere alteration of the old metallurgist's materials, which gives a totally new character to the Iron Period. The gold and the bronze are still there, but the shapes which express to us the intellectual progress of their artificers and owners are essentially changed. The indefiniteness of archaic art gives place to forms and ornaments as positive and characteristic as any in which we recognise the expressive types of medieval art, or the changing fashions of the Elizabethan and Louis Quatorze styles. It is important that we should fix as nearly as possible the true date of this change, when for the first time we find our inquiries bringing us in contact with ascertained epochs and recorded facts. From this, as from a central point, we may perhaps yet be able to reckon backward as well as forward, and at least secure a basis for future observations.
When iron first became known to the native Britons its value was naturally estimated in accordance with its rarity, and it was applied to such uses as we now devote the precious metals. Converted into personal ornaments, it formed rare, if not beautiful trinkets, and in the shape of ring-money it even superseded or supplemented the older gold. Julius Cæsar speaks of the Britons as using such a rude currency; but we may infer from other evidence already referred to that this did not arise, at that comparatively late period, from its extreme rarity. Herodian indeed speaks still later of the Britons wearing "iron about their bellies and necks, which they esteem as fine and rich an ornament as others do gold." But we have abundant evidence that they were familiar with the value and beauty of gold, and we shall not, I think, overstrain the allowances to be made for the prejudiced accounts of the most intelligent Roman, in receiving even the narrative of Cæsar with some limitations. His personal opportunities of observation could extend only to a very limited section of the native Britons, and these seen under the most disadvantageous circumstances; while the polished and haughty Roman was little likely to trouble himself with attempting any very impartial estimate of what were in his eyes only different phases of barbarism.
The fact has already been adverted to, that all the descriptions of the weapons of the Gauls furnished by classic writers, lead us to the conclusion that the ancient bronze leaf-shaped sword had been entirely superseded by the more effective iron weapon prior to their collision with the veteran legions of Rome. The same is no less true of the contemporary Britons. Tacitus describes the Caledonians as "a strong, warlike nation, using large swords without a point, and targets, wherewith they artfully defended themselves against the Roman missiles." We know, moreover, that before the Romans effected a landing in Britain, they were familiar with the fact of an intimate intercourse having been long maintained with Gaul. The former is described by Julius Cæsar as the chief seat of a religion common to both; and the evidence is no less explicit which shews that many of the southern British tribes were of the same race, and differed little in arts or customs from the Gauls of the neighbouring continent. But still more, the reason assigned by Cæsar for the first invasion of Britain was the provocation its natives had given him by the aid which they furnished to his enemies in Gaul. There could not therefore exist any great disparity in their arts or military accoutrements; while we discover in this no slight evidence of the maritime skill to which they must have attained even at that early period, to enable them to embark such bodies of auxiliaries for the help of the continental tribes as attracted the notice and excited the indignation of the Roman general.
To the early part of this Age of Iron should most probably be assigned the construction of the vast monolithic temple of Stonehenge. Its difference from the older temples of Avebury and Stennis, as well as from all other British monuments of this class, has already been referred to. Rude and amorphous as its vast monoliths are, they are characterized by such a degree of regularity and uniformity of design, as marks them to belong to a different era from the Avebury or the Stennis circle, when the temple-builders had acquired the mastery of tools with which to hew them into shape. Much greater mechanical skill, moreover, was required to raise the superincumbent masses and fit them into their exact position, than to rear the rude standing stone, or upheave the capstone of the cromlech on to the upright trilith. Stonehenge, therefore, is certainly not a work of the Stone Period, and probably not of the Bronze Period, with the exception of its little central circle of unhewn stones, which may date back to a very remote era, and have formed the nucleus round which the veneration of a later and more civilized age reared the gigantic columns, still so magnificent and so mysterious even in ruin.
The isolation which we have reason to believe had hitherto exercised so much influence on the native tribes of Britain, is now seen to be finally at an end. The Celtic races are once more nomade, or mingling their blood with the more civilized tribes which are gradually securing a footing in the south-eastern portions of the island. The first stream of Teutonic colonization had set in, which, followed successively by the Romans with their legions of foreign auxiliaries, by Saxons, Angles, Scoti, Norwegians, Danes, and Normans, produced the modern hardy race of Britons. The term Teutonic has been adopted here as at once the most comprehensive and definite one by which to characterize this period. In Scotland the Celtic races maintained a progressive civilisation which ultimately developed itself in new forms, producing an essentially Celtic style and era of art at a later period; but throughout the last Pagan era, the arts of the Celtic Caledonians appear to have been modified by the same Teutonic influence as those of South Britain, Gaul, Germany, and Scandinavia. The tribes of North Britain were indeed only indirectly affected by the aggressive movements of the earlier Teutonic invaders, and were probably a pure Celtic race when the Roman legions penetrated into the Caledonian fastnesses in the second century of our era. But the close affinity between the relics of North and South Britain abundantly proves the rapid influence resulting alike from the friendly interchange of useful commodities and personal ornaments, and doubtless also from the frequent spoils of war. The beautiful coinage of the British Prince Cunobeline, (circa A.D. 13 to A.D. 41,) and supposed to be the work of a Roman, or of a native monier familiar with Roman art, exhibits the type which the Gauls imitated from the Didrachmas and Staters of Macedonia upwards of three centuries before. Little doubt is now entertained by our best numismatists that the coins of Comius and others of an earlier date than Cunobeline or the first Roman invasion, include native British mintage. There is no question, at any rate, that they circulated as freely in Britain as in Gaul, and have been found in considerable quantities in many parts of the island. The iron or bronze and copper ring-money of the first century must therefore be presumed as only analogous to our modern copper coinage, and not as the sole barbarous substitute for a minted circulating medium.
Several interesting discoveries of the primitive iron ring-money have been made in Scotland, though in no case as yet in such a state as to admit of its preservation. In a minute description of various antiquities in the parish of Kilpatrick-Fleming, Dumfriesshire, superadded to the Old Statistical Account, the contents of several tumuli opened about the year 1792 are detailed. In one was discovered a cist, inclosing an urn of elegant workmanship, filled with ashes. The urn was found standing with its mouth up, and covered with a stone. At a small distance from it, within the cist, lay several iron rings, each about the circumference of a half-crown piece, but so much corroded with rust that they crumbled to pieces on being touched.[402] A similar discovery made in Annandale is thus described by an eyewitness: "In the centre of the tumulus was found a red flag-stone laid level on the earth, on which were placed two other slabs of equal size, parallel to each other; and other two, one at each end; another was laid on the top as a cover. In the interior of this was an urn containing ashes, with a few very thin plates of iron in the form of rings, so completely corroded that when exposed to the air they crumbled into dust."[403] In these frail relics of the new material we can have little hesitation in recognising the annuli ferrei of Julius Cæsar, used by the Britons of the first century as their accredited native currency.
Assuming it as an established fact that the native Britons of the southern parts of the island, at least, had carried the arts of civilisation so far as to coin their own money, we perceive therein the evidence of a totally different era from the Archaic Period, in which direct imitation of the simplest positive forms is hardly traceable. Bronze, as has been already observed, continued to be used no less than in the former era, of which it has been assumed as the characteristic feature, in the manufacture of personal ornaments, domestic utensils, &c. In Denmark, indeed, some remarkably interesting relics have been found, seemingly belonging to the very dawn of the last transition-period, when iron was more precious than copper or bronze.
These include axes consisting of a broad blade of copper edged with iron, and bronze daggers similarly furnished with edges of the harder metal. Even in Denmark such examples are extremely rare, and no corresponding instance that I am aware of has yet been discovered in Britain. A great similarity is traceable between the bronze relics of the various northern races of Europe, belonging to the Iron age, and that not of an indefinite character, like the stone hammer or flint lance and arrow-heads of the Primeval Period, but a distinct uniformity of design and ornament, which has mainly contributed to confirm the prevalent opinion that the majority of British and especially of Scottish bronze relics are of Danish origin. In examining these relics in detail, I shall endeavour honestly to assign to Scandinavia whatever is her own, but if the arguments advanced here have any foundation in truth, it is obvious that the British Iron age had lasted well-nigh a thousand years, and as a Pagan era was at an end before we have any historical evidence of Scandinavian invaders effecting permanent settlements on our shores. The whole evidence of history manifestly leads to the conclusion that Britain long preceded the Scandinavian races in civilisation, nor was it till she had been enervated alike by Roman luxury and by the succeeding intestine jealousies and rivalries of native tribes, that Scandinavia, fresh in her young barbarian vigour, made of her a spoil and a prey.
On none of the native arts did Roman intercourse effect a more remarkable change than on British fictile ware. From the English Channel to the Frith of Tay, Roman and Anglo-Roman pottery have been met with in abundance, including the fine Samian ware, probably of foreign workmanship, the rude vessels of the smother kiln, and the common clay urns and coarse amphoræ and mortaria, designed for daily domestic use. Numerous Anglo-Roman kilns have been discovered, some of them even with the half-formed and partially baked vessels still standing on the form or disposed in the kiln, as they had been abandoned some fifteen or sixteen centuries ago. Cinerary urns of the same class have been frequently found accompanied with relics corresponding to the era of Roman occupation. But, be it observed, the bronze relics of the Teutonic type corresponding in general style and ornamentation to those discovered in the Scandinavian countries, when found in British sepulchral deposits are almost invariably accompanied with the primitive pottery, or with a class of urns, described in a succeeding chapter, in which we trace the first elements of improvement in the manufacture of native fictile ware. This must settle the question of the priority of their deposition to the earliest conceivable era of Scandinavian invasion. The native Britons did unquestionably greatly degenerate after being abandoned by their Roman conquerors; but it is opposed alike to evidence and probability to imagine that they resumed the barbarous arts of an era some centuries prior--a proceeding more akin to the ideas of the modern antiquary than to the practice of a semi-civilized race.
The devices most frequently employed in the decoration of the gold, silver, and bronze relics of this period, are what are called the serpentine and dragon ornaments. They are common to the works of all the northern Teutonic races, and are manifestly to be referred to the same Eastern origin as the wild legends of the Germano-Teutonic and Scandinavian mythic poems, in which dragons, snakes, and other monsters, play so conspicuous a part. Along with these, however, there are other patterns indirectly traceable to Greek and Roman models, as is also observable in the dies of the early Gaulish and British coins. This, however, will be more fully considered in treating of the personal ornaments of the period, but meanwhile we may draw the general conclusion, that the arts of the Iron age pertained to the whole Teutonic races of Northern Europe, and reached both Denmark and Britain from a common source, long prior to the natives of these two countries coming into direct collision. We see that an intimate intercourse was carried on between Britain and Gaul at the very period when the transition to the fully developed Iron age was progressing in the former country: it is easy, therefore, to understand how similar arts would reach the Danish Peninsula and the Scandinavian countries beyond the Baltic. But Scandinavia had long passed her Bronze Period, and succeeding transition era, when she sent forth her hardy Vikings to plunder the British coasts. It was with other weapons than the small leaf-shaped bronze sword that the Norse rovers came to spoil and desolate our shores.
In recent cuttings, during the construction of the Dublin and Cashel Railway, there were found a number of large and heavy iron swords, which are now deposited in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy. These Mr. Worsaae examined during his visit to Ireland in 1846, and unhesitatingly pronounced them to be Norwegian. "The swords are long and straight, formed for cutting as well as thrusting, and terminate in points formed by rounding off the edge towards the back of the blade. The spears are long and slender, and similar in form to the lance-heads used in some cavalry corps."[404] They are formed of a soft kind of iron, like those referred to by Polybius, as in use among the Gauls more than a century prior to the invasion of Julius Cæsar; and, like them, they differ nearly as much in every essential point, as can well be conceived possible, from the bronze sword of the previous era, which has been so perseveringly bandied about by modern antiquaries between Romans and Danes. Mr. Worsaae especially referred to the great size and weight of the swords found in Ireland, and contrasted them with the lighter weapons of the same metal which he believed to be contemporary swords of the native Irish, from whence he drew the inference that Ireland was--like England, France, Germany, &c.--so weak, from about the eighth till the twelfth century, in consequence of intestine wars, that she fell an easy prey to small numbers of Scandinavian invaders. Mr. Worsaae farther remarked of the weapons found at Kilmainham:--"They are so like the Norse swords, that if they were mixed with the swords found in Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish tombs, and now in the collections of Christiania, Stockholm, and Copenhagen, it would be difficult to distinguish one from the other. The form of the handle, and particularly of the knob at the end of the handle, is quite characteristic of the Norse swords. Along with them some other antiquities of undoubtedly Scandinavian origin were also discovered."[405]
The source from whence Europe derived this great gift of iron has yet to be ascertained. It certainly was not from Rome. The Norici, it has already been observed, furnished the chief supplies of iron to Rome, and taught her metallurgists the art of converting it into steel. It is not impossible, however, that it was from the remote North that this source of civilisation was sent to the Mediterranean coasts. British antiquaries have obtained as yet only a partial view of Scandinavian archæology, notwithstanding the valuable publications of Mr. Worsaae. The ancient land of the Scandinavian races includes Denmark,--a country of peculiar geological formation, having abundant stores of silex in its chalk strata, but no minerals to tempt the skill of its aboriginal occupants,--and Sweden, including Norway, a country abounding in minerals, and still furnishing Europe with the finest iron from its native ores. It is remarkable that this latter country appears, from its primitive relics, to have had its primeval stone period and birth-time of the mechanical arts, but, with the exception of the small district of Sweden adjacent to Denmark, so far as yet appears, this was immediately succeeded by the Iron Period. No bronze archaic era is indicated in its archæological annals. We cannot assume from this, as some are inclined to do, that therefore Norway must have remained an unpeopled waste, while Denmark was advancing into the period of well developed mechanical and ornamental arts. With our present imperfect materials for judging, we are better perhaps to assume nothing, but wait for some able Norwegian archæologist doing that for his native antiquities which Thomsen and Worsaae have done for those of Denmark. Yet good evidence has been furnished in part, especially in one important department, by Professor Nillson's Skandinaviska Nordens Urinvänare, or Primitive Inhabitants of Northern Scandinavia, though in this he assigns to the true Swea race, and the first workers of the native iron, no earlier a date as the colonists of Sweden than the sixth century. The Samlingar för Nordens fornälskare, already referred to, is also of considerable avail, especially from its copious illustrations. From these we learn that the primitive tumuli-builders of Denmark and Norway are of the same race, and that Norway had her monolithic era, of which no less remarkable traces remain than that of Denmark. Hence we are led to ask the question,--May not her Archaic Period have been an iron instead of a bronze one, and her forges the source from whence the Norici and other Teutonic and Celtic races of Europe learned that the iron-stone was also an ore, and could be smelted and wrought like the more ductile bronze? Northern mythological traditions throw some imperfect and uncertain light on this subject. They refer, for example, to their Gnomes and Dwarfs, their Alfes, and other supernatural metallurgists, as inhabiting mountain regions lying beyond and around them. This is peculiarly noticeable in all the oldest mythic fables, mixed up with the wild inventions of dragons, serpents, and the like fanciful machinery, which tell of their far birthland in the older continent of Asia. But it is worthy of notice, that the topography of these mythological legends in no way corresponds with the natural features of the Scandinavian peninsulas, lying as they do between two seas. May we not infer, therefore, that they had their origin while yet the Scandinavian nomades were wandering towards their final destination between the Baltic and the German Ocean, and that these distant mountains, with their metallurgic Gnomes and Alfes, were none other than the mountain ranges of Norway, the mineral treasures of which now furnish so valuable a source of national wealth to their descendants? The Germanic tradition has already been noticed which places the forge of the mythic Weland in the Caucasus, a fading memorial, perhaps, of the wanderings of their Teutonic fathers towards their western home. Such wild traditions must necessarily be used with much doubt and caution; yet they are not meaningless, nor the mere baseless offspring of fancy. Other and more direct evidence may possibly be within reach of the Norwegian archæologist, to induce the belief that the Alfes of his ancestral myths may have been a hardy race of Finnish, Celtic, or other primitive metallurgists, who, like the Norici, supplied the weapons by which themselves were subjugated. All this, however, is advanced with the greatest hesitation, not as a theory which it is proposed to maintain, but only as guessings at truth which lies at present beyond our grasp. By far the most important iron ore wrought in Norway and Sweden is Magnetite, which appears to pertain nearly as exclusively to the North as tin does to the British Isles. The largest known masses occur in Scandinavia, Lapland, Siberia, and in North America. In Norway, Arendal is the most important locality; and in Sweden, Dannemora, Utoe, Norberg, and Taberg. The fine quality of the Magnetite ores is ascribed to their being mixed with calc-spar, thallite, hornblende, and other natural adjuncts advantageous for their reduction, so that the granular ores often require no other flux. Such a condition of the iron ore was manifestly peculiarly calculated to facilitate the processes of smelting and fusing, and thereby to adapt it for working by the primitive metallurgist. Magnetite is not unknown in several of the remoter parts of Scotland, but the distance from fuel has hitherto prevented its application to economic purposes, at least in modern times. Bog iron ore, an hydrated oxide of iron still more readily fused, is also common in Sweden, and abundant in the northern and western islands of Scotland; but though well adapted for castings, it is inapplicable for other purposes. Hæmatite, or specular iron, is another of the most abundant iron ores specially worthy of notice here, because it is found in a state more nearly resembling the metal than any other ore of iron, and occurs in the most ancient metallurgic districts of England, where the previous native industrial arts were so well calculated to suggest its economic use when observed in such a form. It appears at Lostwithiel, in Cornwall, in the form of fine red crystals of pure iron peroxide, and is also found at Tincroft and St. Just in the same district, and in Devonshire, Wales, Cumberland, and Perthshire. Such are some of the lights by which mineralogy enables us to trace out the probable origin of the working of iron in Europe; but after all, it is to Asia we are forced to return for the true source of nearly all our primitive arts, nor will the canons of Archæology be established on a safe foundation till the antiquities of that older continent have been explored and classified. The advocate of Druidical theories may find his so-called "Druidical temple" in the steppes of Asia as well as on Salisbury Plain; and probably very many other supposed national relics, exclusively appropriated by the local antiquary, will yet be discovered to have their types and counterparts in the evidences of primitive Asiatic art.
"Sepulchral tumuli are spread over all the northern and western parts of Europe, and over many extensive regions in northern Asia, as far eastward at least as the river Yenisei. They contain the remains of races either long ago extinct, or of such as have so far changed their abodes and manner of existence, that the ancestors can no longer be recognised in their descendants. They abound on the banks of the great rivers Irtisch and Yenisei, where the greatest numbers of the then existing people were collected, by the facilities afforded to human intercourse. In Northern Asia these tombs are ascribed to Tschudes, or barbarians, nations foreign and hostile to the Slavic race. The erectors of these sepulchral mounds were equally distinct and separate from the Tartar nations, who preceded Slaves; for the tombs of the Tartars, and all edifices raised by them, indicate the use of iron tools; and the art of working of iron mines has ever been a favourite attribute of the Tartar nations. But silver and golden ornaments of rude workmanship, though in abundant quantity, are found in the Siberian tombs. The art of fabricating ornaments of the precious metals seems to have preceded by many ages the use of iron in the northern regions of Asia."[406]
Keeping these important facts in view, which so entirely coincide with the ascertained truths of primitive European history, it is still worthy of note that there appears to be something altogether remarkable in the archæology of Sweden and Norway, destitute as these countries would appear to be of the traces of the primitive metallurgic arts discoverable elsewhere, equally in the Asiatic seats of earliest population, and in the other European countries colonized by the Arian nomades. If we accept the conclusions arrived at by Professor Nillson, that the Swea race did not settle in Scandinavia till the sixth century, we shall be the more certainly forced to the conclusion that they were then a people far advanced in the arts of civilisation; since it is the same race whose powerful fleets are found ravaging the northern coasts of Europe in the ninth century, establishing colonies on their shores, and soon after planting Scandinavian settlements in Iceland, Greenland, and in Vinland on the continent of North America. Leaving, however, the question of dates to further inquiry, the curious coincidence of these northern mythological fables with the topography of the country and the peculiar characteristics of its primitive antiquities, suggest the conclusion that the latest intruding race brought with it--probably from Asia--a knowledge of the art of working the metals; and found on settling in the northern Scandinavian countries that their predecessors were already familiar with the mineral treasures of the North, and knew how to smelt the dark iron-stone and convert it to economic purposes. The latter, according to the craniological investigations of Professor Nillson, were a race of Celtic origin, having skulls longer than the first and broader than the second of the two elder races of the Scandinavian barrows. There is therefore nothing in the ethnological character of the race inconsistent with such metallurgic skill, but, on the contrary, much to add to the probability of an early practice of the arts of the founder and the smith, the Celtæ having shewn, wherever circumstances favoured it, a remarkable aptitude for working in metals.
This digression pertains, perhaps, more to general Archæology than to the direct elucidation of Scottish antiquities. But independently of the legitimate interest attached to the inquiry into the origin of these metallurgic arts which brought civilisation in their train, the history of Scotland at the period we are now approaching is more intimately connected with Norway than with any other country, except Ireland. To the primitive Scandinavian literature we still look for some of the earliest traces of authentic national history; and whatever tends to illuminate the Iron Period of the North can hardly fail to throw some light upon our own. This must be the work of the archæologists of Scandinavia; nor are they insensible to its importance.
