Under Another Sky (22 page)

As it turned out, Agricola did not get the opportunity to capitalise on the victory, or to turn conquest into the deadening slog of provincial peacekeeping. He was recalled to Rome by the emperor Domitian, whom Tacitus characterised as jealous of Agricola’s military success. ‘
Perdomita Britannia et statim omissa
’ – Britannia was completely subjugated and immediately let go – wrote Tacitus in his
Histories
. As far as Agricola’s biography was concerned, Tacitus made Britain perform the role he required of it. These remote and primitive lands, so far from the dissolute centre of empire, provided the writer with a stage on which his subject could be the Roman he needed to be: a virtuous warrior, destroying enemies themselves untainted by the rottenness of Rome. As a by-product of his need to heroise Agricola, he created the idea of the redoubtable, freedom-loving Highlander, just faintly
perfumed with a whiff of savagery – an image that still endures. In William Hole’s great Victorian frieze of notable Scots that circles the entrance hall of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, Calgacus is the first named character, closely followed by those honorary Scots Tacitus (who was probably Gaulish) and Hadrian (who was Spanish).

That there were parallels between Romans and Hanoverians in Scotland was not lost on at least some of those in George II’s army. One bitingly cold winter day, Matthew and I drove north-east from Glasgow, stopping at the Perthshire village of Braco to admire the fort of Ardoch, which was probably built in the Agricolan period. It is the best-preserved Roman fort in Scotland, surrounded by quintuple earth ramparts that rise up to two metres tall, and then drop into ditches the same depth, as if the land had been ploughed into furrows by the giants that Geoffrey of Monmouth said once roamed Britain. We crunched over the frosted ground to look at the traces of two larger temporary camps from later centuries, whose geometries bafflingly criss-crossed each other through the sheep-grazed fields. From there we drove on to the little town of Aberfeldy, north-west of Perth, not to look at Roman remains, but to see the bridge built here over the Tay by General Wade, part of the network of forts and military roads (like Roman roads, made as straight as the territory would allow) constructed after the first Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1719.

The bridge is a grand and lovely thing, designed by William Adam, father of the better-known Robert. Five arches span the river; four obelisks ascend from its central parapet, and the river flows silver and supple beneath. When it was built, it was the only bridge across the Tay. As we crossed it, we saw two inscriptions. Facing south was one in English, recording that the bridge had been erected in order to secure ‘a safe and easy communication between the Highlands and the lowland trading towns’. The other, facing north, was in Latin, crusted over with lichen and largely obscured. We scraped away at the scales of grey-green growth, piecing together the words as the traffic bowled past us. It was composed by Robert Freind, an eighteenth-century headmaster of Westminster School. Translated, it read:

Marvel at this military road, stretched out on both sides of the river for 250 miles beyond the Roman frontier, mocking wildernesses and
swamps, opening up through rocks and mountains and, as you see, laid over the indignant Tay. George Wade, commander of the forces in Scotland, completed this work in the year of our Lord 1733 through his own ingenuity and his soldiers’ 10 years’ labour. Behold how mighty is the royal will of George II.

It is a knowing echo of the speech to the Roman troops that Tacitus put into the mouth of Agricola at Mons Graupius, the rhetorical counterbalance to Calgacus’s rousing words. In that flight of oratory, Agricola cries: ‘Britain is discovered and subdued. How often on a march, when you have been struggling over bogs, mountains and rivers [
paludes montesve et flumina
], have I heard the bravest among you exclaim, “When shall we meet the enemy? When will they come and fight us?”’ General Wade’s inscription claims that he has subdued these same ‘
tesquis et paludibus … rupes montesque
’ – wildernesses and bogs, rocks and mountains. His boast is that he has achieved what the Romans did not – he has built roads beyond their frontier; he has tamed the landscape that eluded his ancient predecessors.

