The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland

by Alistair Moffat

  After the expedition to Kintyre, Agricola’s attention turned northwards once more. No doubt with imperial approval from Domitian, the Roman war machine rumbled again through the Stirling gap. Here is Tacitus:

  To resume the story, in the summer in which he began his sixth year in post, he enveloped the states situated beyond the Bodotria [the Firth of Forth]. Because there were fears that all the peoples on the further side might rise and the land routes be threatened by an enemy army, Agricola reconnoitred the harbours with the fleet.

  The campaign almost immediately met with near disaster. For the first time, according to Tacitus, ‘[T]he peoples who inhabit Caledonia turned to armed struggle’. Agricola had brigaded his legions and auxiliaries into an invasion force of at least 17,000 men, probably more. It seems likely that Agricola’s own legion with whom he had served on an earlier tour of duty in Britain, the XX Valeria Victrix, had marched north with him in some strength. The II Adiutrix were with them and part of the IX Hispana had been summoned from their garrison at York. In addition there were regiments of auxiliaries, the Batavians and Tungrians from the lands near the mouth of the Rhine. It was a substantial, battle-hardened and experienced army.

  To meet this challenge, the kindreds of the Highlands and the coastal straths of the north-east had formed an alliance. In what must have been a series of rapid negotiations conducted as the Romans advanced, the northern kings had combined their household war bands and almost certainly mustered the host, the gosgordd. If the Celtic society beyond the Forth was indeed as combative as that of Gaul (there may be an instructive but long-range comparison with relations between the Highland clans of the historic period and how each chose sides in the Jacobite rebellions of the eighteenth century) and had regularly raided cattle from each other, then these differences were quickly patched up. It seems likely that there were some pre-existing interlocking loyalties which could be brought into play for the size of the army needed to confront the Romans must have involved not scores but hundreds of different war bands. Perhaps there was indeed a network of overkings between whom an alliance could be forged.

  In any event, the size of the Caledonian confederate army turned out to be enough to give Agricola pause and persuade him into a tactical mistake. Tacitus of course nowhere concedes this, merely stating, ‘To avoid encirclement by superior forces familiar with the country, he himself divided his army into three divisions and advanced’.

  The leaders of the confederate army were aware, had good intelligence and showed themselves sufficiently flexible to take advantage. There follows one of the most vivid pieces of reporting in Tacitus’ Agricola. Perhaps he saw events unfold with his own eyes or perhaps the old general told a good tale of a close-run thing:

  When the enemy discovered this, with a rapid change of plan they massed for a night attack on the Ninth Legion, as being by far the weakest in numbers. They cut down the sentries and burst into the sleeping camp, creating panic. Fighting was already going on inside the camp itself when Agricola, who had learned of the enemy’s route from his scouts and was following close on their tracks, ordered the most mobile of his cavalry and infantry to charge the combatants from the rear and the whole army was to raise the battle-cry. At first light the standards gleamed.

  Agricola’s army was shadowed by the Classis Britannica, the Roman fleet, and, as the advance continued northwards, they probably supplied the troops. The Caledonian generals had different problems of supply. As in the night attack on the IX Legion, the confederate army had favoured guerrilla tactics, always avoiding the set-piece battle in open country. With their tight shield-walls, short, sharp, stabbing swords and iron discipline, the legions had defeated Celtic armies again and again. They were professionals and their drills and skills had been honed by centuries of experience. But problems of supply were pressing hard on the confederate generals and at last they were forced to take the decision to stand and fight in pitched battle.

  The problem was timing. Tacitus wrote of Agricola’s campaign beginning in the summer of either AD 83 or 84, what commanders had traditionally seen as the fighting season. By the time of the attack on the IX Legion and the advance up through Angus and the Mearns, harvest-time had passed. This allowed the gosgordd, the Caledonian army of farmers finally to muster. And it also forced them into a set-piece battle. A huge Roman army of more than 17,000 hungry mouths consumed everything in its path and the native granaries of the north had just been filled. If the Caledonian generals wished to defend their food stores and avoid a starving winter for their people, then a battle was inevitable.