The traditional Vœlund-myth has already been attempted to be connected with a definite historic epoch, the reign of King Nidung, king of Nerika, in Sweden, in the sixth century. Such a mode of interpretation, however, shews a very imperfect appreciation of the true nature of this remarkable myth, which belongs in reality to no single country, but is as essential a link in the history of the human race as are to each of us the momentous years which form the stage between infancy and manhood. We cannot, indeed, too speedily abandon this misdirected aim, of seeking for precise dates of epochs in primitive history. With these the archæologist, in his earlier historical investigations, has generally little more to do than the geologist. Both must rest content with a relative chronology, which yet further investigation will doubtless render more definite and precise. Where dates are clearly ascertainable, the archæologist will gladly avail himself of them; and in this Iron Period much of the indefiniteness of primeval annals gives place to authentic history. But while rejecting the localization of the Vœlund-myth at the court of Nerika, it is of importance for our present purpose to note the general evidences of Scandinavian progress in the arts by which nations attain their majority. Not in the ninth century only, but perhaps in this era of King Nidung, in the sixth century, or in the fifth or fourth--we know not indeed how early--the Northmen may have begun to build ships, and learned boldly to quit their fiords for the open sea. Our annals prior to the ninth century are so meagre that we must lie open to the recovery of many traces of important events unnoted by them, in the interval between that ascertained epoch and the older one when the Roman legions were compelled to abandon the vallum of Antoninus, and repair the barrier beyond the Tyne. We cannot too speedily disabuse ourselves of the idea, that because no Celtic or Scandinavian Herodotus has left us records of our old fatherland, therefore the North had no history prior to its Christian era. We owe to the Romans the history of centuries which otherwise must have remained unwritten, yet not the less amply filled with the deeds of Cassivelaunus, Boadicea, Galgacus, and many another hero and heroine, all unsung; though they wanted but their British Homer, or Northern Hermes with his graphic runes, to render the sieges of the White Caterthun as world-famous as that of Troy.
FOOTNOTES:
[402] Sinclair's Statist. Acc. vol. xiii. p. 272.
[403] New Statist. Acc. vol. iv. p. 97.
[404] Hand-Book of Irish Antiquities, p. 166.
[405] The Antiquities of Ireland and Denmark, by J. J. A. Worsaae, Esq. Dublin, 1846. P. 14.
[406] Prichard's Natural History of Man.
II. THE ROMAN INVASION
The fashion of Scottish archæologists in dealing with our national antiquities has heretofore most frequently been to write a folio volume on the Anglo-Roman era, and huddle up in a closing chapter or appendix some few notices of such obdurate relics of primitive nationality as could in no way be forced into a Roman mould. Some valuable works have been the result of this exclusive devotion to one remarkable epoch; but since this has been so faithfully explored by Camden, Sibbald, Horsley, Gordon, Roy, Chalmers, and Stuart, there is good reason why we may be excused following the example of the Antiquary par excellence, and plunging, "nothing loth, into a sea of discussion concerning urns, vases, votive altars, Roman camps, and the rules of castrametation," with copious notations on the difference between the mode of entrenching castra stativa and castra æstiva, "things confounded by too many of our historians!"
To English archæologists the Anglo-Roman Period is one of the greatest importance; for the Romans conquered and colonized their country, taught its inhabitants their religion, sepulchral rites, arts, and laws, and, after occupying the soil for centuries, left them a totally different people than they had found them. There is something, moreover, in the very geological features of the south-eastern districts of England, which the Romans first and chiefly occupied, at once more readily susceptible and more in need of such external influences. It cannot, indeed, be overlooked, among the elements of ethnological science, that the geological features of countries and districts exercise no unimportant influence on the races that inhabit them. The intelligent traveller detects many indications besides the mere difference of building materials, when he passes from the British chalk and clay to the stone districts. To the Romans it can hardly be doubted that England owes the art of converting her clay into bricks and tiles; and that in all probability, the P. P. BRI. LON.--præfectus primæ [cohortis] Britonum Londinii?--stamped on recently discovered Roman tiles found on the site of modern London,[407] indicate some of the products of the kilns by which the inexhaustible bed of London clay was first converted to economical uses. The Roman mansion, with its hypocaust and sudatorium, its mosaic paving and painted walls, its sculptures, bronzes, and furnishings of all sorts, introduced the refinements of classic Italy into the social life of England; while the disciplined hardiness of legionary colonists tempered the excesses of Roman luxury. New wants were speedily created, and many dormant faculties excited into action among the intelligent native tribes. The older British pottery entirely disappeared, superseded by the skilful products of the Anglo-Roman kiln, or the more beautiful imported Samian ware. England might, and indeed did, greatly degenerate when deserted by her conquerors, but it was altogether impossible that she could return to her former state. The footmark of the Roman on the soil of England is indelible. It forms a great and most memorable epoch between two widely different periods, the influence of which has probably never since ceased to operate, and hence the important place which it still continues to occupy in English archæology.
The history of the Scoto-Roman invasion is altogether different from this. It is a mere episode which might be altogether omitted without very greatly marring the integrity and completeness of the national annals. It was, for the most part, little more than a temporary military occupation of a few fenced stations amid hostile tribes. Julius Cæsar effected his first landing on the shores of Britain in the year B.C. 55; but it was not till after a lapse of 135 years--as nearly as may now be guessed, in the summer of A.D. 80--that Agricola led the Roman army across the debatable land of the Scottish border, and began to hew a way through the Caledonian forests. Domitian succeeded to the throne of Titus in the following year, while the Roman legions were rearing their line of forts between the Forth and the Clyde; and the jealousy of the tyrant speedily wrested the government of our island from the conqueror of Galgacus. From that period till the accession of the Emperor Hadrian, in A.D. 117, the Roman historians are nearly silent about Britain; but we then learn that the Roman authority was maintained with difficulty in its island province; and when Hadrian visited Britain the chief memorial he left of the imperial presence was the vallum which bore his name, extending between the Solway and the Tyne. Up to this period, therefore, it is obvious that the Roman legions had established no permanent footing in Caledonia--using that term in its modern and most comprehensive sense; nor was it till the accession of Titus Antoninus Pius to the Imperial throne, and the appointment of Lollius Urbicus to the command in Britain, nearly two centuries after the first landing of Cæsar in England, that any portion of our northern kingdom acquired a claim to the title of Caledonia Romana. Lollius Urbicus, the legate of Antoninus Pius, fixed the northern limits of Roman empire on the line previously marked out by the forts of Agricola; and beyond that boundary, extending between the Forth and the Clyde, nearly the sole traces of the presence of the Romans are a few earth-works, with one or two exceptions, of doubtful import, and some chance discoveries of pottery and coins, mostly ascribable, it may be presumed, to the fruitless northern expedition of Agricola, after the victory of Mons Grampius, or to the still more ineffectual one of his successor, Severus. In this extra-mural region, indeed, lies the celebrated Roman military work, Ardoch Camp, within the area of which was discovered the sepulchral memorial of Ammonius Damionis, the only Roman inscription yet found north of the Forth. Such an exception is the strongest evidence that could be produced of the transitory nature of Roman occupation in the region beyond the boundaries fixed by Lollius Urbicus.
Here, then, we have the proprætor of Antoninus Pius established within the line of ramparts which bear the Emperor's name, A.D. 140. The Roman soldiers are busy building forts; raising each their thousand or two paces of the wall, and recording the feat on the legionary tablets which still attest the same; constructing roads and other military works; and establishing here and there coloniæ and oppida, with a view to permanent settlement. For a period of about twenty years, during which Lollius Urbicus remained governor of the province, peace appears to have prevailed; and to this brief epoch, when a Roman navy was stationed on the coasts of Britain, we may, with great probability, ascribe the rise of Inveresk, Cramond or Alaterva, and other maritime Roman colonial or municipal sites. With the death of the able Titus Antoninus, whom grateful Roman citizens surnamed Pius, all this was at an end. Calphurnius Agricola had to be despatched by the new emperor, Marcus Aurelius, to put down an insurrection of the British tribes. The reign of his successor Commodus was marked by a still more determined rising of the North. The Caledonian Britons again took to arms, assailed the legions with irresistible force, defeated them and slew their general, broke through the rampart of Antoninus, and penetrated unchecked into the most fertile districts of the Roman province of Valentia, as it was subsequently named, comprehending the whole district between the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus which at a later period became the Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Another legate, Ulpius Marcellus, had to hasten from Rome to arrest the Caledonian invaders, and a few more years of doubtful peace were secured to the northern province. Lucius Septimius Severus succeeded to the purple A.D. 197, learned that the Caledonian Britons were once more within the ineffectual ramparts; and after a few years of timid negotiation, rather than of determined opposition to these hardy northern tribes, Virius Lupus, the legate of Severus, was compelled to own that the occupation of Caledonia was hopeless. The aged emperor immediately commenced preparations for marching in person against the Caledonians. About A.D. 208 he effected his purpose, and entered Caledonia at the head of an overwhelming force; but it was in vain. He penetrated indeed as far, it is thought, as the Moray Frith, but only to return, with numbers greatly reduced, to fix once more the limits of Roman empire where they had been before marked out by the wall of Hadrian, between the Solway and the Tyne. It is possible, indeed, that the northern wall was not immediately abandoned. At Cramond have been found both coins and medals of Caracalla and Diocletian. The Roman tenure of the North, however, was manifestly insecure; and the successor of Severus was little likely to recover what that able emperor had been compelled to abandon.
A period of sixty-eight years is thus the utmost that can be assigned for this occupation of Caledonia as a Roman province, and the history of that brief era is amply sufficient to justify the oft-claimed title--whatever be its value--of the unconquered Caledonians. The tribes in the immediate vicinity of the garrisoned strongholds of the invaders might be overawed and forced into apparent submission; but the country was no more subdued and rendered a tributary province than when Edward made himself the arbiter between Baliol and the Bruce.
The successors of Severus were glad to secure the forbearance of the Caledonians on any terms; and for seventy-three years after the departure of his sons from Britain its name is scarcely mentioned by any Roman writer. In subsequent allusions to the restless inroads of the Caledonians on the southern province, they are mentioned for the first time in the beginning of the fourth century by the name of Picts; but it is not till the reign of the Emperor Valentinian, in the latter part of the fourth century, A.D. 367, that we find the Roman legions under Theodosius effectually coping with the northern invaders, and recovering the abandoned country between the walls of Antoninus and Severus. This was now at length converted into a Roman province, and received the name of VALENTIA, in honour of the emperor; and to this latter occupation should probably be ascribed the rise of most of the inland coloniæ, the traces of which are still recoverable. But its meagre history is that of a frontier province. The Picts were ever ready to sally forth from their mountain fastnesses on the slightest appearance of insecurity or intermitted watchfulness. Again and again they ravaged the southern provinces, and returned loaded with spoil; and it is chiefly to the notices of their inroads and repulsions that we owe the possession of any authentic history of North Britain in the fourth century. Early in the fifth century, about the year 422, a Roman legion made its appearance in Scotland for the last time. They succeeded in driving back the Picts beyond the northern wall, as a disciplined force must ever do when brought into direct collision with untrained barbarian tribes; but it was no longer possible to retain the province of Valentia. The legionary colonists and the Romanized Britons were advised to abandon it, and once more withdraw within the older limits fixed by Severus on the line of Hadrian's Wall. So ended the second and last Roman occupation of Scotland, extending over a period of about fifty years. It is to this latter era that we should probably assign the establishment of the Roman town near the Eildon Hills, as well as of other sites in the interior of the country, bearing traces of Roman occupation, which it has been customary to seek for among the stations mentioned by Ptolemy. Roy, for example, adhering to one of the names given by Ptolemy, while he rejects the locality which he assigned to it, fixes the site of Τριμοντιον, or Trimontium, in the neighbourhood of the Eildons, because "the aspect of the hills corresponds exactly with the name."[408] In this he has been implicitly followed by later writers. But Trimontium is a mere Latinized version of Ptolemy's Τριμοντιον, and does not necessarily signify Tres Montes, the supposed designation suggested by the triple summits of the Eildon Hills; unless, as is possible, the name is only a Greek rendering of the original Tres Montes, which has been anew transformed into the later Latin form. Still the mere resemblance of the name to certain features of an ascertained Roman site is very insufficient evidence in contradiction to the more precise information of the old geographer, as well as to the probability of the later origin of the Eildon town. We must therefore leave Trimontium where Ptolemy places it, in the district of the Selgovæ, not far from the military station at Birrens, although it will be shewn that very extensive Roman traces, unknown to General Roy, do exist in the neighbourhood of the Eildon Hills. The first period of the Roman presence in Scotland in the second century was obviously little more than an occupation of military posts; the second, in the latter end of the fourth century, was the precarious establishment of a Roman province on a frontier station, and within sight of a foe ever watching the opportunity for invasion and spoil.
Hence the paucity of Roman remains in Scotland, and the trifling influence exercised by Roman civilisation on its ancient arts. Roman pottery has been found in considerable quantities on the sites of well-known forts and stations, but no Roman kiln has yet been discovered in Scotland, such as suffices in England to shew how completely native arts were superseded by those of the Italian colonists. Few, indeed, of the memorials which the Romans have left of their presence in Scotland pertain to the practice of the peaceful arts. Their inscriptions, their altars, and their sepulchral tablets, all relate to the legionary, and shew by how precarious a tenure his footing was maintained beyond the Tyne. No evidence serves more completely to prove this transitory and exotic character of the occupation of the country than the traces of Roman masonry. Passing beyond the limits assigned by Hadrian to Roman dominion, the legions entered on a country the geological features of which are totally dissimilar to any part of Britain which they had previously acquired. Yet the ruins of their buildings, discovered in the very centre of the Lothians, shew that they brought with them the art of the brickmaker, and manufactured their building materials by the same laborious process above the fine sandstone strata of the Frith of Forth, as within the chalk and clay districts of England, where their earliest settlements were effected.
This evidence of the practice of exotic arts becomes still more noticeable on the sites of some of the wall-stations. At Castlehill, for example, the third station from the west end of the rampart of Antoninus, though the fort no longer exists, its materials have been employed in erecting the farm-offices and inclosures which now occupy its commanding site. Here, so recently as 1849, an inscribed tablet of the Twentieth Legion was discovered. On visiting the station the intelligent observer can hardly fail to be struck with the peculiar character of the stones built into the new walls, and lying about where they have been turned up by the plough. The legionary builders would seem to have found clay unattainable, or inconvenient to work, and were sufficiently remote from the Clyde to render importation unadvisable. They have accordingly been compelled to resort to stone; but true to the more familiar material, they have with perverse ingenuity hewn it into the shape and size of the common Roman brick, making in fact, as nearly as possible, bricks of stone. It is not improbable that similar relics may still exist at some places on the line of Hadrian's Wall; such, however, is not the case with its more substantial successor. When Severus abandoned the northern rampart and rebuilt a wall nearly on the line of that of Hadrian, the Anglo-Roman occupants of Northumbria were no longer strangers to the peculiar facilities of the district, and the wall of Severus accordingly exhibits many traces of substantial masonry, such as antiquaries familiar only with the Roman remains of the clay districts can scarcely persuade themselves are the work of the same builders who wrought with chalk and brick, or bonded even their stone walls in the south with courses of Roman tile.
Another conclusive proof of the temporary and mere military occupation of Scotland by the Romans, appears from the fact, that with a very few exceptions the Scoto-Roman remains have been brought to light on the line of the Antonine Wall. A very remarkable altar was found at Inveresk, near Edinburgh, so early as 1565, dedicated APOLLINI GRANNO, by Quintus Lusius Sabinianus, proconsul of Augustus, which possesses a singular interest to us from the fact that it attracted the special notice of Queen Mary of Scotland. In her treasurer's accounts appears the charge of twelve pence paid "to ane boy passand of Edinburgh with ane charge of the Queenis Grace, direct to the Baillies of Mussilburgh, charging thame to tak diligent heid and attendance that the monument of grit antiquitie, new fundin, be nocht demolisit nor broken down;" an evidence of archæological taste and reverence for monuments of idolatry, which probably did not in any degree tend to raise the queen in the estimation of the bailies of the burgh. The same ancient relic became an object of interest to Randolph and Cecil, the ambassador and minister of Queen Elizabeth,[409] and afterwards furnished Napier of Merchiston with an illustration of the idols of pagan Rome when writing his Commentary on the Apocalypse. This remarkable monument of the Roman colonists of Inveresk must have been preserved for some generations, as Sir Robert Sibbald mentions having seen it.[410] He died about the year 1712, and the Itinerarium Septentrionale of Gordon, in which no notice of it occurs, was published only fourteen years later. The remains of Roman villas with their hypocausti, flue-tiles, pottery, and other traces of Italian luxury, have been found at various times in the same neighbourhood, leaving no room to doubt that an important Roman town was once located on the spot. A few miles to the west, along the coast of the Forth, the little fishing village of Cramond is believed to occupy the site of the chief Roman sea-port on the east of Scotland. There also altars, inscribed tablets, coins, and other relics, attest the importance of the ancient Alaterva. Newstead, near the Eildons, has also furnished one altar, and Birrens, the old Blatum Bulgium, several inscriptions and sculptures. But even these are nearly all military relics, chiefly of the first and second Tungrian cohorts; and if to them are added some few fragments of sculpture and pottery, and examples of bronze culinary vessels, we have a summary of nearly the whole Roman remains found in Scotland, apart from the stations on the wall of Antoninus, and the celebrated Arthur's Oon, the supposed Templum Termini, of which so much has been written to so little purpose. The earliest writer who notices this remarkable architectural relic is Nennius, abbot of Bangor, as is believed, in the early years of the seventh century. His own era, however, is matter of dispute, and his account sufficiently confused and contradictory. Its masonry appears to have differed entirely from any authentic remains of Roman building found in Scotland, and, indeed, to have had no very close parallel anywhere; though its form very closely coincided with the round or bee-hive houses of Ireland, and its masonry was not greatly dissimilar to that of the Scottish round towers of the same builders, by whom it was more probably erected. The total absence of cement must at least be sufficient with most English antiquaries, to throw no little doubt on its Roman origin. The modern archæologist may be pardoned if he smile at the enthusiasm of elder antiquaries, who discovered in this little sacellum, or stone bee-hive, of twenty-eight feet in diameter and twenty-two feet in height, a fac-simile of "the famous Pantheon at Rome, before the noble portico was added to it by Marcus Agrippa," to which Gordon--the ever-memorable Sandy Gordon of the Antiquary--resolved not to be outdone by Dr. Stukely, adds, "The Pantheon, however, being only built of brick, whereas Arthur's Oven is made of regular courses of hewn stone!" Sir John Clerk, writing to Mr. Gale, shortly after the destruction of the Oon, remarks,--"In pulling these stones asunder, it appeared there had never been any cement between them, though there is limestone and coal in abundance very near it. Another thing very remarkable is, that each stone had a hole in it which appeared to have been made for the better raising them to a height by a kind of forceps of iron, and bringing them so much the easier to their several beds and courses."[411] These facts we owe to the barbarian cupidity of Sir Michael Bruce, on whose estate of Stonehouse this remarkable and indeed unique relic stood. The same zealous Scottish antiquary, quoted above, writing from Edinburgh to his English correspondent in June 1743, remarks with quaint severity,--"He has pulled it down, and made use of all the stones for a mill-dam, and yet without any intention of preserving his fame to posterity, as the destroyer of the Temple of Diana had. No other motive had this Gothic knight but to procure as many stones as he could have purchased in his own quarries for five shillings!... We all curse him with bell, book, and candle,"--an excommunicatory service not yet fallen wholly into disuse. Of this unique architectural relic sufficiently minute drawings and descriptions have been preserved to render it no difficult matter to reconstruct, in fancy, its miniature cupola and concentric courses of stone; but it still remains an archæological enigma, which the magic term Roman seems by no means satisfactorily to solve.
The course of Antoninus's rampart and military road lay through a part of the country since repeatedly selected by later engineers from its presenting the same facilities which first attracted the experienced eye of Agricola, and afterwards of Lollius Urbicus, as the most suitable ground for the chief Roman work in Scotland. Gordon, it is understood, acquired his chief knowledge of the Roman remains of this district while examining the ground with a view to the formation of a projected Forth and Clyde Canal.[412] General Roy again surveyed the same ground, through which at length the Canal, and still more recently the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway, have been carried; in each case leading to interesting discoveries of Roman remains.
The most remarkable of these disclosures took place at Auchindavy during the construction of the Forth and Clyde Canal, when a pit was discovered within the area of the Roman fort, containing five altars, a mutilated statue, and two ponderous iron hammers. Four of the altars, and probably the fifth, had been erected by one individual, M. Cocceius Firmus, a centurion in the Second Legion, Augusta. Their position, thus hastily thrown together and covered up on the spot where they were destined to lie undiscovered for so many centuries, seems to tell, in no unmistakable language, of the precipitate retreat of the Roman garrison from the fort of Auchindavy, which had been committed to the charge of the devout centurion who was thus compelled to abandon his desecrated aræ. All these, as well as most of the other relics found from time to time along the line of the Roman wall, have been deposited in the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow. They mark most emphatically the dawn of a totally new era in Scottish archæology. Definite historic annals henceforth come to the aid of induction. Dates take the place of periods, and individuals that of races. Unhappily also, with the definiteness of written records, we come in contact with doubts far more difficult to solve than many of those which have to be unravelled from the unwritten primeval records, since it is no longer the accuracy of the induction, but the veracity of the annalist, that has most anxiously to be looked to. Such, however, is not the case with the inscribed evidences of the presence of the Roman legions.
Fortunately for the Scottish antiquary the builders of the Caledonian Wall appear to have taken a peculiar and unprecedented pleasure in recording their share in this great work, actuated thereto, in part perhaps, by the reverence with which the name of Titus Antoninus was regarded alike by Roman soldiers and citizens. These legionary inscriptions, peculiar to the Scottish wall, indicating the several portions of it erected by the different legions and cohorts, are most frequently dedications of the fruit of their labours to the Emperor, Father of his Country. They are objects of just interest and historical value, supplying definite records of the legions by whom the country was held during the brief period of Roman occupation, and meting out to the modern investigator a measure of information more suited to his desires than he could hope to recover of so remote and poor a province of the Roman empire, from the notices of any contemporary author.
