The Wall

by Alistair Moffat

  In what was to turn out to be as significant a move as his consulship, Agricola allowed his daughter to marry Publius Cornelius Tacitus. The historian would guarantee that both their names would become famous. A year after the marriage, Agricola was appointed Governor of Britannia, by now a prestigious posting, and it is very likely that he took his new son-in-law with him as a military tribune.

  As soon as he arrived in the province, Agricola hurried north to the legionary fortress at Wroxeter, the headquarters of his old comrades-in-arms, the XX Valeria Victrix. It was late in the campaigning season but the new Governor wanted to make an immediate impression, set the tone for his time in the province he knew so well. The cavalry patrolling the lands of the Ordovices in North Wales had been attacked and destroyed. Vengeance moved swiftly as the XX marched along the coast road. Retreating in front of Agricola, the Ordovices sought the sanctuary of the Welsh mountains, refusing pitched battle, hoping that the onset of autumn, and the winter behind it, would persuade the Romans to return to their barracks and their granaries.

  Knowing that time was short, Agricola pursued the warbands into the high valleys with himself at the head of the column so as to impart his own courage to the rest by sharing the danger. It was a bold, even foolhardy, decision to take on the Ordovices in the landscape they knew intimately. Snowdonia is known in Welsh as Eryri, the Eagles’ Lair, impregnable, almost sacrosanct. Snowdon itself is Yr Wyddfa, the Throne of Kings, the place of heroes. But the strategy worked. In a brutally brief sentence, Tacitus reported: Almost the entire people was cut to pieces.

  Agricola quickly followed his success in the mountains by returning to a place he will never have forgotten. In AD 60 with Suetonius Paullinus, as a twenty-year-old tribune, he had faced the Ordovices and the curses of their Druids at the Menai Strait, and almost immediately afterwards raced southwards at the news of the Boudicca rebellion. This time Agricola did not hesitate. The Batavians and their ponies swam the Strait once more, and the sacred island of Anglesey was forced into submission and into the Empire.

  To cement his gains, Agricola moved the II Adiutrix up to a fortress at Chester. Close to the Dee estuary and the Irish Sea, a naval base was established. Having been recruited only eight years earlier from the sailors of the Italian fleet at Ravenna, the II Adiutrix was in essence a naval legion, staffed with shipwrights who could build the ships needed in western waters. Piles for a huge jetty were driven into the mudflats below the fortress, and the jetty stretched out into the midstream of the Dee to allow ships to dock and sail in all tidal conditions. Out of Chester, the army could be supplied up the Irish Sea coast and beyond. Agricola was clearly planning a move up the north roads.

  The following summer he made it. Brigading the legions and auxiliaries into two battle groups, he advanced from the new fortress at Carlisle and from the Tyne, from a base built at Corbridge. Diplomacy paved the way and dictated the line of march. The Votadini of the Tweed basin and the Lothians were productive farmers, able to grow a corn surplus and, as had been established before a legionary set foot out of his camp, willing to sell it at reasonable prices – which was of great importance to Roman quartermasters.

  The eastern battle group pushed north up the line of the modern A68, reaching the watershed ridges of the Cheviots a few miles east of where the road now crosses into Scotland, at the Carter Bar. Agricola was probably riding at the head of the western army. Following the line of the modern A74, they proceeded with great caution. The planned pincer movement hoped to encircle the Selgovae, the onetime allies of Venutius and the Brigantes. But like their Border Reiver descendants fourteen centuries later, these warriors knew their windswept hills and hidden valleys very well. They could disappear into nowhere and appear out of nowhere. Roman caution is recalled by the decisions of the engineers who built the road north of the fort at Crawford. Instead of following the flat ground by the headwaters of the River Clyde, the road zigzags up a hillside and onto a boggy plateau. It seems a perverse decision – until the alternative route is looked at closely. If the Roman road-builders had taken the easier option, they and their comrades would have had to march through a narrow defile between steep slopes on one side and the river on the other. A perfect place for a Selgovan ambush.