  ‘So he came to the Graupian Mountain. It had already been occupied by the enemy,’ wrote Tacitus. What Agricola saw was a massed host of perhaps 30,000 men arrayed on the slopes of the mountain, probably Bennachie in Aberdeenshire. At its foot stood the Caledonian vanguard, most of them warriors from many royal teulus. Leading the host was Calgacus, not a king but a man ‘outstanding among their many leaders for his valour and nobility’. His name means ‘The Swordsman’ and he was almost certainly a warrior of tremendous reputation, a real Cuchulainn and not a myth-hero.

  Faced with such numbers stationed in a superior position, looking down on the battlefield, Agricola immediately saw that his men might quickly be outflanked, surrounded and annihilated. He extended his lines to counter even though it thinned the ranks. The disposition of Roman forces was otherwise standard. In the centre of the line stood 8,000 auxiliary infantry, their shields locked, their short swords bristling. On the flanks 3,000 cavalry guarded against encirclement and behind the centre ‘the legions were stationed in front of the rampart: victory in a battle where no Roman blood was shed would be a tremendous honour; if the auxilia were driven back, the legions were a reserve’.

  In the awful moments before battle was joined, the confederates behaved like a Celtic army. Warriors sallied out to issue challenges, charioteers made ‘a din as they rode back and forth’. Individual bravery in the Caledonian ranks was not doubted but it would be collective discipline that would triumph. After each side had exchanged volleys of javelins, the auxiliaries attacked in formation. Despite a period when the Caledonian cavalry looked as though they might indeed outflank Agricola’s army, the Roman front line ground forward. Pushing, stabbing and always staying together, they forced their way up the hillside and cut their way into the heart of the confederate army.

  It was a defeat but, while Tacitus tried hard to portray it as a rout, the battle was not absolutely decisive. His tally of 10,000 Caledonian dead is a suspiciously round number but only a figure of 360 Roman casualties is probably accurate. Mons Graupius saw the end of native resistance for the time being but the Highlands were never penetrated by Roman roads or forts and never would be.

  4

  Kingdoms Come

  Y RHUFEINIWR, ‘THE ROMANS’, had lost their emperor. Their High-King, Hadrian, had at last succumbed to a wasting disease. When his sick heart ceased to beat, the elders of Rome had hailed a new emperor. Antoninus Pius was his name, and he had been anointed by the dying Hadrian as he groaned through his last months of agony and misery. But the passage of power from one High-King was always uncertain – even more so when there was not just a kingdom at stake but the mightiest empire the world had ever seen. Y Rhufeiniwr knew it and, as they sat with their warriors and discussed the vicissitudes of Roman politics, the kings of the northern kindreds knew it too.

  After Hadrian’s death in 138, there was war. Across the waist of Britain, from the eastern sea to the western shore, the Romans had built a mighty stone wall. Painted white with lime-wash, it sliced like an obscenity through the lands of the plainsmen of the lower Tyne Valley, the Textoverdi and the Corionototae and it divided the hill country of the Brigantes and the Selgovae and the Carvetii in the west. It was an affront and a challenge. Here is the Greek writer, Pausanias: ‘Also he [Antoninus Pius] deprived the Brigantes of most of their territory because they had taken up arms and invaded the Genounian district of which the peop
le are subject to the Romans.’

  Leaving aside the mysteries of Genounia, probably a scribal error or a simple mistake of geography, the thrust of the passage is clear enough. The British kings and their war bands had ridden out of their upland strongholds and probably ambushed columns of soldiers or attacked forts. It seems that, by ‘Brigantes’, Pausanias meant the hill peoples of the north in general. After the slaughter of Mons Graupius, no native general would risk a set-piece battle and none is reported or celebrated. Skirmish and guerrilla tactics were preferred. The hit-and-run stings of fast-moving cavalry and possibly squadrons of chariots were certainly disruptive but occasionally Roman retaliation was effective and gruesome.