Only one of all the Roman historians, Julius Capitolinus, the biographer of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, makes any allusion to the erection of the Caledonian Wall; and on his sole authority, for fully fourteen centuries, rested the statement that the imperial legate, Lollius Urbicus, reared the vallum which still in its ruins perpetuates the name of the Emperor, and preserves, as a visible link between the present and the past, the northern limit of the Roman world. The very site of the several British walls was accordingly matter of dispute, when fortunately, towards the close of the seventeenth century, a rude and very imperfect fragment of an inscribed tablet was discovered at or near the fort of Bemulie,[413] which in point of historical value surpasses any Roman relic yet found in Scotland. The inscription is such a mutilated fragment that the farmer might have turned it up with his plough and flung it from the furrow, or the mason broken it up to build into his fence, without either of them dreaming that it differed in value from any other stone, though its few roughly inscribed letters supply a fact indispensable to the integrity of Scottish history. Gordon pronounces it "the most invaluable jewel of antiquity that ever was found in the island of Britain since the time of the Romans." It is the fragment of a votive tablet, so imperfect that it is doubtful whether it be a dedication by the Second Legion in honour of the Imperial Legate, or by the latter in honour of the Emperor. It contains, however, the names of both, and establishes the only essential fact, that the wall between the Forth and the Clyde is the work referred to by Julius Capitolinus. The stone, which now forms one of the treasures of the Hunterian Museum, measures seventeen by ten inches, and bears the abbreviated and mutilated inscription:--
P · LEG · II · A · Q · LOLLIO · VR LEG · AVG · PR · PR
No great error can be committed in thus extending it as a votive tablet in honour of the Legate, rather than of the Emperor: POSUIT LEGIO SECUNDA AUGUSTA QUINTO LOLLIO URBICO LEGATO AUGUSTI PROPRÆTORI. The ordinary legionary inscriptions include the name and distinctive titles of the legion, cohort, or vexillation, by whom the number of paces of the wall recorded on them have been erected; and dedicate the work in honour of the emperor. The larger tablets are generally adorned with sculptured decorations, and frequently bear the device of the legion; that of the Twentieth Legion being the Boar; and probably that of the Second Legion, surnamed Augusta, the Sea-Goat. One singular sculptured legionary tablet, however, found at Castlehill, the site of the third station on the wall, seems to leave little room for doubt that this fanciful hybrid of the goat and seal was also employed as the emblematical symbol of Caledonia, and may have been adopted by the Second Legion to commemorate their victories over the hardy race whom it not inaptly symbolized. It is a tablet recording with less abbreviation than usual the completion of 4666 paces of the wall by the Second Legion, Augusta:
IMP · CAES · TITO · AELIO · HADRIANO · ANTONINO · AVG · PIO · P · P · LEG · II AVG · PER · M · P · IIII · DC LXVI · S
On one side of this inscription appears a literal representation of imperial triumph:--captives stripped and bound, above them a mounted Roman armed and in full career, and over all a female figure, supposed to bear a wreath emblematic of Victory. On the other side is the Roman eagle perched on the prostrate sea-goat, the manifest counterpart of the literal exhibition of the conquered Caledonians. The origin of the singular emblem, however, is still open to question. It may be doubted if it was a Roman emblematic device, though familiar to them as the most usual form of Capricornus, for the imperial conquerors more generally adopted the most characteristic literal representations of the vanquished. It occurs on a rare coin figured by Gough, and now ascribed to Comius, about B.C. 45; but it may also be seen as the zodiacal sign, on a very remarkable calendar cut in marble, which was found in a ruined villa of Pompeii.
The Roman fort at Castlehill, where the above tablet was dug up, was one of the inferior class; its small dimensions arising, in part at least, perhaps, from the natural advantages of its position. The discoveries on its site, however, are possessed of greater interest than those yet known belonging to some of the largest stations on the wall. In the year 1826, a votive altar was brought to light on the same locality, dedicated, as Mr. Stuart renders it,[414] to the Eternal Field-Deities of Britain--CAMPESTRIBUS ET BRITANNI--by Quintus Pisentius Justus, prefect of the fourth cohort of Gaulish auxiliaries; a cohort which we learn from another altar discovered in Cumberland was afterwards stationed on the wall of Severus.
There are altogether in the Hunterian Museum six altars, twelve legionary inscriptions, and several centurial stones, all found along the line of the Caledonian Wall, besides a few more of each known to be in private hands. But nearly the whole of these have been so frequently described and engraved, that it would be superfluous to repeat their inscriptions here. One interesting discovery, however, made at Castlehill, since the publication of the Caledonia Romana, deserves to be noted. It was found during the spring of 1847, by the plough striking against it, where it lay imbedded in the soil with its edge upward, as if it had been purposely buried at some former period, in the shady ravine called the Peel Glen: a dark and eerie recess, where the Campestres Æterni Britanniæ, the fairies of Scottish folk-lore, have not yet entirely ceased to claim the haunt accorded to them by immemorial popular belief. The Roman relic discovered here is a square slab, considerably injured at the one end, but with the inscription fortunately so slightly mutilated that little difficulty can be felt in supplying the blank. The stone measures two feet six inches in greatest length, and two feet four inches in breadth. A cable-pattern border surrounds it, within which is the inscription.
This sculptured tablet is nearly the exact counterpart of another legionary inscription found about one hundred and fifty years since in the neighbourhood of Duntocher. In the latter the number of paces is defaced in the inscription, and unfortunately the duplicate recently discovered, which should have supplied the deficiency, is also mutilated, the break passing through where probably the additional mark of the fourth thousand originally stood. Both Horsley and Stuart guessed from the smallness of the space left for the figures in the former, that it must have been a round number, either III. or IIII. This argument is equally conclusive in regard to the inscription recently found, and little doubt can be entertained that the reading should be four thousand paces. It will doubtless appear to most men of this nineteenth century a matter of sufficient indifference, now that the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway occupies the line of the Roman vallum, whether the vexillation of the Twentieth Legion dedicated three or four thousand paces of their long obliterated wall to the Emperor whose name it bore. This tablet, however, establishes an additional fact suggested by some previous discoveries, that the legionaries were wont to erect these stones in pairs at the beginning and the end of their labours, thereby the more distinctly defining the extent of the work dedicated by them to the favourite emperor. The inscriptions heretofore found at the Castlehill Station, furnish no evidence of the presence of the Twentieth Legion as the garrison of that fort. At one time it appears to have been held by a detachment of the Second Legion, Augusta--the sculptors of the curious emblematic relievo of Caledonian defeat; and at another by the fourth cohort of Gaulish auxiliaries, as we learn from the votive altar of their prefect. The former were doubtless the contemporaries of the Twentieth Legion who, located at Duntocher, reared there the Roman fort, and constructed the vallum eastward till it joined the work of the Second Legion at Castlehill. This is confirmed by the diversity of the sculpture on the two slabs. Underneath each inscription is the wild boar, the symbol almost invariably figured on the works of the Twentieth Legion. They are disposed, however, in opposite directions, so that when the slabs were placed on the southern or Roman side of the wall, where they would be seen from the adjacent military road, the boars of the twin legionary stones would be facing each other.[415] Still more recent agricultural operations on the Castlehill farm have brought to light during the autumn of the present year, 1850, extensive indications of the remains of buildings in the immediate vicinity of the Peel Glen, where the tablet of the Twentieth Legion was discovered. The most remarkable feature hitherto exposed by these later operations is the singularly sculptured base of a column figured here; but these chance discoveries leave little room to doubt that a systematic trenching of the area of the fort would amply repay the antiquary for his labour.
Thus minute and circumstantial is the information still recoverable at this distance of time regarding the Roman colonists of Britain. Every century yields up some further additional records, and were we in possession of all the inscriptions graven on votive altars or set up on tablets and centurial stones, we would possess more ample and authentic elements for the history of the Roman occupation of Scotland than all that classic historians supply. Sufficient, however, has been preserved to furnish a very remarkable contrast between the relics of the Roman invasion and every other class of the archæological records of primitive Scottish history.
The whole of the legionary inscriptions and nearly all the altars and other remarkable Roman remains found on the line of the ancient vallum, have been discovered at its western end. No railway or other great public work has traversed its eastern course. The sites of its forts are uncertain or altogether unknown, and its famous Benval is not yet so entirely settled as to preclude all controversy, should antiquaries think the theme worthy of further contest. From time to time some new discovery adds to our materials for the history of the Roman occupation of Scotland, and many records of the builders of the ineffectual rampart of Antoninus probably still lie imbedded beneath its ruined course. It is more important for our present purpose to observe that the discoveries which have been made on some single Anglo-Roman sites greatly exceed all that has ever been brought to light in Scotland truly traceable to the Roman occupancy. No archæological relics can surpass in interest or value the legionary inscriptions peculiar to our Scottish wall, so precise and definitely minute in the information they have hoarded for behoof of later ages. But they are purely military records, the monuments, in reality, of Roman defeat; while of the evidences of Roman colonization and the introduction of their arts and social habits, it is far short of the truth to say, that more numerous and valuable Anglo-Roman antiquities have been brought to light within the last few years at York, Colchester, or Cirencester, than all the Roman remains brought together from every public and private museum of Scotland could equal.
"How profitless the relics that we cull, Troubling the last holds of ambitious Rome, Unless they chasten fancies that presume Too high, or idle agitations lull! . . . . . . . Our wishes what are they? Our fond regrets tenacious in their grasp? The sage's theory? the poet's lay?-- Mere fibulæ, without a robe to clasp; Obsolete lamps, whose light no time recalls; Urns without ashes, tearless lachrymals!"[416]
It is of importance to our future progress that this should be thoroughly understood. English archæologists, we may be permitted to think, have devoted their attention somewhat too exclusively to the remains of a period on which information was less needed than on most other sections of archæological inquiry. Still the field of Anglo-Roman antiquities is an ample one, and therefore well-merited to be explored. But when Scottish archæologists, following their example, fall to discussing the weary battle of Mons Grampius--the site of Agricola's Victoria, founded at Abernethy, or elsewhere--and the like threadbare questions, they are but thrashing straw from which the very chaff has long since been gleaned to the last husk, and can only bring well-deserved ridicule on their pursuits.
In the present brief glance at the indications of Roman occupation of Scotland little more is needed for fulfilling the plan of the work than to note a few of the most interesting Scoto-Roman relics, including such as have either been discovered since the publication of the "Caledonia Romana," or have escaped the notice of its industrious and observant author. It is surprising, however, that under the latter class has to be mentioned the most beautiful specimen of Roman sculpture existing in Scotland. In the front of an old house in the Nether-Bow of Edinburgh there have stood, since the early part of last century--and how much longer it is now vain to inquire--two fine profile heads in high relief, the size of life, which, from the close resemblance traceable to those on the coins of Severus, there can be no hesitation in pronouncing to be designed as representations of the Emperor Septimius Severus and his Empress Julia. They were first noticed by Gordon in 1727, and are described by Maitland about twenty years later, in a sufficiently confused manner, but with the additional local tradition that they had formerly occupied the wall of a house on the opposite side of the street. A medieval inscription, corresponding in reading as well as in the probable date of its characters, to the Mentz Bible, printed about the year 1455, has been intercalated between the heads of the emperor and empress, and seems, as it were, to furnish an earlier witness from the fifteenth century, to say that the Roman sculpture is still in situ.
It admits of serious doubt whether the discovery at Copenhagen, in the last century, of the work of Richard of Cirencester ought to be viewed as any great benefit conferred on British archæology. The compilation of a monk of the fourteenth century, even as supplementary to the geographical details of Ptolemy, can hardly be received with too great caution, but used as it has been almost entirely to supersede the elder authority, it has in many instances, and especially in relation to our northern Roman geography, proved a source of endless confusion and error. Without, however, aiming at reconstructing the Ptolemaic map of Caledonia, we have abundant evidence that various important Coloniæ were established, which have received no notice, either in Ptolemy's geography or the "De Situ Britanniæ" of the monk of Westminster, whom antiquaries may be pardoned suspecting to have assumed the cowl for the purpose of disguise, being in truth a monk not of the fourteenth but of the eighteenth century.[417] Attracted by the supposed correspondence of the triple heights of the Eildon Hills to the designation of Ptolemy's Trimontium, General Roy sought in their neighbourhood for the evidences of a Roman station, and though less successful than he desired, he found sufficient indications of the convergence of the great military roads towards this point, to induce him to conclude "that the ancient Trimontium of the Romans was situated somewhere near these three remarkable hills, at the village of Eildon, Old Melros, or perhaps about Newstead, where the Watling Street hath passed the Tweed."[418] Though the propriety of assuming this as the site of Trimontium is questioned, the sagacious conclusions as to a Roman site detected by the practical eye of General Roy, have since been amply confirmed by the discovery of undoubted traces of a Roman town at the base of the Eildon Hills. Stuart has engraved an altar dedicated to the forest deity Silvanus, by Carrius Domitianus, a centurion of the Twentieth Legion, which he describes as "a few years since discovered, not far from the village of Eildon."[419] As this discovery is of considerable value as a clue to the true site of this central Roman town within the province of Valentia, it is worthy of note that it was found on the 15th of January 1830, in digging a drain, about three feet below the surface, in a field called the Red Abbey Stead, near Newstead, a village to the north of Eildon, and directly east of Melrose.
More recently the Hawick Railway has been carried through the vale of Melrose, and in its progress has added further evidence of the presence of the Roman colonists on the site, while the ordinary course of agricultural operations has exposed numerous foundations of buildings, Roman medals and coins, and a regular causewayed road, undoubtedly the ancient Watling Street. This road was laid bare only a year or two before, in the progress of draining a field called the "Well Meadow," immediately to the west of the Red Abbey Stead. It was about twenty feet broad, and was entirely excavated by the tenant, in order to employ its materials for constructing a neighbouring fence. In the course of removing it the foundations of various houses were exposed, and a sculptured stone was discovered, considerably mutilated, but still bearing on it, in high relief, the wild boar, the well-known device of the Twentieth Legion. As this corresponds with the inscription on the altar previously discovered, there can be little question that the roadway and other military works of this important station, were executed by the same legion. Another sculptured portion of an inscribed tablet, found in the same field, evidently of Roman workmanship, retains only the fragmentary letters CVI. Among the numerous foundations of ancient buildings much Roman pottery has been dug up, including the fine red Samian ware, the black, and the coarser yellowish or grey fragments of mortaria and other common domestic utensils. It is not improbable, indeed, that the name of Red Abbey Stead has been conferred on the site of the Roman colonia, owing to the colour of the soil and the characteristics of the remains of ancient building so frequently exposed, arising from the presence of numerous fragments of Roman brick and pottery. By the same means the course of the Antonine Wall may frequently be traced in the new ploughed fields on its site, where all other indications have disappeared. There is no evidence of any abbey having ever existed on the site; but surrounded as the district is with Newstead and New and Old Melrose, the seats of ancient ecclesiastical establishments, the discovery of the brick foundations of extensive buildings would very naturally suggest the local name of the Red Abbey. It was in the immediate neighbourhood of this Roman site that one of those curious subterranean structures was discovered, which has been referred to in an earlier chapter.[420]
Towards the close of 1846, during the excavations for the Hawick branch of the North British Railway, several circular pits or shafts were laid open a little to the east of the village of Newstead, and nearly on the line of the Roman road, an additional portion of which was exposed by the railway-cutting. Two of these shafts were regularly built round the sides with stones, apparently gathered from the bed of the river, and measured each two feet six inches in diameter, and about twenty feet deep. The others greatly varied both in width and depth, and were filled with a black fetid matter, mixed with earth, and containing numerous fragments of pottery, oyster shells, antlers of the red deer, and bones and skulls of cattle, apparently the Bos Longifrons: the skulls being broken on the frontal bone as if with the blow of a pole-axe, or possibly of the sacrificial securis. A piece of a skull discovered in the same place seems to have been that of a small-sized horse. In one of the pits the skeleton of a man was found standing erect with a spear beside him, and accompanied with mortaria and other undoubted remains of Roman pottery. The spear-head, which measures fourteen inches in length, and only one and a quarter in greatest breadth of blade, is figured here. The skull has been already described and compared with the crania of the Scottish tumuli in a previous chapter;[421] and the weapon represented here, as well as various mortaria, urns, coins, and other relics from the same locality, are now in the possession of John Miller, Esq., C.E., under whose direction the railway was constructed. A bronze kettle, lachrymatories, bricks, clay tubes, stones cut with the cable-pattern and the like familiar classic mouldings, and numerous other Roman remains, all attest the important character of the Roman town on this site. Coins from the same locality are also in the possession of Thomas Tod, Esq., of Drygrange, and Dr. J. A. Smith. In so far as these are to be received in evidence of the length of time during which the Eildon station was occupied, they extend over a longer period than we have any reason to believe the Roman colonists possessed the province of Valentia; including those of Vespasian, Domitian, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Severus, as well as of Diocletian, Maximianus, Carausius, Constantius Chlorus, and Constantine. It is to be borne in remembrance, however, that among the Britons of that early period a coin was money whose ever image or superscription it bore, and doubtless the Roman mintage continued to circulate long after the last of the military colonists had abandoned the province of Valentia.
Directly to the north, on the line of the road discovered in the Well Meadow, there existed, in the memory of some few village patriarchs, the foundations of a bridge on the banks of the Tweed, which also may be assumed as the work of the Twentieth Legion. It appears to have attracted the notice of General Roy, as he speaks of the Watling Street having crossed the Tweed about Newstead. Continuing our course northward along this ascertained Roman route, we are once more left to the guidance of the recent interpreters of Ptolemy and the believers in Richard of Cirencester, though it is possible with the aid both of new and old evidence to fix another portion of the route which has heretofore been misplaced. The assigned old Roman Iter proceeds from Eildon to the supposed Curio or Curia, near Borthwick--a site still requiring confirmation--and thence directly to the Roman port of Cramond or Alaterva.
The southern shores of the Bodotria Æstuarium, or Frith of Forth, bear more abundant traces than almost any other Scottish district of continuous occupation by Roman colonists; doubtless owing, in part at least, to the frequent presence of the fleet in the neighbouring estuary. If Alaterva, to whose Deæ Matres one of its altars was dedicated, be indeed the ancient name of Cramond, no such epithet is to be found in the old itineraries, nor has a classic name been suggested for the no less important Roman town at Inveresk; unless that one zealous local antiquary[422] has recently conceived the possibility of establishing its claims to be the true Curia, hitherto located elsewhere on very slender and inconclusive evidence.
Following the course of the assigned Roman route from the supposed Curia at Currie, near Borthwick, it is carried by Roy, in his revised map, by a westerly sweep towards Cramond, leaving the rocky heights of Edinburgh some two miles to the east of it, and joining Inveresk, in the maps of Chalmers and Stuart, by imaginary crossroads, sufficiently satisfactory on paper. A totally different arrangement may, however, be shewn to have been followed in laying down the Roman military roads of this district. Earlier writers were not so ready to exclude the Scottish capital from Roman honours: e.g.,--"The town of Eaden," says Camden, "commonly called Edenborow, the same undoubtedly with Ptolemy's Στρατοπεδον Πτερωτον, i.e., Castrum Alatum."[423] Sir Robert Sibbald was one of the first of our Scottish authors to place a Roman colonia at Edinburgh, but without advancing any satisfactory grounds for such a conclusion.[424] "Some," says he, "think Edinburgh the Caer-Eden mentioned in the ancient authors." Others, equally bent on maintaining the honour of the Scottish metropolis, found in it the Alauna of Ptolemy, and in the neighbouring Water of Leith the Alauna Fluvius--a discovery perhaps not unworthy to match with that of Richie Moniplies when he sneered down the Thames with ineffable contempt in comparison with the same favourite stream! Such arguments, like those for too many other Romano-Scottish sites, were mere theories, unsupported by evidence, and little more can be advanced in favour of the supposed Castrum Alatum.[425] Later writers on the Roman antiquities of Scotland have accordingly excluded Edinburgh from the list of classic localities. There are not wanting, however, satisfactory traces of Roman remains on the site of the Scottish capital, a due attention to which may help to furnish materials for a revised map of the Roman Iter.
There passes across the most ancient districts of Edinburgh, and skirting the line of its oldest fortifications, a road leading through the Pleasance,--so called from an old convent once dedicated to S. Maria de Placentia,--St. Mary's Wynd,--another conventual memorial,--Leith Wynd, St. Ninian's Row, Broughton, and Canonmills, right onward in the direction of the ancient port of Alaterva. Probably more than fourteen hundred years have elapsed since Curia and Alaterva were finally abandoned by their Roman occupants, and the dwellings of the Eildon colony were left to crumble into ruins; yet the traces of the Romans' footsteps have not been so utterly obliterated but that we can still recover them along the line of this old road, so deeply imprinted with the tread of later generations.
