At the New Kilpatrick cemetery, among graves of Curries, Gillespies and Capaldis, I looked at two stretches of the wall’s stony foundations, exposed during landscaping of the cemetery in the early twentieth century. I followed it on through the generous gardens of the respectable Glasgow suburb of Bearsden, where a set of bathhouses from the fort was hemmed in among a 1970s block of flats. When the archaeologists analysed sewage deposits from the Roman latrines, they found that the soldiers had been eating raspberries, strawberries and figs, and poppy- and coriander-seed bread. As were, I suspected, the middle classes of today’s Bearsden. West again, and the wall – aside from a tiny, rather sad stretch preserved in a narrow park between streets of bungalows – was lost in a maze of crescents, avenues and drives. I chatted to a retired schoolteacher on Iain Road, who was watering delphiniums and Canterbury bells in her front garden, and realised she was the only person with whom I had had a conversation for three days. She walked with me to Castle Hill, a magical spot circled by beeches and sycamores, with views sweeping south to the tip of Glasgow and its tower blocks, east back to Bar Hill and south-west to Hutcheson Hill, marking out my onward route. Optimistically I set forth cross-country, but, tired, and finding myself drowning in a field of chest-high grass and thistles, gave in, and put myself on to a bus to Duntocher.
This was the last lap of my journey. In Duntocher, I followed the course of the wall along Beeches Road, lined with pebble-dashed terraces. It was early evening, and families were queuing for fish and chips. In the distance I could hear the melancholy, distorted notes of ‘Greensleeves’ playing from an ice-cream van. As Duntocher petered out, I pressed on through wasteground, and a group of lads clambered out of a car, regarding me with elaborate casualness. At the Clydebank Crematorium, among the dead, I stopped, exhausted, my way barred by the pulsing rush of the A82. Ahead snaked the Clyde, spanned by the Erskine Bridge, and below was Old Kilpatrick, the terminus of the Antonine Wall.
On Roy’s map of the wall, north of Falkirk on the banks of the river Carron is neatly inscribed the following words: ‘Here stood Arthur’s Oon’. Arthur’s O’on, or Oven, was one of Scotland’s most impressive ancient monuments: a beehive-shaped stone building that had attracted a certain amount of Arthurian legend in the Middle Ages, not least because of its proximity to the village of Camelon, which some identified with Camelot. By Roy’s lifetime, however, it was confidently ascribed to the Romans, and indeed had been so as long ago as the fourteenth century, when John of Fordun had described it as a ‘rotundam casulam’, a round chamber, ‘columbaris AD instar’, in the form of a dovecote. (Less convincingly, he argued that it had been built by Julius Caesar either to mark the northernmost boundary of his military endeavours; or else as a kind of mobile home that he had ‘built up again from day to day, wherever they halted, that he might rest therein more safely than in a tent; but that, when he was in a hurry to return to Gaul, he left it behind’.)
William Stukeley published a tract on Arthur’s O’on in 1720, without, let it be said, having made the journey to Scotland to study it in person. Conjecturing that it was a temple ‘dedicated to Romulus the parent and primitive Deity of the Romans’, he compared it lavishly to Rome’s Pantheon, which he had also never seen. (He included just the faintest pre-emptive acknowledgement that ‘some may think we have done the Caledonian Temple too much Honour in drawing such a Parallel’.) Gordon included a description of it in his Itinerarium, arguing that it was ‘not a Roman Temple for publick Worship’ but, rather, ‘a Place for holding the Roman Insignia’, or legionary standards. However, the two men agreed about its appearance, describing an imposing dome of a building, constructed from large blocks of masonry, some six metres tall. For Stukeley, it was ‘the most genuine and curious Antiquity of the Romans in this Kind, now to be seen in our Island or elsewhere’. It gave its name to the nearby village of Stonehouse, as it is marked on Roy’s map – now the town of Stenhousemuir. (Thus Arthur’s O’on has the distinction of being the only Romano-British monument to have a football team named after it.)