  Native warriors were decapitated, either in action or by execution, and their heads spitted on poles and planted as a dire warning at the gates of at least two Roman forts in the north. On Trajan’s Column, soldiers are depicted doing exactly this in the Dacian wars of thirty years before. In the early 1900s, Trimontium, the large fort near Melrose, was excavated by James Curle, a local solicitor. In rubbish pits dug close to the walls of the fort, he found several skulls but no skeletons associated with them. Unlikely to be burials, these were almost certainly the heads of Selgovan warriors either captured or killed in battle by the garrison. In the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall, at Vindolanda, another skull was discovered much more recently. This time, DNA testing was used to determine that this was the head of a native warrior, probably a member of the teulu of the king of the Anavionenses. Forensic analysis confirmed the excavators’ suspicions. The head had certainly been spitted on a pole and no doubt displayed as a grisly trophy in a prominent place.

  War in Britain was quickly seen by the incoming regime on the Palatine Hill as an opportunity. Like every new emperor, Antoninus Pius needed to establish military credentials and amongst his first acts was the appointment of a governor of Britannia. He found a remarkable man to take over the troubled province.

  Quintus Lollius Urbicus was born in the Roman province of Numidia, modern Algeria. His father was a modest landowner, himself the son of a Berber tribesman. It was a dazzling transformation – a triumph of merit over the class rigidities of imperial Rome. Lollius Urbicus was clearly an excellent soldier and, as Antoninus Pius well knew, he depended absolutely on the emperor’s favour for advancement.

  The new governor began his mission to Britannia by repairing and refurbishing the fort at Corbridge, just south of Hadrian’s Wall. With the II Augusta legion in the van, the empire drove northwards once more. Here is the relevant notice in a biography of Antoninus Pius: ‘Through his legates he carried on many wars; for he conquered the Britons through Lollius Urbicus, the governor, and, after driving back the barbarians, built another wall, of turf.’

  Before he could set his soldiers to the task of building yet another frontier wall, Urbicus had to subdue the kings of southern Scotland. The campaign cannot have been easy for it lasted at least two and possibly three years. Since this was a war of conquest, aimed at bringing more territory into the empire and thereby enhancing the emperor’s early prestige, it required a systematic occupation. Striking north along the well-established line of Dere Street, Urbicus garrisoned forts at Risingham and High Rochester in north Northumberland before climbing up and across the Cheviot watershed and rebuilding Trimontium on the Tweed.

  The large fort was the hub of the Roman occupation of the south of Scotland. It commanded the head of the gently undulating and fertile river valley just at the point where the Tweed emerges from the western hill country. Probably deliberately placed on the frontier between the Selgovae and Votadini, Trimontium could both protect and police. Well-placed to act as an ingathering depot for the agricultural produce needed to feed the occupying forces, it also overlooked a crossing of the Tweed, at first a ford just above Leaderfoot and then almost certainly a bridge.

  Communications were good. With their usual briskness, Roman surveyors climbed the sacred mountain of Eildon Hill North and planted a signal station smack on the summit. Ringed by a three-mile-long symbolic rampart, Eildon Hill had been a sacred precinct for the peoples of the middle Tweed Valley for a thousand years. Now it suffered detachments of soldiers signalling to their comrades to the south and north, using either a white flag system or polished, reflective metal sheets. Modern experiments have shown that signals sent from Eildon Hill could be picked up on Ruberslaw where there was another Roman station, fifteen miles to the south. This abuse of holy ground was another affront – part of the cost of subjection.

  The mechanics of subjugation depended heavily on the Roman main road clearly visible from the top of the hill as it runs arrow-straight up to Ancrum Moor. Dere Street began in York, the headquarters of the VI Adiutrix Legion (and much later part of the Anglian kingdom of Deira, hence the name of the road) and it made its way over the Cheviots, down past Trimontium, up the Leader Valley, over Soutra and down to Edinburgh. No longer clearly traceable under the modern city after it reaches the junction at Nether Liberton, the great road is thought to have turned west and run on through the Stirling Gap and as far north as Perth.