In the year 1782 a coin of the Emperor Vespasian was found in a garden in the Pleasance, and presented by Dr. John Aitken to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland,--the first recent recovery, so far as is known, of any indications of the Roman presence on the highway which it is now sought to retrace to a Roman origin. Much more conclusive evidence has, however, since been brought to light. In digging in St. Ninian's Row, on the west side of the Calton Hill, in 1815, for the foundations of the Regent Bridge, a quantity of fine red Samian ware, of the usual embossed character, was discovered. It was secured by Thomas Sivright, Esq. of Southhouse, and remained in his valuable collection of antiquities till the whole was sold and dispersed after his death.[426] In 1822, when enlarging the drain by which the old bed of the North Loch, at the base of Edinburgh Castle, is kept dry, portions of an ancient causeway were discovered fully four feet below the modern level of the road. Some evidence of its antiquity was furnished on the demolition, in 1845, of the Trinity Hospital, formerly part of the prebendal buildings of the collegiate foundation of Queen Mary of Gueldres, founded in 1462, when it was discovered that the foundations rested on part of the same ancient causeway;[427] and on the demolition of the venerable collegiate church an opportunity was afforded me of examining another portion of it above which the apsis of the choir and part of the north aisle had been founded. The conclusion which its appearance and construction immediately suggested, was that which further investigation so strongly confirms, that these various remains indicate the course of a Roman road. It was composed of irregular rounded stones, closely rammed together, and below them was a firm bed of forced soil coloured with fragments of brick, bearing a very close resemblance to the more southern portions of the same Roman military way recently exposed to view in the vale of Melrose. The portions of it discovered in 1822 included a branch extending a considerable way eastward along the North Back of Canongate, in a direct line towards the well-known Roman road in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, popularly styled "The Fishwives' Causeway."[428] Here, therefore, we recover the traces of the Roman way in its course from Eildon to Alaterva, with a diverging road to the important town and harbour at Inveresk, shewing beyond doubt that Edinburgh had formed an intermediate link between these several Roman sites. The direction of the road, as still visible in the neighbourhood of Cramond in the early part of the eighteenth century, completely coincided with the additional portion of it thus recovered. "From this same station of Cramond," says Gordon, "runs a noble military way towards Castrum Alatum, or Edinburgh; but as it comes near that city, it is wholly levelled and lost among the ploughed lands."[429]
Within a few yards of the point where this ancient Roman road crosses the brow of the hill on which the ancient Scottish capital is built, are the beautiful bas-reliefs above referred to, the heads of the Emperor SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS and his wife JULIA. I have already suggested elsewhere[430] that these sculptures, which in Maitland's time, 1750, were said to have been removed from a house on the opposite side of the street, have probably been discovered in digging the foundations of that building. This idea has received striking confirmation during the present year, (1850.) In the progress of laying a new and larger set of pipes for conveying water to the palace of Holyrood, the whole line of the High Street has been opened up, the workmen in many places digging into natural soil, and even through the solid rock. In the immediate neighbourhood of the site of the old "Heart of Mid-Lothian," several coins were found, including one of Henry IV. of France, bearing the date 1596; and lower down the street, two silver denarii of the Emperor Septimius Severus were discovered, in good preservation, not many feet from the locality of the Roman sculptures. The reverse of the one represents a soldier armed, and bearing the figure of victory in his right hand--legend, AVGG · VICT., and of the other a female figure in flowing drapery, bearing in the right hand a wreath, and in the left a cornucopia--the legend illegible. The prejudices of a strong local partiality induce me to look upon these traces of Roman presence on a spot which formed the battle-ground of Scotland during the "Douglas Wars," as well as in older struggles, with an interest which I cannot hope to communicate to archæologists in general, but which to many of them may perhaps seem a pardonable excess. The visit of the Emperor Septimius Severus, and still more, of his Empress,[431] to this distant corner of the Roman world, were incidents of a sufficiently unusual occurrence to be commemorated by those who have left records of every few thousand paces of an earthen vallum which they erected. If we suppose the road which has been traced out in continuation of the Watling Street to have been the route by which the Emperor journeyed northward--as there is good probability that it must have been--we may imagine him pausing on the brow of the hill, just above the steep slope occupied by Leith Wynd, and catching the first view of the Bodotrian Frith, with the Roman galleys gliding along its shores, or urged with sail and oar towards the busy sea-port of Alaterva, now the humble fishing village of Cramond. On this spot it seems probable that some important memorial of this distinguished Emperor's visit had been erected, of which the beautiful sculptures still remaining there formed a prominent feature. Overthrown amid the wreck of Roman empire, they may have lain interred for many centuries; for within a very short distance of their present site, recent discoveries have brought to light medieval sculptures and remains of buildings many feet below the foundations of those of the sixteenth century.[432]
These, however, are not the sole evidences of the occupation of Edinburgh by the Romans. In the Reliquiæ Galeanæ, of date March 1742, Sir John Clerk thus describes "a Roman arch discovered at Edinborough,"--"Just about the time that your structure at York was pulled down, we had one at Edinborough which met with the same fate. It was an old arch that nobody ever imagined to be Roman, and yet it seems it was, by an urn discovered in it, with a good many silver coins, all of them common, except one of Faustina Minor, which I had not. It represents her bust on one side, and on the reverse a lectisternium with this inscription, SÆCULI FELICITAS."[433] It is much to be regretted that this information is not more precise, both about the other coins and the arch in which so remarkable a deposit was found. Such as it is, however, it is of great value. To these traces of the Roman presence there remain to be added the sculptured heads which formerly adorned the old Cross of Edinburgh, demolished in 1756, and described by Arnot as apparently of the Lower Empire--an opinion to be received with some doubt. In digging the foundation of a large reservoir erecting on the Castlehill, during the present season, among various very remarkable discoveries, to be afterwards noticed, there was found another relic of the Lower Empire, a single copper coin, in excellent preservation, struck under Constantine the Great.
Pennant describes in his Second Tour, "certain curiosities in a small but select private cabinet," found in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, which had escaped his notice on his former visit. Notwithstanding their very great local value they have experienced the usual fate of private collections, and are no longer known. "Among other antiquities in the cabinet of Mr. John Macgouan, discovered near this city, is an elegant brass image of a beautiful Naiad, with a little satyr in one arm. On her head is a wine-vat or some such vessel, to denote her an attendant on Bacchus; and beneath one foot a subverted vase, expressive of her character as a nymph of the fountains." If this beautiful group still exists the description must render it easily identified. Other relics in the same private collection, and it may be assumed, from the connexion, included in Pennant's description as discovered in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, are a bronze vessel with a perforated top, possibly designed for incense, and an iron scourge or flagrum, one of the dreadful instruments of torture used by the Romans, chiefly for the discipline of slaves, but afterwards employed in the persecutions of the primitive Christians. Lastly, it is not unworthy of note, in passing, that in the foundations of the ancient Chapel of St. Margaret, in the Castle, an early Romanesque work, there are bricks which may possibly be only fragments of medieval floor-tiles, but which more readily suggest the idea of their being traces of older Roman buildings, similar to those which remained in the contemporary Church of St. Michael at Inveresk, until its recent demolition, and are still recognised amid the later masonry of Dumbarton Castle, the THEODOSIA of Richard of Cirencester. Independently of this, however, evidence enough has, I think, been adduced to establish the fact that a Roman colonia existed on the site of Edinburgh. Yet it was not without reason that this was assumed as probable by older Scottish antiquaries in the absence of such proof, since the admirable military positions presented by the locality are too obvious to have escaped the practised eyes of the Roman engineers established on the neighbouring coast; especially as they had previously been occupied by the native Britons, as is manifest by the discoveries of their cists and cinerary urns, as well as of their primitive weapons, in the immediate vicinity. Taking these latter arguments into consideration, the mere fact of the Roman roads from Newstead--and perhaps Curia--from Cramond and Inveresk, all meeting in the valley between the Calton and the Castle Hills, is of itself good presumptive evidence in favour of a Roman post having occupied the site.
It need not excite surprise that traces of Roman occupation should be found in localities unnoted in the pages of Ptolemy. We may rather wonder that history should furnish the amount of information it does regarding the brief presence of the legions in a country from which they returned with such dubious accounts of triumph. Among the Romano-British relics in the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, are a circular bronze ornament, an elegant foot of a bronze tripod in form of a horse's leg and hoof, and a small figure of Minerva on a pedestal of brass gilt, measuring nearly three inches high, all found at different times in East-Lothian. The last relic is not to be compared, however, to another bronze in the same collection, a figure of the goddess Pallas Armata, five inches in height, dug up in the neighbourhood of the Kirkintilloch station on the Roman wall, and presented to the Society in 1786. It is a beautiful work of art; but the most remarkable feature about it is the spear which the goddess holds in her hand, bearing an exact resemblance to the tilting-spear of the middle ages.
In the same collection are also preserved a bronze stamp, discovered near the village of Carrington, Mid-Lothian, bearing the inscription, which is reversed, in bold relief, TVLLIAE TACITAE; and a bronze key of undoubted Roman workmanship, found within a camp-kettle, in a moss near North-Berwick Law,--probably the same locality where a quantity of bronze vessels were recently dug up, as already described. In addition to these must be noted the exceedingly beautiful bronze lamp four and three-fifth inches in length, figured on a previous page, found along with a small and rudely executed bronze eagle, at Currie, Mid-Lothian. These remarkable Roman relics will probably be considered sufficient to establish the fact, that the Roman road had passed through that line of country. They will add, however, only a very slight addition to the unsatisfactory evidence on which the last named place has been assumed to be the site of the Roman Curia--heretofore on little better authority than the correspondence between the ancient and modern names. Gordon describes another "most curious Roman lamp of brass, adorned with a variety of engravings," found at Castlecary.[434]
"As you very well notice," writes Sir John Clerk to his friend and correspondent Mr. Roger Gale, "Ptolemy mistook several Latin names when he rendered them into Greek. Of this kind, as I suspect, is his Πτερωτον Στρατοπεδον, Castrum Alatum, which our antiquarians have applied to Edinburgh. I rather believe that the place designed by Ptolemy is an old Roman station on the sea-coast, which we call Cramond, and that it was anciently called, not Castra Alata but Alatervum, or Castra Alaterva." To this Mr. Gale replies, with equally cogent arguments for restoring the Castra Alata to the winged heights of Edinburgh, on which we need not enter here, having already sufficiently discussed the question of the latter's claims as a Roman site. While, however, Edinburgh has undergone the ceaseless changes which centuries bring round to a densely populated locality, Cramond was in all probability abandoned to solitude, or at most occupied by a few fishermen's huts when deserted by its Roman founders. Hence the traces of its ancient colonists have been discovered in great abundance in recent times. An almost incredible number of coins and medals, in gold, silver, and bronze, have been found at different periods, of which Gordon mentions between forty and fifty of special note which he examined in Sir John Clerk's possession. Sibbald, Horsley, and Wood, all refer in similar terms to the valuable numismatic treasures gathered on this Roman site, including an almost unbroken series of imperial coins from Augustus to Diocletian; and thereby proving that the ancient Alaterva had not been abandoned to utter solitude on the retreat of Severus. Some rare and valuable medals have also been discovered among its ruins, including one of the Emperor Septimius Severus, inscribed on the reverse, FVNDATOR PACIS, and supposed to have been struck to give the character of a triumph to the doubtful peace effected by him with the Caledonians.[435] Three altars have been found at Cramond; one sacred to Jove, one to the Deæ Matres of Alaterva, and the third, figured by Horsley, and assigned by him, as well as by later writers, to the favourite forest deity Silvanus. The obvious resemblance, however, of the sculpture on the last altar to an Anglo-Roman mosaic, now in the British Museum, representing the sea-god Neptune with horns of lobster's claws, and dolphins proceeding from his mouth, leaves little room for doubt that the colonists of the chief Roman port on the Bodotrian Frith had more appropriately dedicated their altar to the ruler of the waves.[436] The large altar found at Cramond, dedicated to the Supreme Jove, formerly in the Advocates' Library, and now deposited in the Scottish Antiquarian Museum, has been frequently engraved. It is thus inscribed,--
I O M COH · V · GALL· CVI · PRÆEST IMINE · HONVIS TERTVLLVS PRAEF · V · SL L · M
Its well-known inscription is repeated here, in order to associate it with another relic found at Cramond, probably prior to the discovery of this altar, which attests the presence of the same Roman Prefect, Imineus Honorius Tertullus, at the station of Alaterva. Among the numerous Roman remains acquired by Sir John Clerk from this interesting locality, and now preserved at Penicuick House, is a bronze stamp, measuring two and three-eighths by one and a half inches. It is surmounted by a crescent, and bears the words, in raised letters of half an inch in height, TERTVLL. PROVINC. The inscription is reversed, having evidently been designed for use as a stamp, and on the back is a ring handle in form of a bay leaf. A centurial inscription of the Second Legion, Augusta, a sculptured figure of the imperial eagle grasping the lightning in its talons, with numerous carved stones, bricks, flue-tiles, and pottery, have from time to time been recovered on the same Roman site. To these may be added another inscription, derived from the Morton MS., presented in 1827 to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, by Susan, Countess-Dowager of Morton.
It is indorsed, "Ancient inscriptions on stones found in Scotland," and is supposed to have been written by James, Earl of Morton, president of the Royal Society, who died in 1786. Some of the inscriptions appear to have been derived from Camden and other well-known authorities; but others, including the following imperfect relic, are probably nowhere else preserved. Even in its extremely mutilated and fragmentary state, it is, perhaps, not altogether unworthy of preservation. It is thus described,--"This inscription is on a stone on the east end of the church of Cramond, in West-Lothian, [Mid-Lothian,] being three foot long, and one foot and a half broad, having four lyons drawn on it, all being almost worn out,"
. . . . G PVBLIVS CR. . . . . . IN POMPONIAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PAT · P · D · D . . . .
This inscription escaped the notice of Wood when preparing his history of the parish, or was perhaps thought to be too imperfect to be worth recording, and it now no longer exists.
Another Scottish stream bearing the name of the Almond forms a tributary of the Tay, and is also associated, by the remarkable discoveries on its banks, with the memory of the legionary invaders. A Roman camp, once in good preservation, has been nearly obliterated by the encroachment of the stream on its banks; but the changes which destroyed its entrenchments have brought to light still more satisfactory traces of their constructors. The most interesting of these is a bar of lead of 73 lbs. weight, marked thus--[Illustration: (X J XXXX II], beside which lay the remains of a helmet and spear, nearly consumed by rust. Another stamped pig of lead was found at Kirkintilloch, on the line of the wall; and examples from various English localities, inscribed with the names and titles of Roman Emperors, are preserved in the British Museum, and in private collections. One of these, marked IMP. ADRIANI. AVG, supplies a new argument relative to ancient British metallurgy. It was found near the lead mines of Mr. More of Linley Hall, county Salop, where an old drift, distinguished from those of modern date by various evidences of imperfect mining, is still designated the Roman Vein. Ancient mining tools have been found in it, and Sir R. I. Murchison states his opinion that the block of lead is the product of the neighbouring British mine.[437] Another pig of lead, with its Roman inscription partially defaced by oxidation, was recently dug up at Chester, and is figured in the Journal of the Archæological Association,[438] along with one found at Broughton Brook, Hants, and still preserved at Bossington Park. The latter is inscribed NERONIS. AVG. EX. KIAN. IIII. COS. BRIT., and supplies a remarkably interesting example of the historical value frequently pertaining to such relics. The inscription refers to the Cangi or Kiangi, immediately prior to the reverses experienced by the Romans from the courage and skill of the heroic Boadicea. The precise date is furnished, Nero having been consul for the fourth time only the year before; and it is suggested, with great probability, that this block of lead was on its way for exportation, composing part of the tribute, the harsh exaction of which contributed to incite the Britons to resistance.
Among minuter relics belonging to the same period, the dentated bronze ring figured here, from the original in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries, is worthy of some note from the rarity of such objects in Britain. It was discovered near Merlsford, on the river Eden, Fifeshire, and closely corresponds to another example found in Suffolk, and figured in the Archæological Journal, where it is remarked that objects of this kind are frequently met with in Continental collections, but have rarely, if ever, been found in this country.[439] They occur with one, two, and three rows of teeth. Sir Samuel Meyrick describes them as dentated rings, the form apparently suggested by the Murex shell, and supposes them to have been attached to the whirling arm of a military flail.
But by far the most remarkable of the recently discovered remains of the Roman occupants of Scotland is a medicine stamp, acquired by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, along with a very valuable collection of antiquities, bequeathed to them by E. W. A. Drummond Hay, Esq., formerly one of the secretaries of the Society. From his notes it appears that it was found in the immediate vicinity of Tranent Church, East-Lothian, in a quantity of debris, broken tiles, and brick-dust, which may not improbably have once formed the residence and laboratory of Lucius Vallatinus, the Roman oculist, whose name this curious relic supplies. It consists of a small cube of pale green stone, two and three-fifth inches in length, and engraved on two sides as in the annexed woodcut; the letters being reversed for the purpose of stamping the unguents or other medicaments retailed by its original possessor.
The inscriptions admit of being extended thus on the one side: L. VALLATINI EVODES AD CICATRICES ET ASPRITUDINES, which may be rendered--The evodes of Lucius Vallatinus for cicatrices and granulations. The reverse, though in part somewhat more obscure, reads: L. VALLATINI A PALO CROCODES AD DIATHESES--The crocodes, or preparation of saffron, of L. Vallatinus of the Palatine School,(?) for affections of the eyes.[440] Both the Euodes and the Crocodes are prescriptions given by Galen, and occur on other medicine stamps. Several examples have been found in England, and many in France and Germany, supplying the names of their owners and the terms of their preparations. Many of the latter indicate their chief use for diseases of the eye, and hence they have most commonly received the name of Roman oculists' stamps. No example, however, except the one figured here, has ever occurred in Scotland; and amid legionary inscriptions, military votive altars, and sepulchral tablets, it is peculiarly interesting to stumble on this intelligent memento, restoring to us the name of the old Roman physician who ministered to the colonists of the Lothians the skill, and perchance also the charlatanry, of the healing art.
A remarkable gold relic of a semicircular form was found in 1787 in a moss on the borders of Moffat parish, Annandale, near the track of the Roman way. It measured from three to four inches in length, but was evidently imperfect, and had on the exterior edge an ornamental raised rim, inscribed in characters perforated through the gold: IOVI. AVG. VOT. XX. An exceedingly beautiful bronze flagon, twelve inches in height, plated with gold, and of undoubted Roman workmanship, discovered in the bottom of a small burn, on the edge of an extensive moss, in the parish of Lesmahagow, Lanarkshire, is now in the Hunterian Museum, and has been engraved in the Archæologia.[441] A pair of patellæ, found near Frier's Carse, Dumfriesshire, in 1790, one of them inscribed on the handle ANSIEPHARR, are also engraved and described in the Archæologia.[442] Two others are noticed by Ure, which were found in a chambered tumulus, in the parish of Rutherglen, and stamped with the name of CONGALLUS. The handle of another of the same type, the name on which is too indistinct to be deciphered, was found at a depth of five feet in the Moss of Ballat, Stirlingshire, in 1849, and is now in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries. In addition to these, among the MSS. in the library of the Society, is a sketch of what appears to be justly described as "one of the most elegant Roman cups ever discovered in Britain, of the finest Corinthian brass, beautifully embellished with a dance of the Bacchantæ in the centre, a wreath of vine leaves tastefully encircling the neck in alto relievo, the whole highly finished. It was found about nine feet under the surface of Lochar Moss, Dumfriesshire, and long preserved in the family of a gentleman in that county, but has now been lost sight of for some years." The drawing, which is by Mr. W. S. Irvine, was forwarded to the Society through the present Sir David Brewster in 1815, along with sketches of Roman altars and other antiquities, and proposals for publishing a work on the antiquities of what the author calls Regnum Cambrense. The drawings are slight, and sadly out of perspective, but they furnish some interesting materials relative to the Scottish Roman invasion, which have escaped the notice of Stuart--the only writer who has treated of the subject since their discovery. The vessel above described is an exceedingly beautiful vase, with floriated handles, curving up into birds' heads where they are attached at the lower ends to the vase. Its dimensions are not given, and the sketch is unfortunately too imperfect to be engraved.
Apart from the stations on the Antonine Wall and the fertile regions of the Lothians, no district of Scotland has been so fruitful in remains of Roman art and military skill as the country of the Selgovæ, and especially Birrens, the supposed BLATUM BULGIUM of Antoninus. To the materials for the Scoto-Roman history of this province I am fortunately able to make additions from various sources. The following tablet, thus oddly located in the Morton MS., belongs to the district of the Selgovæ,--"This inscription is in a house of Jockie Graham's in Eskdale, fixed in a wall, set up, as appears by the Legio Augusta Secunda, in memorial of the Emperor Hadrian;"
IMP · CÆS · TRA · HAD RIANO · AVG · LEG II · AVG · F ·
The successor of Trajan, we know, visited our island soon after his accession to the purple, but he was hastily summoned away to quell an insurrection at another extremity of his unwieldy empire on the banks of the Nile, and was glad to abandon the line where Agricola had reared his forts for that finally adopted by Septimius Severus as the northern limit of imperial sway. Camden mentions an inscription, the counterpart of this, dug up at Netherby,[443] and Pennant describes another nearly similar, (possibly indeed the Eskdale tablet,) which he examined among the antiquities at Hoddam Castle, Dumfriesshire.[444] All the inscriptions, however, transcribed by the latter at Hoddam Castle, are understood, where not otherwise specified, to be from the neighbouring station of Birrens, in which case the Eskdale tablet forms an important addition to the traces of the Roman Emperor's presence in Scotland. It is curious that neither Pennant, nor Stuart in his more elaborate Caledonia Romana,[445] makes any comment on the singular discovery of a legionary dedication to the elder Emperor Hadrian, found thus far within the transmural province of Valentia. The legionary tablets of the Scottish Wall are its most interesting relics. Notwithstanding the very great number of altars and other Anglo-Roman inscriptions found along the line of the southern wall, only two or three have borne the name of either of the Emperors by whom it was erected, and none of them exactly correspond to the Scottish legionary stones. So rare indeed are memorials of Septimius Severus, even in the south, that Gordon characterizes the discovery by Roger Gale of one bearing the name of that Emperor, in the foundation of Hexham Church, Northumberland, as "a very precious jewel of antiquity."[446]
Leaving Eskdale for Annandale, we find ourselves within the interesting locality which includes both the stations of Birrens and Birrenswork Hill. Here have been discovered hypocausti, granaries, altars; a ruined temple, with the full figure, as is supposed, of the goddess Brigantia, inscribed with the name of AMANDUS the architect, who erected it in obedience to Imperial commands; the pedestal and torso of a colossal statue of the god Mercury; a mutilated statue of Fortune, the fruit of a vow in gratitude for restored health, performed by a Prefect of one of the Tungrian cohorts; a sepulchral tablet, dedicated by her mother to the shade of Pervica, a Roman maiden who faded under our bleak northern skies; with numerous other evidences of an important Roman colonia. A few of the Birrens inscriptions and other antiquities belong to the earlier years of the Roman presence in Scotland, but the greater number appear to be clearly referrible to the later era of the province of Valentia, subsequent to the retreat of the Emperor Septimius Severus. This is proved by the debased style of art which stamps nearly all the provincial Roman works of the third and fourth centuries. Confining any detailed accounts, however, to such relics as have not been previously described: in 1810 a beautiful altar, dedicated to Minerva, was dug up at Birrens by Mr. Clow of Laud, and is described in Mr. W. S. Irvine's MS. as serving (in 1815) as the pedestal to a sun-dial in the garden of George Irving, Esq., at his seat of Burnfoot, near Ecclefechan. It measures fifty inches in height by twenty-two inches in breadth, and about nine inches in thickness, the back being as usual roughly cut for standing against the wall. It presents an unusual display of ornament, being decorated with vine leaves, birds, fishes, and various architectural details. The inscription, which is in the highest state of preservation, is--
DEAE MINERVAE COH II TVN GRORVM MIL EQ C L CVI PRÆEST CS L AVSPEX PRÆF
which may be rendered: DEÆ MINERVÆ, COHORTIS SECUNDÆ TUNGRORUM, MILITIA EQUESTRIS CONSTANTINI LEGIONIS, CUI PRÆEST CAIUS LUCIUS AUSPEX PRÆFECTUS. This altar remained a few years since, and I believe still exists, as here described. But it is no solitary addition to the relics of this second cohort of the Tungrians, whose memorials are even more abundant than those of the Second Legion, Augusta, on the wall of Antoninus. The Tungrians were among the first Roman legions to enter Scotland, and appear to have been long stationed at Blatum Bulgium. It was indeed to two Tungrian and three Batavian cohorts that Agricola was principally indebted for his victory over Galgacus. The valuable collection of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharp, Esq., includes three other altars, found about the year 1812 at Birrens, all of them the fruits of pious vows by the same Tungrian cohort. The largest of these is a beautiful altar, in the very finest state of preservation, of which the woodcut conveys a good idea. It measures fifty-five and a half inches in height by thirty inches in greatest breadth at top, and twenty and a quarter inches across the inscribed front. The inscription may be thus rendered: MARTI ET VICTORIÆ AUGUSTÆ CENTURIÆ TIRONUM MILITUM IN COHORTE SECUNDA TUNGRORUM, CUI PRÆEST SILVIUS AUSPEX, PRÆFECTUS. VOTUM SOLVERUNT LUBENTES MERITO.