In 1743, however, came disaster. The landowner, Sir Michael Bruce of Stenhouse, decided to build a dam on the Carron, part of the creeping industrialisation of the river that would, a few years later, see the opening of the Carron Ironworks. (These are marked on Roy’s map; by 1814 they would be the biggest ironworks in Europe, producing cannon for the Napoleonic wars under contract to Roy’s employer, the Board of Ordnance.) To build his dam, Bruce needed stone: so he simply demolished the Roman building on the riverbank and used its masonry.
The destruction of what was surely – even without recourse to the hyperbole of Stukeley et al. – one of Scotland’s most important ancient monuments provoked a furious reaction from antiquaries. Chief among them was Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, a Baron of the Exchequer in Edinburgh, whose eventful life had seen him, as a young man, taking violin lessons in Rome with Arcangelo Corelli before being appointed a commissioner for the Act of Union between England and Scotland. He communicated news of the loss in a despairing letter to his friend and fellow antiquary Roger Gale, who had it transcribed into the minute book of the Society of Antiquaries in London: ‘No other motive induced this Gothic knight to commit such a peice [sic] of barbarity but the procuring of as many stones as he could have raised out of his Quarrys there for five shillings … We all curse him here with Bell, Book and Candle.’ Gale wrote to Clerk: ‘I like well your project of exposing your stupid Goth by publishing a good print of Arthur’s Oven with a short account at the bottom of this curious fabrick when intire, and of its destruction … to be done without mentioning any name but the Brutes.’ Five years later, Clerk was still fulminating in a letter to Stukeley about the ‘barbarous demolition of the ancient Roman temple called Arthurs Oven’ and gleefully communicating that ‘some weeks ago the mill and mill dam which had been raised from the stones of Arthur’s Oven, were destroyed by thunder and lightning’. It is almost as if Arthur’s O’on were some kind of ritual sacrifice to the Industrial Revolution, though the great manufacturing plants its destruction ushered in are themselves now stilled. The Carron works finally went into receivership in 1982. Now owned by a Swiss company, its successor, Carron Phoenix, makes sinks, and lacks its old, bold Latin motto: ‘Esto perpetuo’ – May it last for ever.
Arthur’s O’on had a curious afterlife. Sir John Clerk died in 1755, after composing a richly enjoyable set of memoirs, based on his journals, which peter out in 1754 after his taking ill of a flux ‘occasioned by eating too much cabage broth. NB – All Greens affect me in the same way, and for the future must be avoided.’ (That said, both he and his wife were sufficiently doughty to produce a child when aged, respectively, sixty-two and fifty-one.) Riches were flowing into the family from their coal mines at nearby Loanhead, which enabled Sir John’s successor, Sir James, to build a fine new Palladian mansion on the site of the family’s old house at Penicuik. Sir James also erected a handsome stable block. It was a suite of buildings surrounding a quadrangle; on one side, they were topped by a rather fanciful clock tower, giving them an ecclesiastical air; and on the other, by a dome. The dome was a reconstruction, as accurate as possible according to the extant accounts and drawings, of Arthur’s O’on. It still stands. The new Arthur’s O’on was built to serve as a dovecote. That was appropriate, since the doomed domed original had often been compared to one by observers from Fordun onwards: Stukeley once wrote in a letter to Sir John that after ‘my publication of Arthurs Oon people laughed at me for adoring a dovecoat as they called it’.
The current baronet, Sir Robert, showed the new Arthur’s O’on to me: we climbed up a dark, narrow stone staircase into the interior of the dome, which was lined with little stone compartments – the pigeonholes. He and his family live in quarters converted from the stables by his indomitable-sounding great-grandmother, after a fire in 1899 damaged the main house so seriously that the then baronet – harder up than his ancestors – could not afford to make it habitable. Penicu
ik House, with its pedimented front and grand classicising features, is now itself a picturesque ruin that Sir Robert is fighting to preserve.
