Arthur's O'on

[5] In this tradition, the building commemorated a victory of the Roman emperor Vespasian at Camelon and his capture of the jewelled crown and regalia of the Pictish kings.

Round the interior of the building there were two string courses at distances of 4 and 6 ft (1.2 and 1.8 m) respectively above the paved stone floor, and in several places, notably over the door, there may have been much weathered carvings in which eagles and the goddess Victory are said to have been represented.

A. M. P. M. P. T., were recorded by Sir Robert Sibbald, engraved on a stone inside the building, under a figure of Victory, with the head and part of the handle of a javelin.

[17] Various remains of antiquity have been discovered near its site, such as the stones of querns or handmills, made of a type of lava resembling that now obtained from the mill-stone quarries of Andernach on the Rhine; fragments of pottery, and the vestiges of what was supposed to have been a potter's kiln.

[18] The discovery in a chink of the masonry of a brass finger from a statue, suggested that the O'on was primarily a triumphal monument, or tropaeum, erected to commemorate a victory.

The quality of the structure bears the stamp of legionary workmanship, being too elaborate for a purely local masons and it appears to have been deliberately sited to be visible from the Antonine Wall.

[15] A broken relief from Rose Hill on Hadrian's Wall depicts Victory, an eagle, and a round domed building under a tree, which may represent a structure like Arthur's O'on.

[15] It was demolished to line a mill dam on the River Carron by Sir Michael Bruce of Stenhouse in 1743,[19] an act of vandalism that was reported to the Society of Antiquaries in London and led to paroxysms of rage in the correspondence of leading antiquarians.

[11] When these findings of the likely site of the stones of Arthur's O'on were announced by Burke's Peerage in the late 1980s there rose the possibility of recovery and reconstruction.

[10] The local minister 50 years later noted that ".... the building might have escaped demolition had he not been so poor, possessed of a numerous family of children, his income small, and a considerable amount of it derived from the mill.

[4] He was a monk studying under Bishop Elfodd, and gave a brief description of the building, and asserted, without hesitation, that it was erected by the usurper Carausius, who assumed the purple in Britain in the year 284.

[4] In 1719 Andrews Jelfe, an architect, visited and made careful drawings and measurements on behalf of the antiquarian William Stukeley, which were later published as part of a treatise on the O'on.