The second of these altars found at Birrens is a small but neat one, measuring thirty-six inches high, by fourteen and five-eighth inches in greatest breadth, thus inscribed:--
DIB · DE AB · Q OMNB FRVMENT IVS MIL COH II TVNGR ·
It may be read: DIIS DEABUSQUE OMNIBUS FRUMENTIUS MILES COHORTIS SECUNDÆ TUNGRORUM. The third altar, which is of simpler and ruder workmanship, measures forty-three and three-quarter inches in height, by twenty-three and three-quarter inches in greatest breadth. It appears to be dedicated by Pagus Vellaus to one of those obscure local deities, apparently provincial names with Latin terminations, which are more familiar than intelligible to the antiquary. It belongs to a class of Romano-British relics peculiarly interesting, notwithstanding the obscurity of their dedications, as the transition-link between the Roman and British mythology. These altars of the adopted native deities are generally rude and inferior in design, as if indicative of their having their origin in the piety of some provincial legionary subaltern. In the obscure gods and goddesses thus commemorated, we most probably recognise the names of favourite local divinities of the Romanized Britons, originating for the most part from the adoption into the tolerant Pantheon of Rome of the older objects of native superstitious reverence. Another altar found at Birrens is sacred to the goddess Harimella; but the most comprehensive, as well, perhaps, as the most interesting inscription of the whole class, is that on one of the altars of Marcus Cocceius Firmus, found at Auchindavy, and dedicated GENIO TERRAE BRITANNICAE. With the exception of the name, which adds a new one to our list of local divinities, the inscription on the altar now referred to presents no unwonted difficulties. It pertains, like the other Birrens altars, to the second Tungrian cohort, and is thus inscribed:--
DEAE RICAGM BEDAE PAGVS VELLAVS MILIT COH II TVNG V S L M
Besides these interesting memorials of the Tungrians, Mr. Sharp possesses a fourth altar from the same locality, which, though seen by Pennant at Hoddam Castle, has been so inaccurately transcribed by him, that it deserves a place among the unnoted Roman remains. The inaccuracies, though great literally, are not of very essential importance, except in the name assumed by the cohort, which he renders NERVIORUM MILLE. It measures forty-eight inches in height, by twenty-two and three-eighth inches in breadth at top, and is thus dedicated to the fickle goddess:--
FORTVNAE COH I NERVANA GERMANOR EQ
By means of the Irvine MS. in the Scottish Antiquaries' Library, another altar pertaining to the same cohort is recovered, dedicated to the Father of Olympus. It is a plain squared stone, measuring four feet in height, two feet in breadth, and thirteen inches in thickness, without any ornament or moulding to relieve its bald form. It is stated by Mr. Irvine to have been taken out of the heart of the wall of the old church at Hoddam, when demolished, in 1815. The inscription is complete, and clearly legible; the mark ∞ is by no means of rare occurrence, signifying a thousand. Several of the letters in this, as well as in some of the previous examples, are joined for the purpose of abbreviation, but without affecting the reading.
I O M COH · I · NERVANA GERMANOR · ∞ · EQ CVI PRÆEST L FANI VS FELIX TRIB
To these altars there only remains to be added another dedicated to Jove, derived from the same MS. It was dug up in 1814, in what Mr. Irvine describes as a small vicinal camp on the banks of the Kirtle, near Springkell, the elegant mansion of Sir J. H. Maxwell, Bart. It is of simple form, being relieved only by a small moulding a little way from the top. But the thuribulum is very carefully executed, and on the right side is a præfericulum sculptured in relief. The inscription is slightly mutilated: I.O.M ...NINVS..I FECIT.PP.
But besides these relics of Pagan worship, another sepulchral tablet preserves a contemporary memorial of fraternal affection such as pertains exclusively to no creed or time. It is figured on a note of Mr. Irvine's, which appears to have accompanied the drawing of the altar of Minerva, found at Birrens, and may therefore be presumed, like that dedicated to the shade of Pervica, to have formed another of the numerous Roman remains which attest the importance of the station of Blatum Bulgium. It is thus dedicated to the manes of Constantia, the infant daughter of Philus Magnius, who died at the age of one year, eight months, and nine days,--apparently by her brother: assuming that the letters on the pediment should be read, Frater fieri curavit.
These examples, while they serve to illustrate the traces of the Roman invasion which are found in Scotland, furnish additional materials for its history. The circumstances under which some of them have been discovered, and the fact that so many unedited inscriptions should remain to be described, after the very recent researches of the author of the Caledonia Romana, may suffice to shew how many more such relics must have disappeared from time to time, without an opportunity being afforded to the archæologist of noting their pregnant records.
To these may be added the following meagre list of Potters' Stamps,--all that I have been able to recover pertaining to Roman Scotland. This, however, arises from no paucity of materials. Mr. C. K. Sharp informs me that in his early years he remembers to have seen large accumulations of broken Samian ware and other Roman pottery dug up at Birrenswork. The same is also known to have occurred both at Inveresk and Cramond; and during the progress of construction of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway in 1841, a mass of debris about twelve feet deep was cut through on the site of the Castlecary Fort, which led to the exposure of a quantity of broken pottery, including some very fine fragments of embossed Samian ware, now in the possession of the Earl of Zetland, the owner of the ground. Had the person entrusted by the noble proprietor to take care of any relics that might be discovered, been sufficiently aware of the interest now attached to the potters' stamps, a large addition to the Scottish list would probably have been the result. As it was, however, he only served effectually to prevent this being accomplished. My friend, Mr. John Buchanan, a zealous Scottish antiquary, who visited Castlecary for the purpose, was prohibited from touching anything within the charmed circle; and, accordingly, these evidences of Roman art are mostly buried below the railway embankment, for rediscovery by other generations, when railway viaducts shall be as obsolete relics as Roman vallums now are. Within the area of the station a neatly cut centurial inscription was discovered, and is now preserved by the Earl of Zetland. It bears the inscription,--COHORTIS SEXTÆ CENTURIA ANTONII ARATI, thus abbreviated:
CHO VI Ↄ ANTO ARATI.
It is only very recently, even in England, that the names of the potters stamped on Roman fictile ware, have attracted much attention or been carefully recorded. Through the exertions of Mr. Charles Roach Smith and other zealous archæologists, we are now in possession of ample means for comparing new discoveries with the potters' stamps of London, Colchester, and York; but no collection of Scoto-Roman pottery exists, so far as I am aware, with the exception of the few specimens in the Museum of Scottish Antiquaries. The following apology for a Scottish list must therefore meanwhile suffice. It may perhaps form the nucleus of a more ample one at a subsequent period, by which to enable us to test the question of native or foreign manufacture, and to trace out the sources from whence the Roman colonists of Britain imported their finer fictile wares. The Scottish Museum furnishes a few curious specimens from Castlecary, some of which are given here in fac-simile. The first occurs on fine black ware, and looks like the imperfect attempt of some native or provincial potter to imitate a Roman stamp which he probably could not read. The second and third may be most fitly described as cuneiform. The larger of the two is on thin unglazed red ware. The fourth is on a patera of fine glazed Samian ware, and furnishes a good example of the mode of joining the letters together, with which English antiquaries are familiar, not only on the pottery, but also on the altars and inscribed tablets of the Anglo-Roman period. All these impressions are clear and distinct, so that their peculiarities are designed. Two of the other Castlecary stamps are furnished me by Mr. Buchanan, and the remainder are in my own possession, having been picked up in the neighbourhood of the railway embankment since its completion. For those from Newstead I am chiefly indebted to Dr. J. A. Smith.
Castlecary. PATIRATI OF SACIRAPO VNFO IO (?)[447] AESTIV M IΛIV PRISCVS F LIBER IM Λ · I · BIN · I · M IRSECΛ AHIM WILIIVI [ΛEST][V]M
Falkirk--On a Terra Cotta Lamp. MARCI
Duntocher. BRVSC F[448]
Cramond. CARVS F ADIECTI OF VΛLO OF IVCVN
Birrens. SAC · EROR
Newstead, near Eildon. W · SEC · V · F · O DVRIVS · F OXMII RVRFI · MA OIVSCI[448] CIVs[448] M · I · M[447]
A handle of a Scoto-Roman amphora in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries, the exact locality of the discovery of which is unknown, is stamped with the letters M. P. F. The Roman fictilia in the same collection also include terra cotta lamps from several Scottish localities. One of singular type, in the form of a broad leaf, with the veins strongly marked in relief, was found at Chester Knowes, near Chirnside, Berwickshire, the site as is believed of a temporary camp. Another is from Castlecary, and a third from Birrens. Besides these, various urns, lachrymatories, fragments of mortaria, amphoræ, and Samian, and other wares, all suffice to shew the correspondence of the Roman fictile ware of Scotland and England.
Such are some of the traces of the Roman occupation of Scotland. If we believe the direct statements of the few classic historians who have thought our northern region worthy of notice, the natives were in a state of extreme degradation and barbarism. Yet from the same authors we are able to discover that these barbarians fought in chariots, were armed with swords, lances, bucklers, and poniards, and were capable of offering the most formidable resistance to the veteran legions. Still more, we find that the Caledonians never settled down either in contented peace or in passive despair under the Roman yoke. Experience of the legions did not intimidate them; and at length Septimius Severus, one of the ablest of the Roman emperors, was compelled to employ the arts of the diplomatist rather than of the soldier ere he abandoned them once more to their wild freedom. We may indeed question if this remote region could be worth the labour of conquest; but when once occupied we see in the remains of Roman works abundant reasons why the conquerors should wish to retain it. Our chief inquiry however is, to what extent did this brief and partial Roman occupation affect the native manners and arts? The answer, I think, must be, that its influence was slight, partial, and transitory. Like an unwonted tide, the flood of Roman invasion swept beyond its natural limits, disturbing and unsettling many things long unaffected by change. But the tide ebbed as rapidly as it had flowed, and at most only helped to prepare the soil for a new growth. Neither the manners, the faith, nor the social habits of these foreign occupants of the country could be at all acceptable to the natives, though their superior arts and military skill would not fail to be appreciated, and must have been turned to good account. As, however, we have traced earlier arts and discoveries passing onward from the south to the tribes of the north, and effectually revolutionizing all their primitive habits: so, too, the increasing civilisation of the Anglo-Roman provinces must have extended its fruits beyond the wall of Severus, and effected a more immediate and rapid change than the influence of the same Roman civilisation is seen to have done on Ireland or Denmark, where no legionary invaders ever constructed their intrenchments or established their colonies.
By far the most remarkable native structure which appears to be traceable to the influence and example of Roman arts is the "Deil's Dike," a vast rampart of earth and stone strengthened by a fosse, which passes across many miles of country, through Galloway and Nithsdale. This singular British vallum has excited much less attention than its magnitude and great extent seem to demand. It has been traced through a much larger district of country than the whole length of the Antonine Wall; and though it lacks the historic interest of that structure, and the valuable legionary inscriptions found along its line, it is nevertheless a remarkable evidence of combined action and primitive engineering skill. Mr. Joseph Train remarks of it,--"As it passes from Torregan to Dranandow, it runs through a bog, and is only perceptible by the heather growing long and close on the top of it; whereas, on each side the soil only produces rushes and moss. Near the centre of the bog I caused the peat to be cleared away close to the dike, and thereby found the foundation to be several feet below the surface, which appeared to me a sure indication of its great antiquity." This ancient wall measures eight feet broad at the base, and is mostly built of rough unhewn blocks of moorstone or trap. In districts where stone is more inaccessible it is constructed of stones mixed with earth and clay, and at some few points it is entirely of earth. It has been strengthened at intervals with fortified stations, like the Roman walls from which its model is supposed to be derived. One of these, on the height above Glendochart, is a circular fort 190 yards in diameter. Another fort is situated on a well-chosen, commanding height, called the Hill of Ochiltree, on the east side of Loch Maberrie. The fosse, which is still traceable along a great part of the wall, is on its north side, from whence we are justified in inferring that the vallum was reared by the natives of the southern districts. It is, of course, impossible to assign the age or the builders of this ancient structure with absolute certainty. History is utterly silent on the subject; and it is a fact well worthy of note, in reference to previous remarks on the possibility of many noteworthy deeds having passed unchronicled to oblivion, that everything connected with this defensive erection is involved in the darkest obscurity. The very name which ascribes its origin to the Master Fiend shews how completely tradition has lost every clue to its builders. Yet the civilisation which led to such combined exertion as was needed both for the erection and defence of such an extent of wall must have been considerable. History has doubtless burdened itself with the charge of many meaner themes. The correspondence of the general design to the two Roman walls seems very clearly to point to its erection by the southern Britons after the departure of the Romans, when we know that they frequently suffered from inroads of the northern tribes. The circular forts along the line of the Deil's Dike also furnish a curious link connecting it at once with the older Roman and native military works, while they present a striking contrast to the camps and wall stations of the Roman legionaries.
Cæsar refers to the Britons in his time as using imported bronze. But he had no personal knowledge of the south-western districts of England, where copper and tin had been wrought for ages prior to the Roman invasion. Whether iron was manufactured in Britain before the Roman Invasion it is now perhaps impossible to ascertain, but the familiarity of the Romans with the mineral wealth of England at an early period gives some probability to the supposition that they found native workings of iron and lead as well as of tin and copper. Tacitus refers in general terms to the metallic wealth of Britain; Pliny alludes to the smelting of iron; and Solinus speaks of its use in the manufacture of weapons and agricultural implements. But whether the Romans originated, or only followed up the native workings, in mining for lead and iron, it is unquestionable that they gave a new impetus to the application of the metals to economic purposes. Roman pottery and glass, coins of Nero, Vespasian, and Diocletian, and other undoubted evidences of a Roman origin, have been discovered among the accumulated beds of scoriæ and other refuse of ancient forges in Sussex. Similar traces of iron-foundries accompanied with Roman coins have been observed near the wall of Hadrian, in Yorkshire and other counties. Two altars found at different times, the last at Benwell, in Northumberland, dedicated to Jupiter Dolichenus, the protector of iron-works, add still further evidence of the extent to which this useful metal was wrought during the Anglo-Roman period.[449]
The forest of Dean also is familiar to English archæologists for its extensive mines and shafts, its beds of scoriæ, and other remains of ancient forges, among which have been found unquestionable traces of the Roman presence. Similar works are not to be looked for in Scotland, where no indisputable traces have yet been detected even of the working of the superficial clay. Many remains of ancient forges are, however, known in various districts both to the north and south of the Antonine Wall, though generally unaccompanied by relics which can enable us to assign them unhesitatingly to any precise period. The traces of an extensive iron forge are still obvious on the "Fir Isle," a peninsular promontory on the Carlinwark Loch, Kirkcudbrightshire, a locality peculiarly rich in its stores of archæological relics, including even the rude primitive canoes and other records of the primeval era. During the construction of the great military road through the same district, a large mound was levelled at a place called "Buchan's Croft, near the three thorns of the Carlinwark," which proved to be a mass of scoriæ and cinders, such as are generally left from a forge. This the ancient traditions of Galloway assign to a comparatively recent date, marking it as the spot where the famed Scottish cannon Mons Meg was manufactured in the fifteenth century.[450] Similar remains in the Roman districts of Lanarkshire are unhesitatingly attributed, in the Old Statistical Account of the parish of Dalziel, to operations of the Roman colonists:--"The great Roman highway, commonly called Watling Street, went along the summit of this parish from east to west, but its course is now much defaced by modern improvements. In one place, however, near the centre of that parish, it has been preserved entire, so as to point out the line to after times; the cross stone, the emblem of the baron's jurisdiction, being placed upon it, and that fenced by a large clump of trees planted around. At this place lies a large heap of the cinders of the Roman forges still untouched."[451]
In many of the uncultivated districts of Scotland iron ore occurs in the forms already noted as the most easily adapted for conversion into metal; and it is by no means improbable that such sources may have supplied it to the Celtic metallurgists, long before they had learned the difficult processes requisite for converting the native iron-stone into metal. Whencesoever the art was derived, numerous Highland traditions and even the names of particular localities point to the excellency of the ancient Celtic smiths. In Blair-Atholl, for example, a district abounding with cairns and other primitive memorials, is Dail-na-Cardoch--the dale of the smith's shop, or rather of the iron work; and Dail-na-mein--the dale of the mineral. "Near these," says the old Statist of the parish of Blair-Atholl, "and along the side of the hill, down to Blair, are still to be seen the holes wherein they smelted the iron ore." Similar pits scattered over the northern moors are described as the kilns in which peats were charred for smelting. "There is still to be seen in Glenturret," says Logan in his Scottish Gael, "a shieling called Renna Cardick--the smith's dwelling--with the ruins of houses, heaps of ashes, and other indications of an iron manufactory. Old poems mention it as a work where the metal, of which swords and other arms were made some miles lower down the valley, was prepared. In Sutherland also are distinct marks of the smelting and working of iron with fires of wood."[452] In Islay is still shewn the spot where stood the forge of its once celebrated smiths, and the rocks from whence the iron was dug which they fabricated into the renowned "Lann-Ila," or Islay blades.[453] In the Sean Dana le Oisian also occurs the elaborated poetic description of the ancient bow and quiver, concluding 'S ceann o'n cheard Mac Pheidearain; i.e., and the head of the arrow from the smith MacPhedran. Among the curious relics preserved in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries is the rude pair of iron forge-tongs figured above. They measure thirty and a half inches in length in their present imperfect state, and are described in the minutes of the Society as having been discovered buried under the steep bank of a river in Glenorchy, thirty feet below the surface. It is farther added, in the neighbourhood of the spot great quantities of charcoal were found, and other indications that anciently there had been a smelting work there, though no trace of it now exists in the history or traditions of the country.
FOOTNOTES:
[407] Collectanea Antiqua, vol. i. p. 144.
[408] Roy's Military Antiquities, p. 116.
[409] Archæol. Scot. vol. ii.
[410] Historical Inquiries, p. 41.
[411] Biblo. Topog. Britan. vol. ii. p. 385.
[412] Caledonia Romana, p. 270. I am informed, however, by Sir George Clerk, Bart., of Penicuick, that the author of the Itinerarium Septentrionale was originally a teacher of music at Aberdeen, and according to the traditions of the Penicuick family, was usually known by the name of Galgacus, being no doubt apt to carry his enthusiasm for his favourite hero of Mons Grampius to an extent somewhat amusing, if not troublesome, to friends and patrons.
[413] Roy's Military Antiquities, p. 152.
[414] Caledonia Romana, p. 305.
[415] The preservation of this Scoto-Roman relic is due to the zeal of John Buchanan, Esq., its present possessor, who secured it after it had been in vain offered to the curators of the Hunterian Museum, as an appropriate addition to its Roman collection.
[416] Wordsworth.
[417] C. R. Smith, no mean authority on such a subject, defends the authenticity of Richard of Cirencester in his recent valuable work on "The Antiquities of Richborough, Reculver, and Lime," p. 177. The illustrations of our Northern itinera have led me to an opposite conclusion; but even should the genuineness of the "De Situ Britanniæ" be established, its value to Northern antiquaries must still be open to question.
[418] Roy's Military Antiquities, p. 116.
[419] Caledonia Romana, p. 150.
[420] Ante, p. 87.
[421] Ante, p. 171.--I am indebted for much of the information relative to the recent discoveries at Newstead, to the notes and personal observations of Dr. J. A. Smith, and to John Miller, Esq., C.E., in whose possession the spear now is. The dimensions of the skull are given in the table of cranial measurements, p. 166, No. 16.
[422] D. M. Moir, (Delta,) in a communication to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
[423] Gough's Camden, vol. iii. p. 304.
[424] Sibbald's Historical Inquiry, p. 41.
[425] Itinerarium Septentrionale, Appendix, pp. 180-183.
[426] I owe this information to Mr. A. Handyside Ritchie, the well-known sculptor, who examined the Roman ware while in Mr. Sivright's collection. Probably all record of its locality has been lost sight of by its new possessor, if indeed it has been preserved.
[427] In 1846 Mr. Brown presented to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland "a stone ball, found at the Trinity Hospital, three feet below the surface, and upon a piece causeway." Minutes of Society, 21st Dec. 1846.
[428] Memorials of Edin. vol. ii. p. 176.
[429] Itiner. Septent. p. 117.
[430] Memorials of Edinburgh, vol. ii. p. 50.
[431] "About this time it would appear that Julia, the wife of Severus, and the greatest part of the imperial family, were in the country of Caledonia; for Xephilin, from Dio, mentions a very remarkable occurrence which then happened to the Empress Julia and the wife of Argentocoxus, a Caledonian," &c.--Itiner. Septent. p. 104.
[432] Memorials of Edinburgh, vol. ii. p. 34.
[433] Biblio. Topog. Britan. vol. ii. p. 348.
[434] Itiner. Septent. p. 57.
[435] Sibbald, p. 83; Itiner. Septent. p. 117; Horsley, p. 205; Wood's Cramond, p. 4; Caledon. Romana, p. 163.