William Roy’s Military Antiquities is a joyous book. Aside from his beautiful map of the Antonine Wall, there is page after page of meticulously drawn plans of Scotland’s Roman forts and camps, each as if seen by a bird’s eye, with the slope of hills shaded in tones of graphite, and woodland indicated by delicately drawn individual trees, each with its own shadow. The combination of the Roman geometries and the swollen contours of the landscape make these images sometimes resemble abstract works of art rather than functional maps. Of Roy’s copious text, though, much less can be said; for the writings of this scrupulously empirical, careful mapper of the land were fatally infected. In common with his great-and-good antiquarian peers, he had fallen for one of British historiography’s most successful, and most damaging, forgeries.
It began when William Stukeley received a letter, on 11 June 1747, from one Charles Julius Bertram, a teacher of English language in the Royal Marine Academy of Copenhagen. The letter was, Stukeley later wrote, ‘full of compliments, as usual with foreigners’ (Bertram was in fact an émigré to Denmark from Britain). It also mentioned a medieval manuscript that Bertram said he had seen, composed by one Richard of Westminster. The text was a history of Roman Britain, along with an ‘antient map’. Stukeley recalled: ‘I press’d Mr Bertram to get the manuscript into his hands, if possible. Which at length, with some difficulty, he accomplished: and on sollicitation, sent to me in letters a transcript of the whole; and at last a copy of the map.’
On studying the transcript, Stukeley identified Richard of Westminster with Richard of Cirencester, a known fourteenth-century chronicler. Richard’s work, titled De Situ Britanniae (On the Situation of Britain), drew on known texts about Roman Britain, such as Caesar, Tacitus, the Antonine Itineraries and Solinus. (The Antonine Itineraries were ancient route planners: of uncertain imperial date, they describe journeys through various parts of the Roman empire by listing the places through which a traveller would pass to get from one point to another. Several deal with routes through Britain – giving, for example, directions from Caerwent to Silchester.) But the revelation was that he appeared to have had access to a host of lost original sources, as well as an entirely fresh crop of Antonine Itineraries – indeed, a great deal of significant geographical knowledge that had allowed him to come up with a comprehensive map of the British Isles under the Roman empire. Among this wealth of fresh material came evidence of a previously unknown province of Britain. Scholars already knew of the division, in the last years of the third century or early years of the fourth, of Britain into four provinces – Prima, Secunda, Flavia and Maxima – which between them made up the ‘diocese’ of Britain. They also knew of the disputed, possibly non-existent or only briefly existent Valentia, somewhere in the north of Britain. Richard of Cirencester’s map fixed the location of Valentia between Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall; and, most excitingly of all, introduced the notion of a further province of Vespasiana, in the Highlands of Scotland.
Stukeley revealed the manuscript’s contents in a series of papers to the Society of Antiquaries, published in 1757 as An Account of Richard of Cirencester, Monk of Westminster, and of his Works. ‘He gives us more than a hundred names of cities, roads, people and the like: which till now were absolutely unknown to us. The whole is wrote with great judgment, perspicuity, and conciseness, as by one that was altogether master of his subject,’ he enthused. The ‘highland part of Brittain’, he added, was described ‘very particularly’. The map and new Antonine Itineraries – one describing the mighty journey between Inverness and Exeter – gave Roman names to places that no one had imagined had had the slightest Roman contact. By applying the information contained in Richard’s map to known locations, Stukeley was able to identify numerous Latin place names: Falkirk was Ad Vallum Antonini, Inverness was Alata Castra, Aberdeen was Devana, and the Grampians were Montes Grampium (which was a dead giveaway if anyone had chosen to see it, given that the Grampians became the Grampians only after that 1476 misprint of Mons Graupius). Some of the names even had a Hellenic flavour: Dumbarton was identified as Theodosia – Greek for ‘God’s gift’, though perhaps it was primarily intended to recall the general Theodosius, who put down a northern British insurgency in the fourth century.
