Britain’s Last Frontier

by Alistair Moffat

  To the relief of the defenders of Dunkeld, Lord Cardross arrived the day after with five troops of cavalry who had been able to move quickly across country. They quickly engaged with the groups of clansmen around the town and drove them back into the hills, well out of musket range. But no sooner had they arrived than an urgent order came for Cardross from Col. Ramsay, the commander of the Perth garrison. The troopers were to return to him without delay. Cleland objected strongly but the cavalry were forced to obey a direct order and, on 20th August, they crossed the Tay and rode south. That afternoon, scouts reported that the van of the Highland army had been seen upriver at Dalguise and was approaching fast.

  As dawn broke on the morning of 21 August, the lookouts in the cathedral steeple watched as their enemies drew themselves up in battle order on the hillsides above Dunkeld. They counted more than 5,000 and, sheltering behind the tumbledown walls and ditches of the precinct, the Cameronians saw that they were badly outnumbered by four to one. And no retreat was possible. Col. Alexander Cannon, the commander of the Highland army, had sent detachments across the Tay to block the fords and more of his troops closed the ring to the west of the cathedral. The defenders of Dunkeld were completely surrounded.

  At 7 a.m., the war pipes skirled out the battle rants and the Highlanders swarmed down off the hills and poured into the town. Cleland’s ring of outposts was quickly overwhelmed and his men ran for the redoubts behind the precinct wall. Protected by a bristling wall of their long pikes and halberds, the company led by Lieutenant Stewart managed to hold the barricade at the market cross at the east end of Cathedral Street. Raked by supporting fire from the musketeers behind the precinct wall, the Highlanders were driven back several times. But the sheer press of numbers eventually told, Stewart was shot dead and his men turned and ran for the sanctuary of the cathedral. No further retreat was now possible and Cleland knew that his men would fight to the last. They could expect no mercy.

  The Cameronians may have been badly outnumbered but they had one advantage. The narrow street and lanes of Dunkeld much reduced the effectiveness of the Highland charge, what had swept Hugh Mackay’s army off the braes of Killiecrankie only a few days before. If the Cameronians could keep their discipline and maintain volley fire by rank, then they could hold their ground. But they began to run low on musket balls.

  The Highland captains realised that the charge would simply fail repeatedly across such a narrow front and they changed tactics. Having broken into the houses on Cathedral Street and others overlooking the precinct, their snipers easily found elevated positions from windows and roofs where they could fire down on the Cameronians. Almost immediately, Lt Col. Cleland was fatally wounded. Such was the depth of his courage that he tried to drag himself out of sight so that his men might not lose heart. Major Henderson assumed command but the snipers were so close that they quickly picked him out and shot him a few minutes later. When Captain Munro took over, he set covering fire for parties of Cameronians to go out into the street with burning faggots speared on the tips of their pikes. They thrust these into the thatched roofs of the houses occupied by the Highland snipers and where possible locked their doors. Here is an extract from James Browne’s History of the Highlands:

  The whole town was in a conflagration, and the scene which it now presented was one of the most heart rending description. The din of war was no longer heard, but a more terrific [terrifying] sound had succeeded, from the wild shrieks and accents of despair which issued from the dense mass of smoke and flame which enveloped the unfortunate sufferers. The pik-men had locked the doors of such of the houses as had keys standing in them and the unhappy intruders, being thus cut off from escape, perished in the flames. No less than sixteen Highlanders were burned to death in one house. With the exception of three houses, possessed by the Cameronians, the whole town was consumed.

  As waves of Highlanders attacked the precinct wall, the defenders’ supply of musket balls was diminishing ever more rapidly. Soldiers began to strip lead off the roofs of the Atholl house and the cathedral, melt it and put it into moulds. At one point, the defenders were firing balls as fast as they could be plunged into cold water. More importantly, gunpowder was also running dangerously short and once the last of it had been shaken out of the last flask, the muskets would be no better than clubs. When that happened and the wall was at last stormed, the officers had planned to retreat with their men into the Marquis of Atholl’s house and defend it to the death as a last redoubt.

  But then, suddenly, the Highlanders drew back. Much discouraged by the blazing town and the appalling deaths suffered by their snipers, they seemed to lose heart completely. Unable to drive them on, Col. Cannon was forced to concede a retreat and, at 11 p.m., after 16 hours of fighting, as the darkness gathered, Dunkeld, lit only by the burning houses beyond the precinct wall, was deserted.