[436] Archæologia, vol. xviii. p. 120.
[437] Silurian System, p. 279.
[438] Archæol. Journal, vol. v. p. 226.
[439] Archæol. Journal, vol. vi. p. 181.
[440] A PALº may either refer to the school of the Mediciner, and signify of Palermo, Palatino, or the like; or, as is perhaps more probable, it is the Crocodes of Palermo, or elsewhere. Between sixty and seventy of these medicine stamps are now known, and two specimens of pottery have been found in France impressed with similar prescriptions,--evidently the vessels in which the preparations were preserved.
[441] Vol. xvi. Plate LI.
[442] Vol. xi. p. 105.
[443] Camden, p. 834.
[444] Pennant's Tour, vol. iii. p. 411.
[445] Caledonia Romana, p. 129.
[446] Itiner. Septent. p. 84.
[447] Amphoræ.
[448] Mortaria.
[449] M. A. Lower on the Manufacture of Iron in Britain by the Romans. Journal of the Archæological Association, vol. iv. p. 265.
[450] New Statistical Account, vol. iv., Kirkcudbrightshire, p. 159.
[451] Sinclair's Statistical Account, vol. iii. p. 458.
[452] Logan's Scottish Gael, vol. ii. p. 195.
[453] Stuart's Costume of the Clans, Introd. p. li.
III. STRONGHOLDS
Next to the sepulchral monuments and the temples of remote ages, the fortifications frequently furnish the most durable and characteristic evidences of skill, and of the civilisation of the era to which they belong. In the Great Valley of the Mississippi, after Anglo-Saxon colonists have for upwards of two centuries been effecting settlements on the soil of the Red Indian, and obliterating every trace of him by their more enduring arts, the burial mounds and the forts of a race still older than the Red Indian remain to attest the pre-existence of civilisation in the American continent. Here, too, where for nine centuries at least, we can find authentic records of builders, sculptors, ecclesiastical architects, and military engineers, fashioning rude materials into goodly fabrics, of which traces are still discernible: we also can discover the wrecks of older structures reared in those dim and remote eras, into the secrets of which we long to penetrate. "How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears! How many pages of doubtful record might we not often spare, for a few stones left one upon another! The ambition of the old Babel-builders was well directed for this world. There are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture; and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reality. It is well to have not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their eyes beheld all the days of their life. The age of Homer is surrounded with darkness, his very personality with doubt. Not so that of Pericles: and the day is coming when we shall confess that we have learned more of Greece out of the crumbled fragments of her sculpture, than even from her sweet singers or soldier historians."[454] The Scottish "Caterthun" is no Athenian Acropolis, and our monolithic temples, though not ineloquent memorials of their builders, must rank with the primeval cyclopean structures of Greece, and not with her Parthenon or Colonna. But the aboriginal strongholds, though mostly of a sufficiently rude and primitive character, must not be overlooked in reviewing those "conquerors of the forgetfulness of men." The construction of offensive and defensive weapons is one of the earliest evidences afforded by man, in a savage state, of that intelligence and design by which he is distinguished from the brutes. Domestic and social relationships follow, from whence spring society, ranks, laws, and all the primary elements of civilisation. Among the first indications of such progress is the union for mutual defence, and the erection of strongholds for the safety of the community and the protection of property when threatened by invading foes. Herein lie the essential rudiments of a commonwealth, when the weal of the community and of its individual members have been recognised as the same.
A very slight review of the more simple class of British hill-forts will suffice, since we fortunately possess, in many of the contemporary records already described, more precise and definite history than they can now yield. It is for this reason that all notice of the aboriginal strongholds has been reserved till now, though it cannot admit of doubt that some of the simplest of them are contemporary with the pit-dwellings of the Stone Period, while others manifest such improvements as seem best to accord with the arts and weapons of the Archaic era which succeeded. Of these we have the circumscribed mote-hill or earthen-mound, steeply escarped, and with the remains of its little vallum of earth surmounted originally by the stronger palisades for which the neighbouring forest supplied abundant material. Nearly akin to these are the small circular forts of earth and loose stones which still crown the summits of so many Scottish hills; their lofty sites having secured them from the inroads of the agriculturist, while his aggressive ploughshare has obliterated all traces of the far more skilfully constructed Roman camp and military road which once occupied the neighbouring valleys. Within the area of some of these, or scattered about their neighbourhood, flint arrows and other primitive weapons have been frequently found, accompanied occasionally by more valuable relics. On removing, in 1830, the rich black mould nearly filling the trenches of three such forts, the remains of which still crown the ridge of a rising ground above the valley of Dalrymple, Ayrshire, human skulls and bones, deer's horns, and a horn-lance or spear-head of primitive type, were discovered. Similar records of the aboriginal fort-builders must no doubt frequently be turned up in the course of agricultural operations: but they can only tell us what is already obvious, that this class of strongholds, or duns, as they are locally termed, pertain to a people whose arts were still in their infancy. Some, however, of the small hill-forts must be regarded as the mere temporary lodge-ments of British outposts, in times of actual open war. Of this class probably are the earth-works on the summit of Birrenswork Hill, in Annandale, while the more extensive intrenchments of the Roman legions occupy the level areas at its base. Similar works are also to be met with in the Western Highlands. At Knoc Scalbert, near Campbelton, Argyleshire, is a fort of larger size and more complicated design, covering an area of about fifty paces in diameter; but the neighbouring heights retain the traces of the smaller outpost stations, indicative, when thus found in combination, of considerable skill and warlike strategy. Such also may be presumed to be the origin of these small hill-forts, where we trace a line of them on a series of successive heights, as may be seen on the Lammermoors and in other Scottish districts, and is especially noteworthy along the southern slopes of the Kilsyth and Campsie hills, immediately to the north of the great Roman wall. These are obviously the outposts of the hardy Caledonian, from whence he watched his opportunity for some sudden foray or midnight surprise of the garrisons occupying the stations along the wall, and which he maintained with such persevering success that the Roman conquerors had at length to give way, and to fix the northern limits of empire on the older line of Hadrian, between the Solway and the Tyne.
The circular British forts or camps surmounting the heights of Galloway and the Lothians, and more or less common in nearly every district of Scotland, generally occupy an area of from three hundred to four hundred feet in diameter, and are inclosed with ramparts of earth and stone, or occasionally entirely of loose heaps of stone, which have lost through time every trace of any definite form of masonry they no doubt once possessed. But the subject has already been treated of with ample details in Chalmers' Caledonia;[455] and little that is worth recording can be added to his careful researches. Roy also includes the most important of these native strongholds in his "Military Antiquities," superadding to his descriptions, plans and sections, by which a very perfect idea can be formed of their original design. These include Wood Castle, a very remarkable circular fort near Lochmaben, in Annandale,[456] which General Roy describes as a Roman post, though it differs in every possible feature from any known example of Roman castrametation. That it is a British stronghold is not now likely to be called in question. It bears, indeed, a singularly close affinity to the circular earth-works which so frequently accompany the Scottish monolithic circles. Others of the supposed Roman forts bear scarcely less conclusive marks of native workmanship, as the intrenched post on Inch Stuthill, near the Tay, (Plate XVIII.;) Liddell-Moat, near the junction of the Liddel with the Esk, (Plate XXIII.;) Castle Over, situated on a high point of land, formed by the junction of the Black and White Esks, (Plate XXVI.) supposed by Roy to be the Roman Uxellum; and Burgh-Head, on the Murray Frith, (Plate XXXIII.) which he unhesitatingly assigns as the Ultima Pteroton of Richard of Cirencester, and the Alata Castra of Ptolemy. All of these bear a curious general resemblance to some of the aboriginal forts of the Mississippi Valley; thus affording, under another aspect, evidence of the mind of man operating in the same way when placed in similar circumstances, and with a force not perhaps greatly differing from the unerring instincts of the lower animals. The last example, that of Burgh-Head, possibly includes some remains of Roman works. The straight wall and rounded angles, so characteristic of the legionary earth-works, are still discernible, and were probably much more obvious when General Roy explored the fort; but its character is that of a British fort, and its site, on a promontory nearly inclosed by the sea, is opposed to the practice of the Romans in the choice of an encampment. The remarkable general correspondence of the Scottish "Deil's Dike," described in the last chapter, to the Scoto and Anglo-Roman walls, proves that the native Britons were not slow to avail themselves of the superior engineering skill of the invaders, displayed in military works of more importance than the mere rectangular vallum.[457] The fortifications here specified are not, however, to be classed with the simple circular hill-forts first noted, wherein we trace the mere rudimentary efforts of a people in the infancy of the arts. They display equal skill in the choice of site, and in the elaborate adaptation of their earth-works to the natural features of the ground. Though undoubtedly of native workmanship many of these are not improbably contemporary erections thrown up by the native Caledonian to withstand the encroachments of the Roman invader.
But the most remarkable British fort to the north of the Tweed, if not indeed in the whole island, is that which crowns the summit of Caterthun, looking across the valley of Strathmore. Two neighbouring heights are occupied with British forts. The larger of these, called the White Caterthun, from the colour of its walls, is an elaborate, skilfully constructed stronghold, which must have formed a place of great strength when held by a hardy and well-armed native garrison. It is of an oval form, inclosing an inner area of four hundred and thirty-six feet in length, by two hundred feet in breadth. But this only constitutes what may be regarded as the citadel. Beyond it a succession of ramparts and ditches surround the height at lower elevations, including a much larger area, and affording scope for a more numerous body of defenders. The hollow is still visible, though now nearly filled up, which was once the well of the fort, and probably this strength was maintained as a rendezvous and place of temporary retreat for the entire population of the surrounding district. The White Caterthun has been repeatedly engraved, and its construction and details will be best understood by a reference to the plans and sections in Roy's Military Antiquities.[458] The Brown Caterthun, which crowns another hill about a mile to the north, is also a specimen of ingenious native fortification. Its ramparts are nearly circular, and a series of concentric intrenchments extend down the slopes of the height.[459] Both of these native military works have been constructed with immense labour. The astonishing dimensions of the rampart of the former, composed of an accumulation of large loose stones, upwards of a hundred feet thick at the base, and fully twenty-five feet thick at the top, with its extensive lower earth-works and ditches, excite surprise and wonder in the mind of every observer. General Roy remarks after a careful survey of it,--"The vast labour it must have cost to amass so incredible a quantity of stones, and carry them to such a height, surpasses all description."
Another remarkable hill-fort of the same class is at the Barmekyn of Echt, in Aberdeenshire; and at Dundalaiv, on an unusually steep and rugged height in Glenshiora, Badenoch, is one smaller, but perhaps more striking, from the superior masonry of its walls. These are from twelve to fourteen feet in thickness, and being built of thin flat schistose slate, the walls remain in parts fully fourteen feet high, and apparently as perfect as when first erected. The inclosed area of this ancient fortress also contains a well, and considerable ingenuity has been shewn in strengthening the weaker points of the position. Altogether, it is the most perfect relic of a British stronghold of the class that I know of in Scotland.
The so-called "Vitrified Forts" of Scotland which have been the subject of so many ingenious and baseless theories, form another interesting class of native works. Attention was first drawn to them by Mr. John Williams, in his "Account of some remarkable Ancient Ruins, lately discovered in the Highlands and northern parts of Scotland," published in 1777. Mr. Williams had been employed by the trustees of the Scottish estates forfeited in the last rebellion, to superintend some operations in his capacity of a civil engineer, and in the course of this he for the first time investigated the singular remains to which he gave the name of Vitrified Forts. So entirely new was the discovery that it was generally received at first as an extravagant fiction, and no London publisher could be persuaded to undertake the publication of Mr. Williams's Account. His facts, however, proved indisputable, and theorists thereupon undertook to combat his conclusions, and to assign to the supposed forts a volcanic origin. The appearance of some of the most remarkable of these works is well calculated to sustain such a theory. The fortified area on the Top-o-Noth, near the village of Rhynie, Aberdeenshire, for example,--one of the most remarkable specimens of a vitrified fort in Scotland,--could not be more accurately described than by comparing it to the crater of an extinct volcano.
Since the first announcement of Mr. Williams's remarkable discovery there has been no lack of observation or controversy on the subject, though not always with very satisfactory results. In 1825 the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland directed special attention to it, and the results of a series of careful investigations are published in the fourth volume of the Archæologia Scotica, made chiefly under the direction of the late Dr. Samuel Hibbert, one of the secretaries of the Society, and further qualified for the duty as an experienced practical geologist. The fruit of these investigations may be thus stated:--Dr. Hibbert arrives at the conclusion that the vitrification is an incidental and not a designed effect,--having formed no part of the process of erection of the forts or cairns on which it is now traceable, but resulting accidentally from the frequent kindling of beacon-fires as the signals of war or invasion, as well as from bonfires which formed a part of festive or religious rejoicings; and indeed from numerous independent causes, probably no less widely dissimilar in dates than in origination. The nature of the sites, also, where vitrification has been detected proves that it is by no means confined to fortified positions; nor when it does occur on such is it generally found diffused throughout the ramparts of stone, or even restricted to their limits. Dr. Hibbert accordingly rejects the name of vitrified fort for the more comprehensive and untheoretical one of vitrified site, as most descriptive of remains which appear to include small inclosures for the protection of beacon-fires; sites of bonfires periodically lighted at the ancient places of rendezvous for tribes or clans; and hearths of fort-beacons and signal-fires, occasionally occupying not the ramparts but the ditch.
The only argument which tends to throw any doubt on the result of Dr. Hibbert's conclusions is that of Dr. Macculloch,--a shrewd observer, little inclined generally to extend toleration to any antiquarian hobbies but his own,--who affirms, that in situations where the most accessible materials for constructing a stone fort are such as are incapable of being vitrified, suitable materials have been selected and brought with considerable labour from a distance.[460] But the evidence of design in the choice of such materials is by no means apparent. The examples referred to by Dr. Macculloch only confirm the fact, already familiar to the chemist and geologist, that there are very few districts in Scotland where rocks do not occur capable of being more or less vitrified. This subject is fully illustrated by an interesting series of experiments carried on by Sir James Hall, towards the close of last century, with a view to test some of the geological theories in reference to the igneous formation of rocks, which then furnished a fertile theme of controversy between the disciples of Werner and Hutton.[461] All the varieties of trap are so peculiarly susceptible of fusion, that they have been recently selected as the most efficient and economical flux in the smelting of copper ores. I am indebted to Dr. Francis Hay Thomson, the inventor and patentee of the ingenious application of the common rocks to this novel purpose, for communicating to me the results of his experiments. His invention chiefly consists in "the application of what are commonly called whinstones, and of other stones similar to whinstone--such as trap, basalt, sienite, and the like, being fusible silicates, as a flux in the smelting of copper ores." He has found all these materials capable of easy and complete fusion in a reverberatory furnace; but a much more moderate degree of heat would suffice to produce the conglomerated masses usually found on vitrified sites, where the larger stones are merely inclosed and cemented together by the fused matter. In reply to inquiries as to the probable effect of bale-fires kept blazing repeatedly on the same ramparts or heaps of stones, where a gradual accumulation of ashes from the burning pile must fill up the intervening spaces, and supply a flux capable of combining for the ultimate fusion of the whole, Dr. Thomson remarks:--
"Granite is per se very infusible; that of Aberdeen almost entirely so, in consequence of the presence of an overplus of silica. Sandstone is per se quite infusible, being almost entirely silica. Your supposition may, however, be correct, for the addition of the alkali produced from the wood-ashes would much assist the fusion of all kinds of stone that might be used in building these forts. Whinstone contains at least four per cent. of pure soda, fifteen of iron, and from twelve to twenty of lime. All these form a most fusible mixture, and the silica present is only in such proportion as is necessary for vitrification. Limestone is of itself not fusible except at a very high temperature; but the addition of either iron or soda with silica renders it at once vitreous. Although I am not certain as to the exact degrees of heat requisite for the fusion of these materials, I may mention that, in an ordinary reverberatory furnace, I have fused five cwt. of whinstone in one hour and a half, the product being a dark mass similar to bottle-glass; and I have no doubt, were proper precautions taken, that large slabs might easily be moulded for building purposes."
The degree of heat attainable in a reverberatory furnace manifestly greatly exceeds any temperature that could be produced by an exposed fire of wood; but the usual appearance of the vitrified masses found on the sites of forts or beacon-hills is such as proves them to be the product of a more moderate heat. The larger pieces are not fused into a homogeneous mass, but blocks of trap, granite, and sandstone, or occasionally all three in juxtaposition, are enveloped in a vitrified coating of irregular thickness, and bound into a solid piece by this extraneous substance. The alkali supplied by wood-ashes is abundantly sufficient to produce such a result. Carbonate of potash in contact with trap will readily melt at a red heat, and has a power of uniting with the constituents of the trap to form a fusible compound which hardens into glass in cooling. Fire-clay, which is altogether infusible, and less liable to be affected by heat than most of the known natural rocks, is employed on this account in making the chemists' crucibles; but if an alkali is melted in a fire-clay crucible, it forms a vitreous covering on the surface, and where large quantities are used even goes through the crucible. This is a fact familiar to the chemist, and so impossible is it to keep fused alkalis in contact with silicates, that only crucibles of platina or silver can be used for the analysis of silicious minerals. In this way even sandstone, though per se infusible, is perfectly capable of vitrification, and indeed is, under certain circumstances, peculiarly susceptible of it, as its great porosity admits of the ready absorption of the melted alkali.
This susceptibility of the degree of fusion usually observable on vitrified sites, which trap and others of the common rocks of Scotland possess, has long been recognised by able chemists; and when it is taken into consideration along with the very diversified and dissimilar circumstances under which vitrification has been observed, the conclusion seems inevitable, that it is an incidental and not a designed result of the application of fire. But neither the interest nor the importance of this inquiry is exhausted when we have established the undesigned origin of vitrified sites. The question still remains,--Are they peculiar to Scotland? because, even if we reject the idea that the cementing of stone buildings by means of fire is among the artes deperditæ Scotiæ, still the discovery of so many vitrified sites in nearly every district of Scotland, would seem to indicate the practice of peculiar customs and observances during those early centuries in which the primeval forests furnished an unlimited supply of fuel. It is at all times a precarious and unsatisfactory basis of argument which depends chiefly on the absence of contrary evidence. Nevertheless it is worthy of some note, that although upwards of seventy years have elapsed since Mr. Williams published his account of vitrified forts, no single example, so far as I am aware, has been discovered south of the Tweed.[462] This cannot be ascribed to the subject being one of mere local or temporary interest. It has excited much controversy, not only among English antiquaries, but among the students of various kindred sciences; and while the geological features of some districts preclude the possible existence of such structures, it will, I think, involve very important conclusions as to the peculiar customs of the early Caledonians, if it be recognised as an established fact, that neither in the Welsh Highlands nor in the stone districts of England, are any traces of vitrified forts or sites visible. It has been the fashion of late years to give the whole question the go-by in very summary terms as one that has already commanded undue notice. Such, however, is a more convenient than satisfactory mode of dealing with the inquiry. Dr. Hibbert has appended to his "Observations on Vitrified Forts," a list of forty-four sites already noted, extending over twelve Scottish counties, including the most northern and the most southern districts of the kingdom. To these others have since been added, both north and south, in the Orkney Islands, and in the vicinity of Jedburgh, near the English border. It will suffice, meanwhile, to note these facts, in the hope that English Archæologists may, on fitting occasion, seek a reply to the inquiries which they involve:--Were the southern Britons, whether Celtic or Saxon, or the intruding Scandinavians or Gauls, wont to kindle bayle or beacon-fires on cairns, forts, or elevated sites, with such frequency as to leave similar traces to those which are so common in Scotland? Or must we infer that these abundant remains are the result of ancient rites and customs peculiar to the races of the northern kingdom?
Dr. Hibbert has already invited the investigations of Scandinavian Archæologists, with a like view, anticipating, from the notices of Olaus Magnus, Snorro, and others, that vitrified sites should be found on the mountain tops in Norwegian provinces. Nineteen years have elapsed since Scottish Antiquaries appealed to those of Scandinavia for a reply. They have not been unmindful of the interests of archæological science in the interval, but still we wait in the uncertain negative which their silence furnishes; casting, meanwhile, some curious thoughts backward on the old Scottish festival of Beltane, and its apparent affinity to the rites of the Assyrian Baal.[463]
To attempt to assign a date for these primitive forts or vitrified sites would be manifest folly, but even to apportion them to one or more of those less definite periods is difficult. Some of them doubtless pertain to the earliest era of combined action, of which they would form one of the first results, while others may belong to a comparatively recent period; and, in particular, such border sites as those of Cowdenknowes and Howden Moor[464] perchance date no farther back than to those eventful times of watch and ward on the Scottish borders, quaintly referred to in the Act of James the Second's Parliament, in 1455, "for bailes making" to warn of the approach of the Southron foe: "Ane baile is warning of their cumming, quhat power that ever they bie of; twa bailes togidder at anis, they are cumming indeed; four bailes, ilk ane beside uther, and all at anis as foure candelles, suithfast knawledge that they ar of great power and meanis far."