In 1759, Charles Bertram published the Richard of Cirencester manuscript as part of his Britannicarum Gentium Historiae Antiquae Scriptores Tres (Three Ancient Writers on the History of the British People). Thanks to Stukeley’s passionate advocacy, its authenticity as a genuine medieval document was not questioned – despite the fact that, as Stukeley himself recorded, his requests to be shown the original manuscript were, mysteriously, fruitless. The best he got was a copy of the handwriting of the first few lines, ‘which I shewed to my late friend Mr Casley, keeper in the Cotton library, who immediately pronounced it to be 400 years old’. If there were any immediate doubts about the discovery, they were confined to the truthfulness of Richard as a historian rather than to the intentions of Charles Bertram; and Roy was one of many antiquaries who wasted oceans of ink in trying to square his own accurate on-the-ground observations with the document’s fantasy geography. De Situ Britanniae had a new burst of life when, in 1809, it was brought out in a new edition, with an English translation by Henry Hatcher, whose preface defended Richard as ‘scrupulously exact’.
Some of the document’s spurious Roman names persist indelibly. The hill range that runs like a spine through northern England from the Derbyshire Peaks to the Northumberland Cheviots had no single name by the early nineteenth century. However, when Daniel Conybeare and William Phillips came to compose their pioneering work of 1822, Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales, they decided that it would ‘be useful to distinguish this ridge of mountains by some collective appellation’. They noted that ‘Richard of Cirencester’s description of the Roman state in Britain’ had ‘denominated them the PENINE ALPS’. (Bertram almost certainly had the idea from Camden, who, in his Britannia, likened the range to that other mountainous backbone, the Apennines of Italy.) Conybeare and Phillips announced that as the hills had ‘clearly a title to this, as their earliest known, if not their original designation, we shall therefore henceforth call them the PENINE CHAIN’.
It took until the mid nineteenth century for Charles Bertram’s work to be definitively revealed as a forgery. Doubts grew in the 1850s; and then, between 1866 and 1867, the Gentleman’s Magazine ran a series of splendidly acidulated articles by Bernard Bolingbroke Woodward, a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and librarian-in-ordinary to the Queen, which finally demolished its claims to authenticity. His grounds were numerous: Richard’s Latin was ‘more or less good idiomatic English put into Latin words, and apparently by the help of a dictionary’; he had clearly been working from a dodgy edition of Tacitus – ‘a very badly edited printed one of the 17th or 18th century’; indeed, in order to have consulted Tacitus at all, the putative Gloucestershire monk would have had to have read the works in manuscript, which in his day languished, unremarked, in continental European libraries. Some of the place names he had put forward were derived from medieval linguistic roots. He had repeated mistakes that Camden had introduced in the sixteenth century. In short, it had ‘every mark of being the production of such a man as Bertram translating bad English into worse Latin’.
And yet it was a clever and stupendously successful deception; it wove its inventions seamlessly into the accounts of Britain by known classical authors, and lavishly fed the eighteenth-century antiquarian interest in the origin and etymology of place names. Its revelations were significant and surprising, but not so fanciful, at least to its immediate audience, to raise suspicion. In fact, the credulity of antiquaries was sufficiently notorious to be pilloried, not least by Sir Walter Scott. In his 1816 novel The Antiquary, the title character Jonathan Oldbuck was – like the real Stukeley, Clerk, Gale and Gordon
– engaged in a voluminous, committed correspondence with ‘most of the virtuosi of his time, who, like himself, measured decayed entrenchments, made plans of ruined castles, read illegible inscriptions, and wrote essays on medals in the proportion of twelve pages to each letter of the legend’. A marvellous scene in the novel has Oldbuck showing his new young friend, Mr Lovel, an ‘entrenchment’ that lies upon his Scottish lands, and attempting to persuade him that it marks the site of Agricola’s camp at the battle of Mons Graupius. This looks reasonably convincing, until a local beggar appears and announces that he himself ‘minds the bigging’ of the trench, some twenty years before; and the inscription ‘A.D.L.L.’ marked on a wall, tortuously interpreted by Oldbuck as referring to Agricola, in fact stands for ‘Aiken Drum’s Lang Ladle’. (The scene is surely a joke at Alexander Gordon’s expense: he had made a similarly tendentious interpretation of a series of letters once said to have been inscribed on Arthur’s O’on.)
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