  Seventeen hundred miles to the south, the political weather was changing. On 23 June AD 79, the Emperor Vespasian died (engagingly, his last words were those of a tough and sceptical old soldier: Dear me, I think I am turning into a god). Having made his eldest son, Titus, commander of the Praetorian Guard, the soon to be deified Vespasian will have had few anxieties about the succession. And, as usual, there was an immediate imperial need for prestige. Titus had served in Britain with Suetonius Paullinus. He knew and trusted Agricola, and as the Governor halted his advance to await orders from the new emperor, there will have been little doubt that the word from Rome would be Onward!

  Success was suitably spectacular. By the late summer of AD 79 the legions stood on the shores of the Firth of Tay. Titus celebrated. And it seems that Agricola decided that his men would build Rome’s first identifiable frontier in Britain, perhaps in the Empire: the Gask Ridge.

  Tacitus is disappointingly vague at this point. The legions had encountered new peoples but he does not say who they were. Later sources suggest that the kingdom of the Venicones lay to the east of the new frontier along the Allan Water and the Gask Ridge. With territory comprising Fife and Kinross, the Venicones seem to have been allies of the Votadini and, interestingly, their name translates as ‘the Kindred Hounds’. Like their cousins across the Forth, the Venicones were corn producers, and in the second century AD map of Britain drawn by Ptolemy, he marks a place in Fife called Horrea. It means granaries. Perhaps there was more than one collection point for corn in the kingdom of Fife. The fort of Birrens, just north of the Ridge, was known by the nickname of Blatobulgium, ‘the corn sack place’. Between Cupar and St Andrews lies the hamlet of Blebo and its name derives from the same source.

  On the western side of the Gask Ridge were the hill peoples collectively known as the Caledonii. Later place-names whisper at their presence. Dunkeld means ‘Fort of the Caledonians’ and Schiehallion is ‘the Magic Mountain of the Caledonians’. The name Caledonii itself may mean something unhelpful like ‘the Warrior People’. Other names flit around the historical record. More than a century later the Romans encountered a warlike people known as the Maeatae, and again place-names remember them. On the southern rampart of the Ochil Hills stands Dumyat, ‘the Fort of the Maeatae’, while a few miles further south is Myot Hill. It seems that the new frontier lay along a pre-existing boundary, one which divided the Caledonii from the Venicones, hillmen from plainsmen, shepherds from ploughmen, those friendly towards Rome from those hostile.

  Traces of eighteen watchtowers have been found in the valley of the Allan Water and on the Gask Ridge. Two-storey buildings of timber and turf, they were manned by a platoon or contubernium of eight soldiers, and placed approximately a mile apart so that each could be easily seen by its neighbour. They were connected by a road which also linked four forts at Doune, Ardoch, Strageath and Perth. Smaller fortlets lay between each tower. It appears to have been a considered design, which ought to have worked well.

  If it does date to the time of the Agricolan invasion (or even earlier), then the Gask Ridge is the first example of an artificial frontier in the Empire. A similar arrangement was laid out in Germany east of the natural barrier of the Rhine – but probably in the reign of Trajan (AD 98 to 117).

  UP POMPEII

  Sandals supply a telling clue to the presence of women in the Roman forts. Because of their size and the particular points of wear found on their soles, leather sandals preserved in anaerobic, peaty ground have been identified by archaeologists as definitely belonging to women. They appear only occasionally in the written record, but there is no doubt that at Roman forts there lived more than just a few women. A tiny minority were the wives of senior officers, some were the common-law wi
ves of soldiers (who were not officially allowed to marry until retirement or discharge) and some were prostitutes. As forts settled into permanent garrisons in Britain, many of the civilian villages which grew up around them will have had a brothel somewhere. When the Italian town of Pompeii was submerged under 5 metres of volcanic ash in AD 79, several brothels were preserved. And they show how differently the Roman saw this unsavoury aspect of life. Menus and prices were clearly advertised. Some women were very cheap, others expensive, others offered specialities. Their working names showed versatility – Panta (Everything), Culibona (Lovely Bum) and other much more graphic attributes. Entertainingly their patrons’ nicknames are occasionally recorded: Enoclione (Brave Toper) and Skordopordonikos (Garlic Farter) appear both to have been regulars. Britain, and particularly the large garrison in the north, will have supported a thriving sex industry. But it was not driven underground. The Romans blushed at other things.