Wade’s subjugation of the Highlands was, at best, partial; and after the traumas of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, the urgent necessity for accurate maps of the north was recognised. It was William Roy – a factor’s son from Lanarkshire, nineteen at the time of Charles Edward Stuart’s uprising – who was put in charge of the small group of men who were to undertake the physically exhausting, technically demanding work of surveying Scotland, under the supervision of the Board of Ordnance. Roy began his labours in 1747. It took him and his band eight and a half years to complete the work, spending the springs and summers enduring the vicissitudes of the Scottish landscape and climate, and the winters working on the maps in Edinburgh. The result of their labours was the
Military Survey of Scotland
, ‘undertaken by order of William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland’. It was this achievement that laid the foundations for the Ordnance Survey, the comprehensive mapping of the British Isles that began in 1791. ‘The Duke of Cumberland’s map’, as it is known, is magnificent: thirty-eight large sheets, backed with linen, that present a sweeping picture of a country in ink and watercolour. As I unloosed them from their box, on the largest table in the British Library’s map room, I could barely believe that I had been allowed to touch them. Mountains
loomed as daunting grey whorls. The coastline was a snake of delicate turquoise; the burgeoning towns were picked out in grids of crimson; the parks and estates of the Lowland gentry were domesticated geometries of grass-green. And in a clear, confident red line, like a vein between the seas, ran the Antonine Wall.

The wall was built in
AD
142 by Hadrian’s immediate successor, Antoninus Pius. In pushing the boundary of Roman Britain north from Hadrian’s Wall to the Forth–Clyde line, this essentially unmilitary emperor provided himself with a victory that, however meaningless in reality, could be made to bolster his martial credentials back in Rome. The barrier was held for a mere twenty years before the Romans withdrew south to the Hadrianic frontier.

There was no strategic need for the Roman wall to be marked on the Duke of Cumberland’s map; its appearance is, rather, a conscious salute by Roy to his Roman predecessors. While working on the
Survey of Scotland
, he took detailed plans of the Antonine Wall and the surrounding Roman forts and camps. Forty years later, his maps and descriptions of the
Military Antiquities of Britain
were published posthumously by the Society of Antiquaries, in an imposing elephant folio volume. In his preface, he wrote of his peculiar suitability for the task of researching the past. ‘Military men … in reasoning on the various revolutions they have already undergone, or on those which, in certain cases, they might possibly suffer hereafter, are naturally led to compare present things with the past; and being thus insensibly carried back to former ages, they place themselves among the ancients, and do, as it were, converse with the people of those remote times.’ I like to think of the young William Roy – later the eminent Major General Roy – ‘conversing’ with the Roman military engineers whose work he admired so much, and reflecting, via the rugged geography of central Scotland, on the abundant reversals of life and war.

At the heart of the book is Roy’s fold-out map of the whole line of the Antonine Wall, showing it in exquisite detail as it runs past the villages of Grange and Grange Pans, where the oil refinery of Grangemouth now stands, through the little town of Falkirk and over the steep slopes of Croy Hill and Bar Hill, through Kirkintilloch and thence to the open countryside that would later be swallowed up by the Glasgow suburb of Bearsden, out to Old Kilpatrick (or Kirkpatrick, as Roy calls it), where the A82 now thunders, and finally the broad
sweep of the Clyde. When I spread out its pages for the first time I experienced a curious sense of both familiarity and estrangement: I had just walked the line of the Antonine Wall and knew, I felt, this land well; but how changed it was. Examining Roy’s map was unexpectedly poignant – rather like looking at the childhood photograph of a familiar, elderly face, in which we can recognise the essential features, once we have mentally stripped away the accretions of old age. Roy’s map stands at a junction in the history of Scotland, created as this tract of land between Edinburgh and Glasgow stood poised on the brink of industrialisation. What does not appear on his map is the Forth–Clyde canal, which now shadows, and at time obliterates, the Antonine Wall: it was begun in 1768. The territory was changing fast. By the time it was published in 1793, the map was already commemorating a lost landscape.