The duns and vitrified forts of Scotland have long been the subject of observation and controversy; but there is another class of defensive earth-works observable in various Scottish districts, which, so far as I am aware, have not yet attracted the notice of the antiquary, though sufficiently familiar to rustic observers. These consist of artificial trenches, generally dug in the side of a hill, and obviously designed for the hasty concealment of cattle from predatory bands of marauders, though in some cases tradition associates them with more remarkable events. One, for example, of considerable extent, situated between Kintore and Inverury, in Aberdeenshire, is popularly known as Bruce's Howe, from an old tradition that it had afforded the means of concealment to a party of Robert the Bruce's army before the battle of Inverury. Its depth, like that of most others, is about eight feet, affording effective shelter and concealment both to men and horses. Another of these artificial trenches has been cut out of the side of a hill, near its summit, on the farm of Altyre, parish of Dalry, Kirkcudbrightshire. It is capable of containing about an hundred men, while a person concealed in it can see to a considerable distance, in the two principal directions of approach, without being observed. From the convenient retreat it afforded to the persecuted Covenanters in the time of Charles II., it still bears the name of the Whig Hole. A larger trench of the same kind exists along the side of a steep hill forming one of the range of Scuir-na-fion in Glencoe. This has been constructed with considerable skill, the trench running parallel with the range of hills, and opening at its west end in a gully formed by a small mountain stream, which joins the river Coe somewhat farther down. From a distance, or from any lower part of the Glen, the trench is quite indistinguishable, as the embankment, which in this case has been formed on the side of the hill, is sloped so as completely to coincide with the angle at which the latter rises from the valley. An intelligent correspondent, familiar with this part of the Highlands, informs me that he had frequently visited the Glen without being aware of the existence of the trench, though passing it at no great distance, and his attention was first called to it by observing the fresh colour of the herbage on the upper edge of the embankment, in contrast with the more olive hue of the hill-side beyond,--a phenomenon easily accounted for by the fall of the heavier and coarser debris of the embankment towards its base, thus leaving a finer soil along the ridge. Angus M'Donald, an old and intelligent native of the Glen, at once assigned its origin to troublous times, for the purpose of sheltering the natives and cattle of the Glen when surprised by an invading foe, and stated that it includes ample space for concealing three hundred head of cattle.
Various examples corresponding to those occur in different parts of the Highlands, belonging to no definite period, but indicating the dangers and the resources of a pastoral people, liable to sudden and frequent invasion by powerful warlike foes. A similar state of society, though at a period more advanced in civilisation and the practice of the constructive arts, appears to be indicated in that remarkable class of structures peculiar to Scotland, and generally known as Burghs or Pictish-towers. These, like so many other of our native antiquities, it has been customary to ascribe to a Danish origin; but the increasing interest now manifested by native antiquaries in our northern antiquities, and the frequent communications which have taken place of late years between Scandinavian and British Archæologists, have sufficed to establish the important fact that no such structures are known in the old lands of the Northmen.[465]
The Scottish Burghs are large circular fortresses, or bell-shaped structures, built of unhewn stone, and entirely without cement. The most perfect example of these remarkable edifices is situated upon the island of Mousa, near to the mainland of Zetland; but many remains of them can still be traced, both on the northern and western isles, in Caithness and Sutherland, and on various parts of the north and west coasts of Scotland. They are nearly all formed precisely on the same plan, though differing considerably in size. The form is a truncated cone, occasionally slightly varied, as in that of Mousa, where the wall curves inward till it attains a certain height, and then returns gradually outward again, apparently with the same design as the corbelled battlements of a later date, which enabled the defenders more effectually to annoy any assailant who ventured to approach the base. With this exception the exterior displays no ornamental projections, or any provision for defensive operations, by means of window, loop-hole, or machicolation. The rude but very substantial masonry of the exterior is only broken by a plain narrow doorway, which, from the absence of gate-posts, grooves, or any of the ordinary refinements of more modern architecture, it is not improbable was secured, when danger was imminent, by building it up with a pile of stones. Within the exterior cone a second cylindrical structure is reared, the walls of which are either perpendicular, or constructed at an angle which, leaving a space between the two of about six feet at the base, brings them together at the top. Within this space between the walls a rude staircase, or rather inclined passage, communicates round the whole, and a series of chambers or tiers of interspaces, formed by means of long stones laid across from wall to wall, so as to form flooring and ceiling, are lighted by square apertures looking into the interior area. This central space is open to the sky, and the fact of the only light to the chambers and passages within being derived by means of apertures opening into it, seems to preclude the idea of its ever having been roofed. It is not apparent, however, by what means the occupants could obtain access to the ramparts, so as to resist an assault, and prevent the walls from being scaled, though a sufficiently rude and simple wooden structure may have supplied this very obvious defect.
Cordiner and Pennant have each given a very full account of Dun Dornadil, a Burgh or Pictish tower in Glenelg, and one of the largest of this singular class of military structures.[466] Gordon furnishes descriptions and engravings of Castle Tellve and Castle Troddan, two other examples which he examined;[467] and Dr. Macculloch also supplies a minute account and measurements of one of those, in Glenelg.[468] "The masonry," he remarks, "is without lime, but remarkably well laid, and the lines of the curvature are beautifully preserved throughout. The floors of the galleries consist of single flags, and the window apertures are, in a similar manner, divided by transoms of stone."
One necessary consequence of the plan on which all these buildings are constructed is, that while the lower galleries are roomy, and admit of free passage, the space narrows so rapidly that the upper ones are too straitened even to admit a child. This is particularly observable in the Burgh of Mousa, which, though more perfect, is considerably smaller than that of Dun Dornadil, and consequently a much greater proportion of the internal galleries must have been totally unavailable, either for occupation or the storing of property. No great difficulty, however, need be made about this, even where windows are found made in the inner wall, equally for the wide and the most straitened tiers of galleries. One model, and that a very simple one, supplied the design for all; and it would not be difficult to find corresponding examples in modern masonry where the same unreasoning fidelity to the original is shewn, as in the latest structures of the Tudor style, where unperforated gargoyles project from solid walls, and flying buttresses are thrown where there is nothing to support.
The most remarkable deviation from the common arrangement of these singular structures is where, as in the Burgh of Achir-na-Kyle, Sutherland, regular conical chambers are constructed in the solid wall. This is a manifest refinement upon the original design, and may be regarded as the first progressive step in the art of military architecture. Cordiner remarks of this example:--
"It is situated with peculiar taste on the top of a lofty rock, opposite to some pleasant woods, and near excellent pasture; and round the precipice which overhangs the Brora, the river tumbles over its rocky channel in a number of irregular cascades. This building would have doubtless merited a very particular description, had it not corresponded with your account of those in Glenelg.[469] I must except the apartments within the walls, which are of an oval form, distinct and entire, about eight feet long, six high, and four wide. Those on the ground-floor are still a retreat from the storm for the goats that feed on the neighbouring hills. The stairs from the first to the second row of chambers are regular and commodiously made out. The apartments are carefully lighted by windows from within, a strong evidence that the area within these towers had never been closed above, or entirely covered. The door looks over the precipice towards the river, and is full six feet high.... One chamber had several plans of a level entry to it, and measured nine feet in height; this had been probably intended for the chieftain. The whole structure seems to me so well contrived that it is not easy to conceive a people who could not work in wood or iron could have been more conveniently accommodated in places of defence."[470]
Considerable skill and ingenuity is frequently shewn, both in the choice of a site for these defences and in turning it to the best account. They most frequently occupy capes, headlands, or small islands, either in a lake or on the open sea. Sir Walter Scott describes a curious device which he observed employed for guarding one of those in Shetland against the approach of strangers. "I remember," he remarks, "the remains of one upon an island in a small lake near Lerwick, which at high tide communicates with the sea, the access to which is very ingenious by means of a causeway or dyke, about three or four inches under the surface of the water. This causeway makes a sharp angle in its approach to the Burgh. The inhabitants, doubtless, were well acquainted with this, but strangers, who might approach in a hostile manner, and were ignorant of the curve of the causeway, would probably plunge into the lake, which is six or seven feet deep at the least. This must have been the device of some Vauban or Cohorn of those early times."
These remarkable buildings can hardly be viewed with too great an interest by the Scottish archæologist. They are the earliest native architectural remains which we possess, the cromlechs and stone circles being at best only rudimentary and symbolic or representative forms of architecture. They constitute, therefore, a most important element in our national history, supplying very definite facts relating to an ancient era of which we have received no other information in any degree so trustworthy. The first point accordingly is to ascertain, with such accuracy and minuteness as may now be possible, the precise nature of these facts. Careful investigations have accordingly been carried on of late years, accompanied in several instances with excavations around the buildings and within the inclosed area, the results of which are worthy of note. In more than one instance human remains have been found on removing the accumulated rubbish and debris from these ancient ruins, suggesting the possibility of their correspondence to the Nuraghes of Sardinia, which they somewhat resemble in outward form. It is altogether inconceivable, however, to ascribe a sepulchral origin to these chambered towers; while the same excavations which have discovered the remains of the dead have also in most cases furnished no less conclusive evidence of the former presence of the living. But, it has been already observed, the archæologist finds both "knowledge and understanding" in the grave, and esteems it a conceivable source of valuable insight to have even these dead to question on the subject. Dr. Macculloch mentions the discovery of human bones in the Burgh of Glenelg, but without entering into details; but the results of a careful examination of another of these towers, near Dunrobin, in the summer of 1849, elicited more definite information. On removing the rubbish from the chambers and galleries, a human skeleton was found in one of them, while excavations within the open area disclosed abundant traces of a fire in the centre, and also discovered several stone quernes or hand-mills. The skeleton here appeared obviously to belong to a later period than the quernes and the central fire; but no accompanying relics of the deceased were found to tell how long the fire of the old garrison had been extinguished ere the chamber of their fort was made a receptacle for the dead. More satisfactory results attended the examination of the Burgh of Burghar, another of these singular towers in the parish of Evie, Orkney. It is described by Mr. A. Peterkin, in a letter addressed to Dr. Hibbert in 1825, as the most perfect though not the largest of several in the neighbourhood. Several barrows occur in the vicinity, some of which have been opened and found to contain urns. The central area of the Burgh of Burghar was nearly filled up with the accumulated ruins and rubbish of centuries, and resisted more than one effort to explore it; but the son of the clergyman of the parish renewed the attempt in the spring of 1825, and succeeded in partially investigating the contents of the ruined area. On digging out the earth and rubbish, he found a human skeleton, beside which lay part of a deer's horn, and the rude bone comb represented here, about one-third the size of the original, which is now deposited in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries. Mr. Peterkin appears also to have forwarded the skull to Dr. Hibbert, though it has not been preserved. His description of it has already been noticed in a former chapter.[471]
More extensive excavations were made within the ruined burgh at a subsequent period, and led to the discovery of some very valuable relics, including two fine gold armillæ, now in the possession of the Earl of Zetland. In this example also there can be little hesitation in assuming that the deposition of the dead body did not take place till the abandonment of the burgh, perhaps not till it had been long in ruins, as it does not appear from the description to have been below the level of the original floor, but within the accumulated soil which encumbered the area. This, however, is open to doubt, as the letter is not quite explicit; and if the interment was at some depth below the floor, it might have taken place while the burgh was occupied, and an assailing force precluded access to the neighbouring downs on which the aboriginal sepulchral tumuli are still visible. It may be doubted whether the gold relics were placed there as a sepulchral deposit, or only for security or concealment. They belong possibly to a period long subsequent to that of the first interment with its simple and rude accompaniment of the bone comb. The latter discovery, indeed, seems to furnish some approximation to the period of those buildings. It shews, what we might expect, that they are the work of a people whose arts were extremely rude, and so far as any general reasoning may be built on a solitary instance, it seems to point to the erection of the burghs at a period long prior to the earliest recorded traces of Scandinavian invasion. The discovery, however, is not altogether without precedent. Another bone comb in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries, of even ruder construction, though nearly resembling the one found at Burghar in its general form, was found, in 1782, in the ruins of another burgh in Caithness, and a third discovered under similar circumstances is in the museum at Kirkwall. There appears, indeed, to have been a predilection for burying among the debris of the ruined forts, which must be supposed to have been formed long subsequent to their abandonment as strongholds and places of abode, and therefore adds to the evidence of their great antiquity. Some of these interments are undoubtedly traceable to the period of the Scandinavian occupation of the Orkney Isles.
Mr. W. H. Fotheringham of Kirkwall, Orkney, has communicated to me an account of the recent exploration of another ruin of a circular fort, apparently belonging to the same class of buildings as those previously described. It occupies as usual an isolated promontory, called the How of Hoxay, in South Ronaldshay, immediately opposite to the Bay of Scupa. Rising abruptly from the small Bay of Hoxay is the How or Height of Hoxay, on the top of which are the remains of a circular building. Until brought to light in the course of recent excavations it was entirely buried beneath the accumulated soil, and presented only the appearance of an earthen tumulus. It has now been completely exposed externally, and the inclosed area excavated to the surface of the rock, so that the work of exploration has been most effectually performed. The external wall measures fourteen feet in thickness, and about eight feet in greatest height, and incloses an area of about thirty feet in diameter. The construction of the wall is singular, the exterior and interior facings appearing to have been carefully built with unhewn stones fitted together with great nicety, and the intervening space filled up with stones thrown in with little care or design. No cement had been used, but the wall is still strong and without any displacement in the facings, though so much ruined that no certain idea can now be formed of its original height. The great quantity of stones which lay both within and about it served, however, to shew that only a small portion of the original fabric remains. The accompanying view of the most perfect side of the interior will convey a better idea of the general appearance and details than any description could do. The two upright stones about half way up the wall on the left of the drawing appear to be the side-posts either of a door or outlook, to which the projecting step below was probably designed to give access; but it was found built up like the other parts of the walls, and the proprietor having since, in a misdirected zeal for the preservation of the ruin, had the whole pointed with lime, it is no longer possible to detect the additions of later builders. Round the inner circumference of the wall upright flag-stones project at intervals of six feet apart. Only six of these now remain, but the fragments of others were discovered among the debris. In the recesses formed by these projecting stones there were found several stone quernes, a shallow stone mortar and pestle, or corn-crusher, of the rudest and most primitive construction, and also two smaller circular stone vessels, the one seven and the other five inches in diameter, and both about four and a half inches deep. The remains of the doorway in the eastern and most ruined part of the wall appear to have been of an unusually intricate construction, but these also have unfortunately been obliterated by later repairs, the whole wall having been raised to a uniform height, and a platform and flagstaff superadded in very questionable taste. The proprietor was actuated in his labours by a sincere desire for the preservation of this venerable ruin, and antiquaries must respect his motives, though he has not effected it exactly in the way they would have wished. I am favoured by Mr. Fotheringham with the following description and sketch:--"As to the door on the east side, the information I have got is that it was contracted by means of slates thus; and that at the side of the door was a chamber in the thickness of the wall leading from the interior, from which there was an aperture or slit to the widest part of the doorway, either for the purpose of outlook, or for projecting a weapon against a hostile intruder." This arrangement in the construction of the doorway more nearly approaches the plans for outlook and defence with which we are familiar in medieval military architecture. It is greatly to be regretted that no opportunity was afforded for more accurate observation.
The result of these investigations is highly satisfactory and encouraging, giving promise of further information from the labours of future explorers. Meanwhile some important conclusions may be arrived at. It is not necessary that we should follow Cordiner in his learned arguments concerning King Dornadil, a successor of Fergus I., who ascended the throne A.D. 263, and signalized his reign by erecting the Burgh of Dun Dornadil on the north-west coast of Inverness-shire. With precise dates the archæologist can rarely, if ever, have aught to do while treating of primitive antiquities; but this at least seems established, that they are native erections, and belong for the most part to a period long prior to the era of Scandinavian invasion. Where the Teutonic and Scandinavian races ultimately prevailed they bear the name of Burghs; where the older Celtic race and language survive they retain the name of Duns: and Sir Walter Scott has pointed out, in an ingenious note appended to Ivanhoe, that the venerable Saxon stronghold of Conigsburgh is only a refinement on the older model of the Scottish burghs. This has been illustrated by drawings and sections in the Abbotsford edition of the novels, and the resemblance is certainly sufficient to carry much probability with it, though at the same time the complicated arrangements, and the provisions for aggressive operations against assailants in the burgh of the southern Saxon, cannot but add to the conviction that the Scottish strongholds of this class belong to a much earlier period. They are manifestly the work of an ingenious and patient race, who aimed far more at defence than aggression. Strongholds they undoubtedly are, but they retain no trace of features strictly adapting them to military posts. The Saxon burghs of England were rapidly superseded by the more efficient keep of their Norman conquerors; yet when we institute a comparison between Conigsburgh and Mousa or Dun Dornadil, it seems to present a contrast not unlike that which distinguishes the defensive operations of the wild-cat and the hedgehog!--a contrast which either marks a very great change on the character of the hardy tribes that withstood the Roman legions, or indicates a marked difference between the races which occupied the northern and southern regions of Caledonia.
Dr. Macculloch remarks of these Scottish burghs,--"From the expensive nature of their construction, or the power of hands that must have been employed on them, it might be supposed that they were the palaces or castles of the chiefs or kings of the days in which they were erected. But it seems an insuperable objection to this notion, that four should have existed within so small a distance from each other in Glenelg, or that so many should be found in Sutherland and in Shetland not far asunder. The limits of territory that surround any one are too narrow for any chief; and where all chiefs were in a state of general and constant hostility, it is not likely that they should have chosen to build so near to each other. It is equally impossible that they should have been the dwellings of the inhabitants in general, as the expense of erection bears no proportion to the limited accommodation they could afford." The expense of erection is, in other words, the labour, time being of small value in a primitive state of society; and when their number is taken into consideration along with their limited accommodation, it is difficult to evade the conclusion that they were the temporary places of shelter of a people liable to sudden inroads from powerful foes, like the palisaded log-house or fort which the first settlers in the backwood frontiers of America were wont to erect as a place of safe retreat on any attack of the treacherous aborigines. There is no period that we know of in early Scottish history to which this description so aptly applies as to that immediately preceding the conquest of the Orkneys by Harold Harfager, about the year 880. Prior to this the rude Norse Vikings were wont to make sudden descents on these islands, as well as along the whole Scottish coast, spoiling and slaying with the most remorseless cruelty. At such a period, therefore, we can most readily conceive the natives of a district combining to build a burgh, whither they could retreat so soon as the fleet of the northmen was espied in the offing, and driving thither their cattle, and carrying with them all their most valuable moveables, they could lie secure till the spoilers set sail again in quest of some less watchful prey. Experience would teach the necessary improvements requisite for rendering these structures effectual against such foes; while the improbability of the northmen abandoning their ships and attempting a regular siege of one of these burghs, may account for the absence of the very distinct provisions for offensive operations against assailants which are so characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon burgh.
The Burgh of Mousa, which is still the most perfect of these ancient strongholds, is the only one of which we have any distinct historical notice. Torfæus tells us that Erland, the son of Harold the Fairspoken, carried off the mother of Harold, a Norwegian jarl, who was famed for her beauty, and took shelter with his prize in the Castle of Mousa. Earl Harold followed and laid siege to the place, endeavouring first to take it by assault, and afterwards to reduce it by famine. But both means proved equally ineffectual, and the wrathful Jarl was forced at length to agree to terms by which his mother became the wife of her ravisher. This burgh is not only the most perfect, but also the best adapted for defence of any that now exist; and it is not improbable that it owes its projecting parapet, as well as the more effective repair which has secured its preservation, to its later Norwegian occupants.
Still it does not necessarily follow from the correspondence of the state of society in the north of Scotland in the ninth century, as a weak people, constantly liable to sudden inroads by powerful and merciless invaders, with the apparent indications of these strongholds, that we must therefore assume the origin of all of them to that period. The conquest of the Orkneys, and the occupation of the northern districts of Scotland by the northmen in the ninth century, marks the close of a period which is still involved in almost total darkness. How long before this the natives had learned to watch the horizon for the dreaded fleets of the northmen, or in what form the earliest migration of the Cruithne to the north took place, we have yet to learn; but the very fact of the frequent descents of the former on our coasts must be viewed as affording some evidence that the arts of civilisation had advanced far beyond the rude state indicated by such primitive relics as those which were discovered in the How of Hoxay. The "exactors of rings" could have found little to tempt a second visit to the barbarian Orcades of the Stone Period; for the wandering Vikings knew not the pride of conquest which could tempt a Cæsar to guide his legions to the Ultima Thule, that he might return to the proud honours of a Roman triumph. The disappointed Viking might indeed be not inaptly supposed to apostrophize the outlooking Orcadian, as the English poet Cowper has done the "Gentle Savage" of Tahiti:--
"Expect it not. We found no bait To tempt us in thy country. We travel far, 'tis true, but not for nought; And must be bribed to compass earth again By other hopes and richer fruits than yours."
Without attempting to deduce from such evidence as is now attainable, more than it seems fairly to warrant, it is obvious that we have followed down the unwritten history of our island from that remote and imperfectly defined era in which we catch the first glimpses of its occupation by wanderers from the eastern home of our common race, to the period when definite history begins, and written records supply to some extent the information heretofore painfully sought amid the relics of older times. There still remains, however, some few pages more of these archæological annals to be deciphered before we attempt to sift the perplexing mixture of truth and fable which makes up our earlier written history.
FOOTNOTES:
[454] Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 164.
[455] Vol. i. pp. 87-96.
[456] Roy's Military Antiquities, Plate VIII.
[457] A still more striking proof of such acquired skill is furnished by the existence of a similar moat and rampart in the north of Ireland, of which an account is given by Dr. Stuart in his Historical Memoirs of Armagh.
[458] Plate XLVII. It is also engraved in King's Munimenta Antiqua, Plates I. and II.; and in Pennant's Tour, vol. iii. Plate XVI.
[459] Roy, Plate XLVIII.
[460] "I remarked that at Dun Mac Sniochain the materials of the hill itself were not vitrifiable, but that a very fusible rock was present at a short distance, or scattered in fragments about the plain. The same is true here, (Dunadeer); and in both cases the forts are not erected out of the materials nearest at hand, which are infusible, but collected with considerable labour from a distance. It is hence evident that the builders of these works were aware of the qualities of these various rocks; and it is equally evident that they chose the fusible in preference to the infusible, although with a considerable increase of labour. The obvious conclusion is that they designed from the beginning to vitrify their walls."--Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland, vol. i. p. 292.
[461] Experiments on Whinstone and Lava, by Sir J. Hall, Bart. Trans. Royal Soc. Edin. vol. v. p. 45; Series of Experiments on the Action of Heat, vol. vi. p. 71.
[462] I know of only one example yet noted out of Scotland, but it is a very remarkable one, and has been thought to confirm the idea of designed vitrification. (Vide Account of the Pierres Brulées, or Camp of Peran, a French primitive fort in the Commune of Clédran. Journal of Archæol. Association, vol. ii. p. 278.) The researches of Mr. Squier and Dr. Davis among the ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley, reveal various examples of partial vitrification, tending to confirm the more consistent idea of accidental and varying origin.--Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, vol. i. pp. 12, 17, 28, 36.