  Forward of the frontier three forts were built in the mouths of glens which reached into the Highland massif. Bochastle, Dalginross and Fendoch were positioned to detect and observe movement: if the numbers made sense and it was hostile, challenge it. Behind these forts, the watchtowers could do only that, watch for trouble and report to the commander of the nearest fort along the line.

  In times of peace, movement across the frontier was controlled. In Germany the native peoples were only allowed into the Empire during daylight, if they were unarmed and at particular crossing-points. No doubt a toll was collected, especially if travellers were carrying goods to trade. The Gask Ridge is very likely to have operated in the same way.

  Agricola commanded a large army, perhaps 20,000 legionaries, auxiliaries and cavalry. Wherever they halted to consolidate, they had the numbers and the skills to achieve a massive building programme. Such speed and skill was an integral part of military strategy. After terrorising an area and then offering surprisingly reasonable – and therefore attractive – terms to whomever had suffered the short, sharp Roman shock, they then tightened their grip by building roads and forts. This not only gave an immediate impression of tremendous power, it also allowed Agricola’s soldiers to stay on through the winter. There was no respite for native kings to regroup. The Romans had come and conquered.

  In 81 it seems that forts were built across the Forth–Clyde isthmus before Agricola returned to the XX Legion’s base at Carlisle. While it was not a precursor for the Antonine Wall of the next century, the building programme was certainly a recognition that the narrow waist of Scotland was a good place for a frontier. Here is Tacitus’ appraisal:

  . . . a frontier had been found within Britain itself. For the Firths of Clota (Clyde) and Bodotria (Forth), carried far inland by the tides of the opposite seas, are separated by a narrow neck of land. This was now being securely held by garrisons and the whole sweep of the country on the nearer side was secured: the enemy had been pushed back, as if into a different island.

  As the arms of his pincer had struck through southern Scotland in 78, Agricola cut off the kingdoms of the south-west – Dumfries and Galloway, and Ayrshire – from their former allies in the Cheviots and the Pennines. The Novantae appear to have been a naval power. The Solway coast is indented with dozens of natural harbours, sailors are rarely out of the sight of land in the Irish Sea and it was much more of a highway than a barrier. One of the most sheltered harbours faces north. From Loch Ryan modern ferries sail for Ireland but their journey is an ancient one. The name is a remnant of Rerigonium, a place marked by Ptolemy at the foot of the loch, near where Stranraer stands now. It means ‘Most Royal Place’ and may have been the seat of Novantan kings.

  Agricola’s push north needed consolidation behind it, and he knew that he could not safely leave a hostile people on the northern shores of the Solway. He crossed in the leading ship, reported Tacitus, and defeated peoples up to that time unknown in a series of successful actions. He lined up his forces in that part of Britain that faces Ireland, an expression of hope rather than of fear. Since Agricola believed that Ireland could be taken and held by a single legion and some auxiliaries, it is well he did not attempt to confront the warriors of the Ulster kings – even if Cuchulainn had long before fought his way into legend.

  HOW MANY?

  As those who read the New Testament will know, the Romans were keen on making a regular census of populations in even the farthest reaches of the Empire. It was done mainly to make tax-raising more efficient. Sadly, no census of the province of Britain has survived, but historians have estimated that Roman England, essentially, was inhabited by about a million people. Rome itself was at least as populous (probably two million if slaves are counted) and other cities around the Empire were also very large. Alexandria, Carthage, Antioch, Pergamum, Ephesus and Lyons in Gaul had between 100,000 and 300,000 people living in each of them and the territory immediately adjacent. At the death of Augustus in AD 14, there were around 54 million in his empire.