  The precise terminus for Dere Street was probably intended to be a huge legionary fortress at Inchtuthil on the River Tay. It was begun in AD 83 on the orders of Agricola and intended to house his favoured legion, the XX Valeria Victrix. Vast, the largest fortress north of York, Inchtuthil was planned and its building organised on a grand scale. At fifty-three acres, it could accommodate 6,000 soldiers inside the stone-walled perimeter. There was a hospital, extensive workshops, many barracks blocks and an elaborate headquarters building. All of this suggests that Agricolan Scotland was about to be fully integrated into the provincial administration of Britannia. But events at the other end of Europe derailed those intentions – and thereby changed the course of the history of the north. The Dacians, of modern Romania, had rebelled and plunged the area of the lower Danube into chaos. From Chester, the II Adiutrix was withdrawn to shore up the eastern European frontier and in turn the XX Valeria Victrix was forced to abandon the great building project at Inchtuthil and march south to replace them.

  The huge fort was being constructed in the territory of the Caledonians and, when the news came from Dacia, the native kings will have understood why the XX Legion had to depart immediately. With so much activity and the intensive contact with native communities that this implies, information will have flowed and the military intelligence amongst the Caledonians improved. The notion that Rome operated a separate, much more sophisticated world unintelligible to native elites is often too readily and thoughtlessly assumed. Southern Britain had been occupied for forty years, some northern kings had become subjects of Rome and knowledge of and contact with the Empire is likely to have been much more intense and regular than surviving records allow.

  Rome was suddenly distracted by the flaring of invasion from Dacia but, after the slaughter at Mons Graupius, the kings of the north are unlikely to have entertained any notion of taking a military advantage. Nevertheless the abrupt abandonment of so much work is still striking. In order to bring stone from nearby quarries inconveniently sited at the top of rising ground, the Romans built a sophisticated road system. At a fork at the foot of the incline empty ox-drawn wagons were led up a steeper gradient while moving down the other, more gently sloping road were fully laden wagons. There was always a danger that beasts could be pushed by a great weight of building stone and crushed. It was an elegant solution. But one day the wagons stopped rolling, the roads were left empty and the stone stayed in the quarries. Once equipment had been loaded instead and the legion and its auxiliaries formed up in marching order and anything useful to an enemy which could not be carried away south had been set ablaze, the Empire moved south of the Tay. Then as now, soldiers were used to sudden changes of plan and, as the smoke plumed over the building site by the riverbank, few will have given all that useless work a backward glance

  When archaeologists dug the site of Inchtuthil in 1950, they came across a
remarkable find. In a deep pit, 750,000 iron nails had been carefully concealed. The commanders of the XX Valeria Victrix knew the value of so much smelted iron to Caledonian blacksmiths and were unwilling to leave such handy war materials behind. Too heavy to carry away, all of those nails were needed for the new fortress, probably marked on Ptolemy’s map as ‘Victoria’. Perhaps the soldiers also thought that, one day, they might return but it would need to be soon if the location of the pit was not to be forgotten.

  When the legion and their auxiliaries marched out of Inchtuthil in AD 87, they probably did not really believe that they were leaving behind a serviceable military installation which would be of use to their enemies. While there is later evidence of native use of Roman forts along Hadrian’s Wall after its abandonment in the early fifth century, it was usually partial. These huge facilities were designed on a different scale, intended for use by an incoming occupying force and not suitable for people who already lived around them. When native kings or warlords occupied the sites at Birdoswald, Housesteads or South Shields, they used only the parts of the fortifications which had remained intact – gatehouses, corner towers and the like. It is very unlikely that the empty acres of Inchtuthil attracted new occupants after AD 87 except perhaps in those places where sheep and cattle could be handily corralled.

  Rome’s roads were more durable and useful. They were also very new and different. Before Agricola and other generals came north, native travellers who used long-range routes preferred good ground, avoided the marshlands by rivers and in valley bottoms or steep climbs and preferred a long way round if it was safer and they could remain dry-shod. In the south, native trackways followed the tops of gentle ridges where the drainage was good. Military imperatives and the availability of thousands of soldiers to work on them drove Roman roads through the landscape with what might have seemed like brutal directness. Cutting straight across farmland, dividing holdings and bringing traffic where there had been none before, their impact must initially have been startling.