[463] Vide Jamieson, voce Beltane, for a curious collection of notices of various dates, illustrative of this ancient Scottish festival.
[464] Archæol. Scot. vol. iv. p. 297.
[465] Sir Walter Scott takes the Scandinavian origin of these structures for granted, while Dr. Macculloch, who delights to overturn the assumptions of every other antiquary, jumps to the far more extraordinary conclusion, that "there seems little reason to doubt the Picts and Scandinavians were radically one and the same people." The latter author then produces "perfect and incontrovertible proof of their real origin," by referring to certain examples said to be still visible in Norway. To this it is a very satisfactory reply that Mr. Worsaae, the distinguished Danish antiquary, has expressed his opinion that nothing at all resembling them is to be found in any of the Scandinavian countries; and Professor Munch of the University of Christiania, one of the most learned northern archæologists, completely confirms this, and assures me, after a personal inspection of several, that he is convinced they are of native origin, and peculiar to Scotland. There can be little doubt that Dr. Macculloch's "incontrovertible proofs" are derived, without acknowledgment, from the very dubious authority of the Rev. George Barry, D.D., of Shapinshay. Compare Macculloch, vol. ii. p. 257, and Barry's Orkney, p. 97.
[466] Pennant's Tour, vol. ii. p. 391.
[467] Itiner. Septent. p. 166.
[468] Highlands and Western Islands, vol. ii. p. 250.
[469] Pennant's Tour, vol. ii. p. 391.
[470] Cordiner's Antiquities and Scenery of the North of Scotland.
[471] Ante, p. 178.
IV. WEAPONS, IMPLEMENTS, AND POTTERY
The state of isolation, with all its attendant influences, must now be considered finally at a close. The effects of European civilisation rapidly modified the primitive native arts; and during this era, to which the name of Iron Period is applied, that strange mingling of races was chiefly effected which has resulted in our singular British nationality, in our peculiar virtues and our equally peculiar deficiencies. The Roman influence also failed not, even while indirectly operating, greatly to accelerate the development of the new era. Long before the invasion of Julius Cæsar, or the Roman working of lead and iron mines in England, the increasing demands for iron in the south of Europe could not fail to add somewhat also to the supplies of the north; nor is it improbable that the impetus communicated to the European workers in metals during the protracted struggles of the Punic wars, and the civil commotions which followed on the final supremacy of Rome, mainly contributed to furnish the native Britons with the arms by means of which they withstood both Julius Cæsar and Agricola.
Whatever effect the long occupation of England as a Roman province may have had on the native mythology and sepulchral rites, we have no reason to think that any change was produced on those of Scotland. Relics of the Roman period have been found in tumuli and cairns alongside of the rude British cinerary urn, the bronze spear, and even the stone celt; nor was it till the introduction of Christianity that the Scottish circumscribed cist was entirely abandoned for a sepulchre of ampler proportions. Sepulchral pottery is found alongside of relics of all periods, from the rudest primeval era to that of the general adoption of Christianity; but even where it is accompanied with Roman relics it betrays no indications of any familiarity with the artistic design or manufacturing processes of the Roman potter. The transition is at once from the primitive pottery apparently to that introduced by the Anglo-Saxons. On warlike implements, however, it is probable that the collision with the Roman legions exercised an important influence, though it is now difficult to ascertain its precise character or extent. The state of decomposition in which iron relics are usually found frequently renders it impossible to discriminate between those of Pagan and medieval eras. A few Scottish examples which have been noted from time to time, will, however, supply the means of forming some conclusions relative to the arts of this period.
Lieutenant-Colonel Miller in his "Inquiry respecting the Site of the Battle of Mons Grampius," thus describes some of the antiquities of the locality, which he conceives, with considerable probability, to be relics of native art contemporary with the Roman invasion of North Britain in the second century:--"At a point near Gateside a vast cairn stood until about forty-two years ago, and there the last stand of the Caledonians in a body seems to have been made. Upon removing this cairn many bones were found, and great quantities of iron. Many of the pieces were very small, so as to be called knives and forks by the workmen. Others again were very large; too much so, one might almost suppose, from the account I have had of them, even for the enormes gladios of the Caledonians. None of them have unfortunately been preserved, as they were probably completely oxidized, and reckoned of no value. Great numbers of beads were also found in the cairn, and distributed about the country at the time as curiosities. A few of these are still preserved, and serve to convey rather a favourable idea of the state of the arts at the time. Some of them were of a long elliptical form, and made of jet; others were made of a bluish glass, and shaded with spiral or circular lines; while others were white, enamelled with red and blue spots, the colours of which are as vivid as ever."[472] The same writer describes a great variety of stone and bronze relics found under a variety of circumstances throughout that district of Fifeshire. Many of these, however, must have belonged to very different periods, and most probably also to different races that succeeded each other in the occupation of the fertile region of country lying between the estuaries of the Forth and Tay, though all are pressed by him into the service, in order to add to the accumulated evidence by which he seeks to assign a precise site to the famed battle-field of Agricola and Galgacus. On the 22d November 1849, some farm-servants engaged in draining a field at East Langton, in the parish of Kirknewton, Mid-Lothian, found a skeleton about three and a half feet below the surface. The body lay south-west by north-east, imbedded in moss about three inches thick. Near the feet were found an iron knife, and a dagger with the remains of a wooden handle and a square gold plate and knob on the end of the haft, both greatly corroded and adhering together from the rust. There were also found in the same grave a wooden comb, broken and very much decayed, and a rude bodkin of bone measuring three and a quarter inches long, which had doubtless been employed in fastening the dress of the deceased. The knife is perforated with three holes, by which a handle must have been attached to it, but it is too much corroded to afford any correct idea of its original form. Near to these lay a wooden vessel and an earthen urn coated with green glaze, and rudely ornamented with a waved pattern; both of which were broken by the carelessness of the workmen. The accompanying woodcut represents the dagger and bone pin, the former of which measures with the handle thirteen and a quarter inches long. Nearly at the same time a quantity of billon pennies of James II., of the Edinburgh Mint,[473] were discovered in the field where this interesting sepulchral deposit was found. But it had been in cultivation upwards of fifty years, and there is no reason to think that any connexion was traceable between the two discoveries.
The glazed pottery accompanying the iron weapons at East Langton is a characteristic feature of the sepulchral deposits of the last Pagan period in Scotland, and is perhaps one of the earliest indications of Anglo-Saxon influence. During the progress of the railway works for constructing a branch line of the North British Railway to North-Berwick, in 1848, two stone cists were discovered on the Abbey Farm, both of them measuring a little more than four feet in length, and each containing a human skeleton. In one of them was found an iron sword and dagger, both so much corroded as to break and crumble to pieces in the careless hands of the railway navies. At the side of the skeletons, in both cists, were urns of rough grey ware, ornamented externally with parallel grooves running round them, and internally covered with a green glaze. The woodcut represents one of these rescued in a partially dilapidated state from the railway excavators, and now in the possession of Andrew Richardson, Esq. It measures fully six inches in height, and it will be seen bears a singularly close resemblance to another urn of somewhat smaller dimensions, found in Aberdeenshire, and described below.
In 1791, four urns were discovered under a large stone near Drumglow Hill, Kincardineshire, and some others in a neighbouring cairn, of which the sole description given is that they were made of very coarse materials, and the outside glazed and ornamented with dotted lines.[474] In 1832, Lieutenant-Colonel Miller presented to the Society of Scottish Antiquaries "a finely formed barbed arrow-head of flint, and a fragment of what is supposed by the donor to have been a glazed sepulchral vase, found at Merlsford, at the foot of the Lomond Hill, Fifeshire."[475] This specimen is too imperfect to furnish any idea of the form of the vase, though it affords additional evidence of the introduction of this characteristic change in the primitive Scottish pottery at an early period.
The Old Statistical Account of the parish of Rathen contains a description of three cairns at Memsie, on the eastern coast of Aberdeenshire, which, it is remarked, "were very large, till of late, that great quantities of the stones have been taken away from two of them. The remains of human bones were lately found in one of them." The renewed invasion of one of these cairns about the year 1824 led to the discovery of the small urn here engraved. It measures four and a quarter inches in height, three inches in diameter at the bottom, and four at the top. Externally it is rough and destitute of any ornament, except the six parallel grooves which appear in the woodcut. Within it is entirely coated with a dark green glaze. Unfortunately, however, its most remarkable features no longer exist. Mr. John Gordon of Cairnbulg remarks in a letter with which he accompanied the donation of the urn to the Society in 1827,--"The urn has two projecting ears opposite each other, which fitted into corresponding double ones attached to a lid, by which the vessel, when found, was closely covered; and the whole of the projections were perforated to admit a pin which completed the fastening. The lid was unfortunately broken in opening the urn. It was made of the same materials, and fitted into the mouth which was formed for its reception." Part of the rim has also been broken away, but enough remains to shew, that above each projecting ear is an opening into which the lid had fitted as an additional security. No mention is made of anything having been found within the urn thus carefully secured, but beside it lay a sword, unfortunately no longer known to exist. It is described as "one-edged; the hilt of brass, the blade iron, seventeen inches and a quarter long, one inch and a quarter broad at the guard, from whence it tapers to the point; when found it was enclosed in a wooden scabbard." It appears to have borne considerable resemblance to an iron sword found by Sir Richard Colt Hoare, in a tumulus opened by him at King's Barrow, in the Vale of Warminster, "which had a handle of oakwood. The blade was about eighteen inches long, two inches wide, and single-edged."
In the year 1800, Mr. Robert Dalyell presented to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, a sword fractured in several pieces, portions of a helmet, battle-axe, and spear, all of iron, found under a cairn on his estate of Hunthills, Roxburghshire. But the whole are too much corroded to convey any very distinct idea of their original forms, though they add additional evidence in proof of the continued use of the sepulchral cairn, after the full development of the Teutonic era, with its characteristic implements of iron. In 1834 Professor Traill exhibited at a meeting of the Scottish Antiquaries the fragments of an iron sword, apparently that of a man of distinction, found along with the boss of a shield, at a place called Swenedrow, in Rowsey, Orkney. In the same place many fragments of ancient armour have been discovered; and the Professor believed the sword to have belonged to one of the Norwegian jarls.[476] Pennant engraves another ancient sword discovered in the island of Islay;[477] nor are such discoveries rare, though they have seldom obtained the minute attention they merit. A remarkable discovery of arms and other iron relics was made in the month of August 1834, at Fendoch Camp, an intrenchment on the river Almond, about five miles north-east of Crieff, in Perthshire. It is commonly described as a Roman camp, and the urns found in numerous cairns which surrounded it are no less unhesitatingly assigned to the legionary invaders. A drawing which I possess of one of the urns found inverted within a cist under one of the cairns, leaves no room to doubt that these sepulchral mounds, at least, are of British origin, and probably of a date long prior to the era of Roman invasion. On the occasion above referred to, while a labourer was digging across the eastern rampart of Fendoch Camp, he discovered at some depth below the surface three iron pots or kettles, the largest of which broke in pieces while he was in the act of raising it from the ground. The other two measured ten inches in diameter by four and a half in depth, and eight and a half inches in diameter by three inches in depth. They were each composed of a series of concentric circles rivetted together, the larger one having a straight handle twenty-one inches in length. Along with these were also found three heads of spears or javelins seven inches in length, a portion of a sword-blade eighteen and a half inches in length, three pairs of bits, two pairs of shears eleven inches long, the blades alone measuring four inches, a sort of spoon or ladle ten inches in extreme length of handle and bowl, a beautiful hinge of yellowish metal four inches long, carved and plated with silver, in excellent preservation, besides various other implements. The most of these interesting relics were carefully packed in the largest kettle, and a flat stone placed on its mouth. This curious hoard was purchased by my friend, Mr. John Buchanan of Glasgow, under whose zealous care they might have been deemed secure of a safe asylum, but the weighty box in which they were packed tempted some covetous knave, and our only poor consolation for their loss is to picture the mortification of the thief when he unlocked his treasure and found only a chest full of rusty iron!
But this unhappily is no solitary example of the destruction of ancient Scottish relics. "Vast quantities of arms," says the author of the Statistical Account of the parish of Cummertrees, Dumfriesshire, writing in 1834, "were lately found in a field on the farm of Corrieknows, near the burgh of Annan. The farmer who found them had them all, but a brass battle-axe, converted into husbandry utensils."[478] From inquiries since made, I find that the brass battle-axe was a bronze celt, so that, if we may assume, as seems most probable, that the iron weapons belonged to the same era, we have here most interesting examples of the weapons of the Teutonic Period. The farmer describes the swords as about two feet in length, edged on the one side to the handle, and on the other for the half length of the blade. Beside them lay some long spear-heads, nearly all broken, and more injured by rust than the swords. In the same field he also found a number of horse-shoes, some of which were an entire circle, and others curiously turned in at the heel. On the farm of Broom, in the same parish, there is a field called Bruce's Acres, where King Robert is said to have been defeated by the English; but the singular form of the horses' shoes found at Corrieknows adds additional evidence of these relics belonging to an earlier period. In the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries there are horse-shoes from the field of Bannockburn and from that of Nisbetmuir, Berwickshire, fought 24th June 1355, after the captivity of King David Bruce. They are chiefly remarkable for their very diminutive size, and in no way correspond to those described above. Antique horse-shoes of a different form have repeatedly been found in the neighbourhood of Carlinwark Loch, Kirkcudbrightshire, a prolific source of valuable archæological relics. The ancient name of Castle Douglas, on the margin of the loch, is Causeway End, from its position in relation to an ancient causeway constructed through the marsh, and believed to be a part of one of the great Roman roads. About this place most of the ancient horse-shoes have been discovered. One of them in the collection of Mr. Joseph Train is described by him as consisting of a solid piece of iron, not made to go round the edge of the hoof, but to cover the whole. On the inside, especially towards the heel, it is hollowed so as not to press upon the soft part of the foot. Though much worn in front this cumbrous lump of iron still weighs about six pounds, so that four of them must have formed no slight impediment to a horse. To what period these equestrian furnishings should be assigned it is not easy to determine. No relic yet discovered along with the remains of horses, so frequently found in the later tumuli, suggests the idea of the early Britons having shod the horses which they attached to their war-chariots. Montfaucon, however, describes a small iron horse-shoe which was discovered in 1653, in the tomb of Childeric, founder of the French monarchy, whose horse had been interred along with him, A.D. 481. The Rev. Samuel Pegge, in an ingenious paper "On the Shoeing of Horses among the Ancients,"[479] conceives that the custom was introduced into England by William the Conqueror; but it seems exceedingly improbable that either the Anglo-Romans or the Anglo-Saxons should have remained ignorant of a device which some allusions of Homer would lead us to suppose was not unknown even to the Greeks of the Bronze Period.
Ure describes and engraves in his History of the Parish of East Kilbride,[480] a very interesting discovery made at Castlemilk in 1792, of a helmet, gorget, dagger, and other iron relics, along with which were two bronze vessels, one of them of peculiar form, and also the remains of a leaden vase; but these it is probable were medieval antiquities. No doubt, however, can be entertained of the era of another iron relic described by him, but of which unfortunately no engraving exists. Some workmen engaged in demolishing a cairn in the same parish found in it a large urn filled with human bones, and close by it an iron implement designated "an old spade of a clumsy shape," but which was more probably an ancient bill or battle-axe. Mr. Robert Riddell describes two such weapons, figured in the Archæologia.[481] They were found in a moss near Terregles, Dumfriesshire, and measure each two and a half feet long, and above two inches thick at the back, though greatly corroded with rust. The Kilbride discoverers, on finding the urn, had confidently anticipated that its contents would prove a golden treasure, which they magnanimously resolved should be equitably divided. Having gulped down their mortification as best they might on finding their whole treasure dwindle to an old iron bill, "it was at length unanimously agreed that it should not be sold; it might, for anything they knew, be uncommonly ominous, especially as it was iron, and taken out of a grave which was generally believed to be haunted." So the desired division of the spoil was at length secured by having the curious relic converted into tackets or hobnails for their shoes![482]
The general character of the older Scottish superstitions in regard to iron, of which we have here some indications, more frequently refer to it rather as a charm against spells and malign influences of all sorts, entirely corresponding in this respect with the popular creed of Norway at the present day. In describing the "Adder Stone," Ure remarks, "It is thought by superstitious people to possess many wonderful properties. It is used as a charm to insure prosperity, and to prevent the malicious attacks of evil spirits. In this case, it must be closely kept in an iron box to secure it from the fairies, who are supposed to have an utter abhorrence at iron." This may be compared with another canon of northern folk-lore, referred to in a former chapter,[483] in relation to the flint arrow-head or elf-bolt. The inferences suggested by both are the same, pointing to an epoch when iron, as a novel introduction, could in no way be associated with the Elves and Gnomes, old as the primitive stone weapons of the aborigines. Pennant, however, describes a curious charm against witchcraft, in use in the Hebrides, where the milk of enchanted kine is boiled along with both flints and untempered steel--the bane and the antidote--which was held to give the operator complete power over the enchanter. We are still familiar with the rustic faith in the efficiency of the iron horse-shoe affixed to the stable-door as a certain protection against all supernatural evil influences.
A remarkable class of urns, so far as I yet know peculiar to Scotland, appears to belong for the most part to the Iron Period. They vary in form, but all agree in the singular characteristic of being open at both ends. One of these was discovered within the area of a stone circle at Barrach, Aberdeenshire, by a peasant digging for stones. It lay under a flat stone, with another placed below it, and was found to be filled with human bones.[484] Others are described in the old Statistical Reports as resembling chimney cans. But the most minute account of this singular class of sepulchral urns is furnished by Ure, to whose indefatigable researches within the limited district of which he has treated we owe so many valuable reminiscences of bygone discoveries. "In the bottom of a very small cairn on the lands of East Rogerton, the property of his Grace the Duke of Hamilton, were found five urns not of the ordinary shape. They were about eighteen inches high; six wide at the one end and four at the other. Both ends were open. They were said by the workmen to be glazed, and ornamented with flowers; and narrower in the middle than at either end. They stood upon smooth stones distant from each other about three-quarters of a yard, and placed in a circular form. The top of each urn was covered with a thin piece of stone. They were all totally destroyed by the rustic labourers." Such is the lamentable yet ever-recurring history of our national antiquities. Vallancey has engraved a very beautiful bronze vase, dug up in 1769, near the church of Fahan, county of Donegal. The handles are horses' heads, very closely corresponding to the usual artistic style of this period; and the vase has the same remarkable peculiarity as the class of Scottish urns referred to, in being open at both ends.[485]
The iron relics of the Teutonic Period by no means yield the same amount of information as we have been able to derive from the older weapons and implements of bronze, chiefly owing to the extreme susceptibility of the newer metal to oxidation under nearly all the circumstances in which both classes of antiquities are discovered. This want, however, we shall find abundantly supplied from other sources, including the contemporary works in bronze. Among the most characteristic remains of the defensive armour of this period frequently met with, the umbones of shields occupy a prominent place. The larger ones are of sufficient size to admit the hand, and resemble in this, as well as in other respects, those frequently met with in England. They suffice to shew that the shield was not worn on the arm like the Roman clypeus, but held by a bar crossing the centre of the projecting boss, the hollow of which received and protected the hand. In this it closely corresponded to the bronze buckler of the previous period, which probably continued to be used contemporarily with it. An example of an iron umbo found in Morayshire is figured on a subsequent page. Another, referred to in a brief summary given in the Nenia Britannica, of relics found at Westray, Orkney, is described as "a very small iron vessel like a head-piece, only four and a half inches in the hollow, bruised apparently by a sword or an axe." In the Scottish Museum is a small iron boss, found at Corbiehall, near Carstairs, Lanarkshire, which is only slightly raised in the centre. The locality where it was discovered has furnished many Roman remains, among which it most probably ought to be classed. In general form it closely resembles an exceedingly beautiful boss of a Roman shield in the same collection, made of bronze, and decorated in relief with a crowned female figure seated, holding Victory in her hand, and surrounded with the spoils of war.
A rarer and more remarkable object pertaining to this period is the iron sword, inclosed in its bronze sheath, several very fine examples of which have been found at different times. One of these occurred in the very valuable collection of antiquities discovered at Stanwich, now deposited in the British Museum. Another similar example, found on a moor near Flasby, parish Gargrave, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was exhibited during the meeting of the Archæological Institute at York in 1846. In both of these the iron blade of the sword was still inclosed in the sheath. The annexed illustration is copied from a very perfect bronze scabbard closely resembling the two found in England, now in the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. It appears from an inscription roughly scratched on it to have been found on the Mortonhall estate, at the foot of the Pentland Hills, in the immediate vicinity of the Scottish capital. The blade of this sword must have measured twenty-two and a half inches in length by one inch in breadth,--an exceedingly small and light weapon compared with the enormes gladii which Tacitus describes the Caledonians as using. It appears to have been a straight two-edged weapon, with a sharp point, and was perhaps designedly adapted for more convenient and ready use by the charioteer than the more ponderous sword generally borne by the native Britons. The different examples which have been heretofore noted are furnished with the same large bronze loop which is shewn in the woodcut, attached to the middle of the scabbard, the precise use of which is not quite apparent. The style of ornament entirely corresponds to that employed in decorating the personal ornaments and the horse-furniture of this period, and supplies evidence of a remarkable change from the undefined ornamentation of the Archaic works in bronze.
FOOTNOTES:
[472] Archæol. Scot. vol. iv. p. 43.
[473] Lindsay, Plate XXI. No. 6.
[474] Sinclair's Stat. Acc. vol. iii. p. 561.
[475] Minutes S.A. Scot., January 23, 1832.
[476] Minutes S.A. Scot., May 19, 1834.
[477] Pennant's Tour, vol. ii. Plate xliv.
[478] New Statistical Account, vol. iv. p. 249.
[479] Archæologia, vol. iii. p. 39.
[480] Ure's Rutherglen and Kilbride, p. 159.
[481] Archæologia, vol. x. Pl. XL
[482] Ure's Rutherglen and Kilbride, p. 212.
[483] Ante, p. 125.
[484] Scot. Mag. 1772, p. 581.
[485] Collect. de Reb. Hibern. No. XIII. p. 71, Pl. XIII.