What did the Romans ever give Scotland? Heated floors, flashy sandals, sun gods – and a lot of nails
Inveresk is a handsome village near Edinburgh that sits above a curve of the little river Esk, not far from the mighty Firth of Forth. It is full of elegant 18th-century houses and an attractive kirk, dated 1805. To the casual observer, there is absolutely nothing Roman about it.
And yet, in 2010, when the local cricket pavilion was being rebuilt, an extraordinary find was made – two altars made of local sandstone, lying on their sides, evidently deliberately buried in the Roman era, dedicated to the gods Mithras and Sol. They had been made in the 140s CE as part of a mithraeum, a temple devoted to the worship of Mithras, a cult dependent on secret ritual and complex initiation ceremonies, much beloved by the Roman military. Carved from sandstone quarried nearby, the altars were impressive in scale and finely made, although terribly fragile.
One of them had a frieze of four beautiful female faces carved into it: personifications of the four seasons. Spring was youthful and round-cheeked, winter was cloaked against the frost. Beneath the faces, a Roman mason had also carved the face of the sun god Sol, his rays hollowed right through the stone so that when a lamp was placed behind it, atmospheric flickers of light and shadow would have been thrown into the dark of the temple. There is also an iron hook behind the god’s mouth – archaeologist Fraser Hunter thinks for something metallic to hang there, to be set in motion and jangled by the convection of the lamp’s flame. That way, the god might seem to be murmuring.
The altars will be seen for the first time in public – at least if you consider that, when they were first made and used a little under 2,000 years ago, they were for the eyes of the initiated only and not for the idly curious. They will be one of the highlights of a major new exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland, curated by Hunter and his colleagues. For years, the artefacts have been undergoing an intensive conservation and stabilisation process, since the sandstone of which they were made was threatening to crumble into actual sand.
These impressive altars – once colourfully painted, traces of pigment still clinging to their surfaces – are the tip of the iceberg. Over centuries, chance finds and small-scale targeted excavations have shown that unassuming, pretty Inveresk was, argues Hunter, once the site of a huge Roman military installation. What’s more, this was perhaps the most important campaign of the 140s, when the new emperor Antoninus Pius sought to extend Roman control north of the wall ordered by his predecessor Hadrian, building his own defensive structure, the Antonine Wall, across the skinny tract of land that runs between the firths of Forth and Clyde.
Finds from Inveresk include a huge wine barrel from the Rhône (“For the squaddies,” says Hunter – “the quality wine for the officers came in amphorae”); shards of pottery cups inscribed with soldiers’ names typical of Dacia and Thrace (modern Romania and Bulgaria); and a decorated enamel bowl most likely made in southern England, and carried to East Lothian (perhaps, says Hunter, by a southern British soldier recruited into the Roman auxiliaries). Finds have been turning up in Inveresk for centuries: as far back as 1565, locals stumbled across an altar inscribed with the name of the procurator, or chief financial officer, of the provincial administration – a very big cheese indeed.
A bronze Roman cauldron was even found under the local grammar school in the 1930s. There are certain back gardens in Inveresk, Hunter says, that he is itching to dig up. If a random excavation under a cricket pavilion can turn up a temple to Mithras, who knows what else might be discovered?
“A lot of people think that the Romans never got beyond Hadrian’s Wall,” he says. “But they were here, and they had a huge impact.” It is true that the Roman presence in Scotland can seem elusive. There’s no great ruin in the landscape on the scale of anything in Rome, France, Germany, or even England. “Scotland” itself is a tricky word in the context: the concept of the nation lay well into the future, and certainly would not have been understood by the many, and very different, communities that inhabited its territory in the iron age.
The overall impression of the lands north of Hadrian’s Wall is of a place violently, tenuously, and ultimately unsuccessfully tamed by the Roman military-imperial machine through three successive invasions and campaigns: in the 80s CE under the emperor Domitian; in the 140s under Antoninus Pius, and by Septimius Severus in the early 200s. Classicist Mary Beard once called Britain “Rome’s Afghanistan”. The label is doubly true of its northernmost reaches.
Which is not to say that there are not resonant traces of Rome to observe in the landscape. There are the footprints of many marching camps right up to Tayside and the Grampians, their outlines stamped into hillsides; there are the remains of a bathhouse in a Glasgow suburb; there are the impressive earthworks of a Roman fort in Perthshire. And in an atmospheric, shady grove in a private garden in Inveresk, there is the village’s only trace of Rome that lies, in situ, above the ground.
It is a small part of a hypocaust, or underfloor heating system, a slab of floor resting on four sandstone pilae, the uprights that created the space for hot air from a furnace to flow. It is a mere fragment – and yet one that still gives a powerful sense of the scale of the building that it was once part of. Hunter thinks it may have been part of the grand house occupied by the imperial procurator Quintus Lusius Sabinianus – the man who dedicated the altar that was found and described in 1565 (and now, alas, is lost).
Scotland was also deeply affected by this “contact” (as the euphemism might have it) with Rome. Not all of it was violent. The exhibition in the National Museum brims with traces of ordinary life – for example, beautiful leather women’s and children’s shoes worn by the civilian inhabitants of the settlement that lay outside the Inveresk fort’s walls.
It also shows the remarkable circulation of Roman things – objects that travelled well beyond the borders of the empire even into the western isles and Orkney. One example is a delightful pin decorated with a tiny, big-eyed bronze bird, found in among the remains of iron age roundhouses at Birnie near the Moray Firth in north-east Scotland, and now in the collection of the Elgin Museum. It was perhaps, thinks Fraser, a diplomatic gift from Romans stationed farther south and invested in keeping the peace in this unruly tip of empire.
Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the raw viciousness of conquest and the brute efficiency of the Roman military machine. The show contains what is likely part of a set of manacles, also found in Inveresk – a reminder that the Roman economy depended on enslaving captives. One of the most remarkable finds in Scotland was in 1959-60, when, at the Roman fort in Inchtuthil in Perthshire, a four-metre-deep pit was discovered containing 1m iron nails. Some are on display in the new exhibition; one day, Hunter would like to put all the 600,000 owned by the National Museum on permanent show.
Even the relatively small heap that will be seen in the show is a bizarre sight, a hint of the sheer immensity of the formidable capacity and reach of its supply lines. Most had not even been used when they were discovered, nearly 2,000 years after they were buried. They had likely been transported from iron manufactories in the Kent and Sussex weald to build a fort that was abandoned in the 80s CE before it was even finished.
The story of the Romans in Scotland is a curious one. If Hunter is right, the grandeur of the fort and settlement in Inveresk would have been extraordinary (there are even traces of what might have been a wooden amphitheatre in the village, which, if the hypothesis is correct, would be a sure sign of the fort’s scale and importance).
Not that the locals were unsophisticated – the exhibition offers examples of remarkable armlets and torques that give a hint of the iron age inhabitants’ artistry and wealth. But what is truly extraordinary is how permanent Inveresk’s fort must have seemed, with its stone buildings and confident architecture – and yet how temporary it turned out to be. The reason the altars to Mithras and Sol were buried by the Romans is that the army withdrew from Inveresk within 25 years of establishing it. The Roman occupation here was a little like the gorgeous Roman parade helmet found in Newstead near Melrose: impressive, spectacular and, in the end, hollow.