  When the exhausted garrison peered into the gloom and realised that their attackers had gone and they had won an unlikely and glorious victory, they threw their caps in the air. And, like the Covenanters they were, they raised their exultant voices in a psalm of thanksgiving. As the drums rolled, the Cameronians unfurled their colours and gave thanks to God. Ever practical, uncertain that the Highlanders had really retreated, the captains ordered their men to repair the walls. And the following morning work parties were sent out to cut down some of the trees of Stanley Hill that had given such good cover to the Highland musketeers. But others reported that there was no sign of the enemy around the town – they seemed to have fled, to have melted back into the mountains.

  The successful defence of Dunkeld stopped the first Jacobite rebellion in its tracks. Three hundred Highlanders lay dead in the streets and in the burnt-out houses and the chiefs withdrew northwards. Less than a year later, a remnant of the Highland army was routed and dispersed by government cavalry at the Haughs of Cromdale on Speyside. Richard Cameron’s martyrdom had not been in vain and the standard of the Gospel was raised once more in Christ’s Kingdom of Scotland.

  What the dramatic events of 1689 showed was a Highland Line continuing to be a real frontier – a wide cultural, political and religious divide. The holes and chips made by musket balls are still visible on the eastern gable of Dunkeld Cathedral and it would be two centuries before passions had cooled sufficiently to allow J. M. Barrie to poke fun at the heirs of the Covenanters.

  10

  The First Frontier

  IN THE EARLY SUMMER OF 1961, a team of archaeologists dug a trench across a small part of what they knew to be a very large Roman fort. No upstanding features had survived, not one stone had been left standing upon another but the site was unique for under the grass lay the only complete, undisturbed plan of a legionary fortress anywhere in the Roman Empire. It had never been built over and most of its area was rough, old grazing bordered by mature trees. But, over several digging seasons throughout the 1950s, tantalisingly few finds of artefacts had been uncovered.

  Once the area of the trench had been marked out and the surface mattress of grass lifted, Ian Richmond, the director of the excavation, noticed a difference in the colour and texture of the soil. There was a definite set of edges so perhaps a pit had been dug. Under six feet of gravel backfill, the archaeologists found the corroded remains of ten iron wheel tyres – what cartwrights fitted around wooden wheels to protect them from splintering or cracking. Beneath these, the diggers came upon something strange. It was a solid crust of rusted iron, what looked like a lid of fused pieces of metal. Having lifted this out very carefully, they discovered something even more remarkable.

  In an unparalleled state of preservation, sealed from damp by the lid of fused rust, here was a cache of almost 900,000 Roman nails. All hand-made, ranging from small tacks to secure roof tiles to massive iron spikes for clenching load-bearing timbers, nothing remotely on this scale had ever been found anywhere in the Empire. And the nails told a fascinating story, a sequence of events painstakingly pieced together by a group of patient and dedicated arc
haeologists working without the aid of metal detectors or any of the sophisticated technology now available.

  Ian Richmond’s team made their astonishing discovery at Inchtuthil, a flat and slightly elevated plateau of haughland on the banks of the River Tay, about ten miles downstream from Dunkeld. Marked as ‘Victoria’ on Ptolemy’s 2nd-century map of North Britain, it was designed as a legionary fortress and, as the nail hoard showed, conceived on a mighty scale. Covering an area of more than 53 acres, Inchtuthil or Victoria could accommodate 5,400 legionaries and other auxiliaries. Richmond’s surveyors plotted 64 barracks buildings, a temporary headquarters in the centre, workshops, 170 storehouses, a hospital, 6 granaries and a large drill hall, all protected by a perimeter wall and a two-metre-deep ditch and counterscarp beyond it. Four heavily fortified gateways stood at either end of two principal streets which quartered the whole layout in a grid pattern. It was an immense building project, something no Caledonian had ever seen, and, after the end of the Roman Empire, work on a scale that would not be undertaken in Scotland for another 18 centuries.

  Inchtuthil may have been the site of a marching camp used by Agricola’s invasion force in 82 or 83 but the construction of the legionary fortress certainly commenced in 84 after the battle of the Graupian Mountain. It was the military success that gave the fort its Roman name. Victoria was a concrete statement of imperial policy. North Britain was to be at least subdued and the establishment of a huge legionary base told the Caledonian kings that the Romans planned to stay and bring the whole island into the Empire. Perhaps initially they intended to consolidate the more valuable and malleable Lowlands and, for the time being, contain the Highlands.

