stirling-1963-vol-1/05_071

Transcription

INTRODUCTION : THE ROMAN PERIOD
(No. 118) and Milnquarter (No. 119) - may have been used to accommodate the working
parties actually engaged on the construction of the frontier. ¹
Of the five Wall forts in Stirlingshire, that at Falkirk (No. 113) is buried beneath the
modern town, while Seabegs (No. 116) has not yet been located. The remaining three -
Mumrills (No. 112), Rough Castle (No. 115) and Castlecary (No. 117) - have all been
intensively explored, and they provide between them an admirable illustration of the lack of
uniformity that is one of the prime characteristics of the forts on the Antonine Wall. Thus
Mumrills is 6 1/2 acres in extent, Castlecary 3 1/2 acres, and Rough Castle only a little over 1 acre;
while their ramparts are built respectively of clay, stone and turf. In common with the rest
of the Wall forts, however, all of them had stone central buildings, timber-framed barracks
of wattle-and-daub, and strongly defended annexes almost as large as the forts themselves.
Such annexes sometimes contained public buildings, like the bath-house at Rough Castle, but
were probably mainly occupied by the dwellings of the civilians attached to the fort, and who,
at Carriden at least, were accorded official status as a vicus or village community. ²
According to the Historia Augusta, ³ the construction of the Antonine Wall was associated
with a campaign in which the Britons were defeated and driven back, and it is possible that the
little structure known as "Arthur's O'on", which stood in front of the eastern end of the Wall,
was built at the same time, and was a tropaeum, or victory-monument. The structure itself is
of unique design, a circular stone chamber being capped by a corbelled dome. but neither its
Roman date nor its predominantly religious nature are in doubt, while the high degree of skill
displayed in its construction is more appropriate to an official than to a private monument.
Although technically outside the frontier-line, the O'on was not unprotected, since the main
road to the north was reopened in the Antonine period at least as far as the Tay crossing at
Bertha, where a 2nd-century dedication to Discipline, emanating from the sacellum of the
fort, has recently been found. In Stirlingshire, a new fort, some 6 acres in extent, was built at
Camelon (No. 122) to guard this road, and it is reasonable to assume that the hypothetical fort
at Stirling (No. 123) would also have been constructed at this time.
As has been stated above, the history of the Antonine frontier is still obscure in many
respects, the main difficulty being that whereas only two periods of occupation have been
detected in Antonine forts behind the Wall, the forts on the Wall itself have been thought to
exhibit three periods. Likewise the date of the final evacuation of Roman troops from Scotland
has not yet been established. All are agreed, however, that the occupation cannot have outlasted
the withdrawal of troops from Britain by Clodius Albinus in 196, and that thereafter, apart from
a few occasions where punitive expeditions may have operated in the area, Stirlingshire remained
outside the sphere of direct Roman control.
In a previous section it has been shown that during the Early Iron Age Stirlingshire was
virtually a no-man's land, sparsely inhabited by peripheral groups of peoples from the
surrounding regions. Lacking any common material culture, or tribal strongholds in this
locality corresponding to the oppida at Birrenswark ⁴ or at Eildon Hill North, ⁵ these people
are unlikely to have offered any effective resistance to the Roman forces, and it was not until

1 P.S.A.S., lxxxix (1955-6), 329 ff. The camp at Dalnair (No. 120) may have been another member of the same series.
2. Ibid., xc (1956-7), 3.
3 Vita Antonini Pii, 5, 4.
4 Inventory of Dumfriesshire, No. 272.
5 Inventory of Roxburghshire, No. 597.

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