Scotland during the Roman Empire

[1][2] Agricola then seems to have repeated an earlier Greek circumnavigation of the island by Pytheas and received submission from local tribes, establishing the Roman limes of actual control first along the Gask Ridge, and then withdrawing south of a line from the Solway Firth to the River Tyne, i.e. along the Stanegate.

[8] Despite the discovery of many hundreds of Iron Age sites in Scotland, there is still a great deal that remains to be explained about the nature of the Celtic life in the early Christian era.

[10] For a variety of reasons, much of the archaeological work to date in Scotland has concentrated on the islands of the west and north and both excavations and analysis of societal structures on the mainland are more limited in scope.

Studies have shown that these stone roundhouses, with massively thick walls, must have contained virtually the entire population of islands such as Barra and North Uist.

Extensive studies of such a fort at Finavon Hill near Forfar in Angus, using a variety of techniques, suggest dates for the destruction of the site in either the last two centuries BC or the mid-first millennium.

]Ptolemy, possibly drawing on earlier sources of information as well as more contemporary accounts from the Agricolan invasion, identified 18 tribes in Scotland in his Geography, but many of the names are obscure.

][35] The long distances and short period of time involved strongly suggest a prior connection between Rome and Orkney, although no evidence of this has been found and the contrast with later Caledonian resistance is striking.

We know nothing of the foreign policies of the senior leaders in mainland Scotland in the first century, but by AD 71 the Roman governor Quintus Petillius Cerialis had launched an invasion.

The Legio XX Valeria Victrix took a western route through Annandale in an attempt to encircle and isolate the Selgovae who occupied the central Southern Uplands.

[44][45] Agricola put his auxiliaries in the front line, keeping the legions in reserve, and relied on close-quarters fighting to make the Caledonians' unpointed slashing swords useless.

Even though the Caledonians were put to rout and therefore lost this battle, two-thirds of their army managed to escape and hide in the Scottish Highlands or the "trackless wilds" as Tacitus called them.

[50] The first resident of Scotland to appear in history by name was Calgacus ("the Swordsman"), a leader of the Caledonians at Mons Graupius, who is referred to by Tacitus in the Agricola as "the most distinguished for birth and valour among the chieftains".

[51] Tacitus even invented a speech for him in advance of the battle in which he describes the Romans as: Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep.

[51]Calgacus' fate is unknown but, according to Tacitus, after the battle Agricola ordered the prefect of the fleet to sail around the north of Scotland to confirm that Britain was an island and to receive the surrender of the Orcadians.

Ten tons of buried nails were discovered at the Inchtuthil site, which may have had a garrison of up to 6,000 men and which itself consumed 30 linear kilometres of wood for the walls alone, which would have used up 100 hectares (250 acres) of forest.

This inability to continue to hold the far north may be in part due to the limited military resources available to the Roman Proconsul after the recall of the Legio II Adiutrix from Britain, to support Domitian's war in Dacia.

[50] The fortress at Inchtuthil was dismantled before its completion and the other fortifications of the Gask Ridge (erected to consolidate the Roman presence in Scotland in the aftermath of Mons Graupius) were abandoned within the space of a few years.

Antoninus Pius soon reversed the containment policy of his predecessor Hadrian, and Urbicus was ordered to begin the reconquest of Lowland Scotland by moving north.

[70] It seems likely that Urbicus planned his campaign of attack from Corbridge,[citation needed] advancing north and leaving garrison forts at High Rochester in Northumberland and possibly also at Trimontium as he struck towards the Firth of Forth.

It was possibly after the defences of the Antonine Wall were finished that Urbicus turned his attention upon the fourth lowland Scottish tribe,[citation needed] the Novantae who inhabited the Dumfries and Galloway peninsula.

It enabled Rome to control and tax trade and may have prevented potentially disloyal new subjects of Roman rule from communicating with their independent brethren to the north and coordinating revolts.

[84] According to Dio Cassius, he inflicted genocidal depredations on the natives and incurred the loss of 50,000 of his own men to the attrition of guerrilla tactics, although it is likely that these figures are a significant exaggeration.

[86]It was during the negotiations to purchase the truce necessary to secure the Roman retreat to the wall that the first recorded utterance, attributable with any reasonable degree of confidence, to a native of Scotland was made.

Their geographical locations are highly restricted, which suggests that they may have been contained within a political or cultural frontier of some kind and the co-incidence of their arrival and departure being associated with the period of Roman influence in Scotland is a matter of ongoing debate.

[101] Later excursions by the Romans were generally limited to the scouting expeditions in the buffer zone that developed between the walls, trading contacts, bribes to purchase truces from the natives, and eventually the spread of Christianity.

[86] Scotland has inherited two main features from the Roman period, although mostly indirectly: the use of the Latin script for its languages and the emergence of Christianity as the predominant religion.

Alistair Moffat writes: The reality is that the Romans came to what is now Scotland, they saw, burned, killed, stole and occasionally conquered, and then they left a tremendous mess behind them, clearing away native settlements and covering good farmland with the remains of ditches, banks, roads, and other sorts of ancient military debris.

The sixteenth-century writer Hector Boece believed that the woods in Roman times stretched north from Stirling into Atholl and Lochaber and was inhabited by white bulls with "crisp and curland mane, like feirs lionis".

South of the Forth, the Cumbric speaking Brythonic kingdoms of Yr Hen Ogledd (English: "The Old North") flourished during the fifth to seventh centuries, later supplanted by Anglo-Saxon settlement and the formation of Northumbria in the land between the Humber and the River Forth.

[119] The Legio IX Hispana participated in the Roman invasion of Britain, suffering losses under Quintus Petillius Cerialis in the rebellion of Boudica of 61, and setting up a fortress in 71 that later became part of Eboracum.