The Antonine Wall is not to be walked for pleasure, at least in any straightforward sense. It is quite unlike Hadrian’s Wall, with its friendly wooden fingerposts, its reassuringly solid mass sweeping for miles over crag and pasture, its visitor centres and youth hostels and B&Bs. The Antonine Wall, by contrast, is cussed and shy and recalcitrant. Its traces are hard to discern and often inaccessible, even when they are not tangled in suburban sprawl or devoured by trunk road or canal, as they often are. Now, where the wall can be made out at all, it is most often glimpsed as a ghost of the deep ditch dug to its immediate south: a dip, a depression in the soil. Sometimes – at Bar Hill, or in the woods at Seabegs, or around the tower blocks of Falkirk – the ditch is a mighty trench that gives a corresponding impression, in the imagination, of the hefty proportions of the wall. More often, though, it is a shadow of a faint contour seen in low light across a hillside; or a watery channel running at a field boundary. On foot the route is circuitous and fractured. To walk its thirty-five-mile length, you must often divert and take a parallel path, or stride grimly ahead into A-road traffic. Nor will one find companions on the road: this is a route that lends itself to solitude and introspection.

It must once, though, have been a grimly impressive thing. The wall itself was a turf rampart laid on a stone base, rising to 3.5 metres. Alongside it was a ditch that sank as deep. Imagine the whole apparatus as a cross-section: there was the military way running at
the extreme south, then to its north a rampart, then a flat piece of ground known as the berm, then the ditch, and finally a mound created by the spoil from the ditch. It was the soldiers of the 2nd, 6th and 20th Legions who built it, carving elaborate ‘distance slabs’ to commemorate the sections they had constructed. Sixteen of these sculptures can be seen in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow; one is in the National Museum of Scotland. (One perished in the Chicago fire of 1871, but a cast can be seen in the Hunterian.) They are richly carved things, featuring such scenes as Victory placing a laurel wreath on a Roman legionary standard, and Caledonians being trampled by Roman cavalry or else crouching in submission, bound and naked. Several are decorated with the distinctive mascots of the soldiers’ legions: a running boar for the 20th; a Pegasus and a Capricorn (after the Emperor Augustus’s star sign) for the 6th. The last to be discovered – so far – was ploughed up in a farmer’s field at Hutcheson’s Hill in 1969. Lawrence Keppie, professor emeritus of Roman history and archaeology at the University of Glasgow, remembers its circuitous route to the museum: the slab was spotted by a company rep in the farmyard, who told his doctor, who told the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. One of Keppie’s first jobs when he started at the museum, he told me, was to clean it of the whitewash with which it had been spattered while it lay in the farmyard. In the Hunterian can also be seen an elaborate mausoleum carved with images of togaed figures reclining on couches, found near Kirkintilloch; and the tombstone, erected by his father, of a boy called Salamenes – to judge by his name, he must have come from Greece or the Middle East. Also: fragments of precious glass, delicate intaglios, red Samian ware for dining, and, spine-tinglingly well-preserved, adults’ and children’s leather sandals. The Mediterranean had been brought to the Central Belt.

My way started by Carriden House, near the muddy banks of the Forth, and took me through the park of the seventeenth-century Kinneil House, where stood not only the traces of a Roman fortlet, but also the ruins of a workshop in which once toiled the Scottish inventor James Watt. He was brought here in 1769 to design an engine that could pump water out of the Bo’ness colliery, owned by John Roebuck, the tenant of Kinneil. The route then climbed high above the Firth; I could see the glum mountains of Fife across the water,
while above me larks sang their trickling song and the air was thick with the perfume of honeysuckle. But at the bottom of the hill, on the estuarine shore, was the Grangemouth oil refinery. Even from far above, I could hear the chthonic industrial hum of this vast installation. Steam choked from great chimneys and fiery tongues flew from towers. Monstrous pipes vermiculated their way around structures made on no human scale. This is the terminus of another route crossing this slender neck of Scotland: that of the pipeline that pumps crude oil fifty-eight miles from Loch Long on the west coast.

I walked through Old Polmont, where the wall is lost in the hummock of a dry ski slope, and through Polmont Woods, where I encountered a roving group of shirtless teenage boys and then a little band of girls, all clutching bottles in plastic bags. Through Laurieston, the route of the wall ran straight along Grahamsdyke Street. Graham’s Dyke, or Grym’s Dyke, or Grim’s Dyke, is the old name for the wall, hinting at a long-lost belief that such mighty earthworks must have been built by the Devil. The fourteenth-century chronicler John of Fordun, on the other hand, had another tale to explain the name: he tells that the hero Gryme – grandfather of the legendary Scottish king Eugenius – broke through the wall, which was then named after him.