  Like that of all victorious armies, Roman military intelligence was good. As a matter of routine, Agricola’s staff officers interrogated prisoners, traders, disaffected native aristocrats, anyone who could supply information about enemy positions, strength, even morale. When the first rumbles of rebellion in the north reached Agricola, he began to plan a general advance into Scotland. But he could not move without imperial approval. Titus had died suddenly, perhaps suspiciously, and his younger brother, Domitian, followed him onto the throne. Tacitus thought him loathsome, a despicable tyrant. And since Tacitus was a senator for most of Domitian’s reign, he was close enough to the imperial court to form a firm view. Much of the tone of the Agricola is set by the notion that good men can still behave honourably and achieve good things even when a bad emperor rules in Rome. Suetonius shared a poor opinion of Domitian, listing his many vicious cruelties and the names of the good men he had had unjustly executed.

  Nevertheless, the order from Rome was positive and Agricola began the long march north. Scotland’s geography dictated his strategy. Forced to advance up the eastern lowlands of Perthshire and Angus and the Mearns, Agricola decided not to brigade his legions and auxiliaries into one huge army group. Intelligence reports had warned that the Caledonians (probably a federation like the Brigantes) had massed a vast host and fearing encirclement by superior forces familiar with the country, he himself divided his army into three divisions and advanced.

  Perhaps with the expert advice of the officers of the II Adiutrix, Agricola had organised for a fleet to shadow his land invasion. The east coast of Scotland is blessed with several beaches suitable for landings by supply boats and their protective warships. Lunan Bay, the Montrose basin and Bervie Bay all lie close to the line of march and forts dug by the legionaries. The natural harbour at Stonehaven is less than two miles from the marching camp at Raedykes.

  Agricola’s caution was not rewarded. Having committed the fundamental error of dividing his forces (something not pointed out by the loyal Tacitus), disaster almost struck. The IX Legion was the smallest of the three divisions and, as it moved north, Caledonian scouts counted its numbers and watched and waited. Once a halt had been called in a likely location, a ditch dug and a rampart piled up, the scouts sent gallopers to alert native generals to the opportunity. And the warbands massed for a night attack.

  Roman marching camps were all very similar in layout. Tent lines were pegged out in the same places each time and units always pitched in the same part. This was not simply a matter of habit or bureaucracy. In moments of emergency, soldiers knew exactly where to run to and muster when trumpets sounded or commands were shouted. Even in the darkest, moonless night, they could fall properly into their ranks. Between the lines of tents and the rampart a wide space known as the intervallum was left. This ensured that missiles, slingshots, arrows or javelins launched from outside the perimeter could not reach where the soldiers slept and kept their kit. It also served as an area where units could form up into battle order. The Roman military instinct was always to get
out into open field to fight. In restricted spaces their great advantages in equipment, tactics and discipline were less determinant. Visitors to the ruins of Roman fortresses are often surprised at the number and width of the gates. Used to looking at medieval castles with only one heavily defended entrance, they wonder at such obvious points of weakness. But in fact the gates were designed to allow Roman soldiers to get out of their forts in as large a number and as quickly as possible.

  ROMAN NEWSREEL

  Trajan’s Column is an extraordinary historical object. Standing in the centre of Rome, having miraculously survived for nineteen centuries, its sculpture tells a highly detailed story of the Emperor’s wars in Dacia, modern Romania. Like a film with no soundtrack, the narrative winds up the column, recording several triumphs and hard fights on its way. The reliefs supply an invaluable insight into Roman military methods: battlefield tactics, uniforms, weapons, how marching camps were dug, and a wealth of other information illustrated nowhere else. It is now 95 feet in height (originally 125 feet) and stood on top of Trajan’s mausoleum. Despite a vigorous use of colour (now all gone) to pick out the busy, action-packed scenes, those near the top must have been almost invisible. Hadrian was Trajan’s immediate successor, and the style of almost everything depicted on the column will have looked exactly the same as on the Wall and in the province of Britannia.