  It may be that the victors of the battle of the Graupian Mountain marched south to Inchtuthil in the autumn of 83. On the eastern edges of the haughland, at least two temporary camps were laid out – one for the officers, one for other ranks. After the sites had been cleared, the ditches dug and the rampart raised, Agricola’s own legion, the XX Valeria Victrix, pitched their leather tents and made preparations to overwinter on the bank of the Tay. Raised some time after 31 BC by the first Emperor, Augustus, the XX Legion carried many battle honours. In the wars to subdue the peoples around the Upper Danube, the Twentieth was led by Marcus Valerius Messalla Messallinus and, after defeating rebellious tribes (having been surrounded and cutting their way out), it seems that they took their general’s name. Since Agricola had been their commander during Boudicca’s Revolt of AD 60, he may have favoured them with the additional title of Victrix after the battle of the Graupian Mountain.

  Such moments of military glory are fleeting. Almost 99 per cent of a soldier’s life is spent not fighting and sensible generals keep their men busy. Once the temporary defences were secured at Inchtuthil, the legionaries began the hard work of building a new fortress. And as the nail hoard suggests, it was conceived on a massive scale.

  Third in command of a Roman legion was the Praefectus Castrorum and his responsibilities revolved around supply and logistics. Inchtuthil stood at a point on the Tay where the river is still tidal and was probably deep enough to be used for barges or rafts to bring in materials. In 83–84, Agricola still had the British Fleet under his command. Once the rations for the legion, its men, horses and draught animals had been organised, the Praefectus’s first consideration was a quantity survey. What materials would the great fortress need and where were they to be sourced?

  All of the logistical and construction skills required could be supplied by the legionaries themselves. In addition to their fighting abilities, Roman soldiers also had a wide variety of practical skills – some were masons, joiners, blacksmiths, cartwrights or bookkeepers and most were good labourers with a wealth of building experience. The Praefectus’s principal concern will have been the availability of timber. The Inchtuthil fortress would need vast quantities of felled trees for the ramparts, barracks, storehouses and other buildings and such a bulky material had to be available locally. There had to have been dense and extensive forest near the construction site. Perhaps that was a factor in the choice of Inchtuthil. No doubt defended by patrols of armed comrades, Roman woodcutters felled many thousands of trees around the new fortress and stripped them of bark and branches before carting them down to the site. It may be that they stockpiled timber, keeping the stacks off the ground on bearers, to allow it to season. When the sap and moisture drains from felled trees, the beams, posts and rails made from it are much stronger and easier to work.

  The Price of Victoria

  Idle soldierly hands can cause trouble when not fighting and wise generals always tried to keep their men occupied. Otherwise trouble would be inevitable. The Romans understood this well and the legions were trained for all manner of tasks. They were much more often employed in various sorts of construction than in battle. Inchtuthil Fortress, probably plotted as ‘Victoria’ on Roman maps, was a huge enterprise. In her Building a Roman Legionary Fortress, Elizabeth Shirley has done some precise calculations – and they are staggering in their scale. Not allowing for mistakes, inefficiencies and changes of mind – all normal features of any building project – Inchtuthil took 6.1 million man-hours to build over less than three years. Had the fortress been completed, it would have taken 16.5 million man-hours. There were many phases that needed detailed logistical planning – site clearance, the building of a temporary camp to house officers, the pre-construction (for enclosure and defence) of ramparts and gateways, assembly of building materials, surfacing, drainage and water supply, timber construction, stonework structures and, finally, the work needed to abandon the fortress.

  Stone had to be sourced for road making, the paving of the parade ground and for the building of ovens while gravel may have been dredged from the bed of the Tay. Clay was dug and limestone ground down for mortar. Fresh water had to be readily available and archaeologists have found evidence of a temporary aqueduct to supply the site, a run of pipework probably extending over two miles to bring water from the Millhole Burn. Men need only one gallon of water a day but horses and oxen require ten and animals were probably led down to the Tay twice a day to drink. Romans were famously fond of bathhouses and that facility at Inchtuthil may have been the thirstiest consumer of all.

  One of the Praefectus’s most taxing difficulties was stone. It was not only needed for roads but also for the bathhouse. The nearest quarry for usable sandstone lay three miles to the north of the site, on Gourdie Hill. A road was laid down for the heavy carts and, to pull them, only plodding teams of oxen had the muscle power. To keep carriage weight to a minimum, the quarries roughed out blocks of stone to size, their edges only needing to be smoothed off by a chisel to fit. So that the three-mile journey was easier and more productive, the gromatici, the surveyors, made it longer. They chose an easier downhill gradient for fully loaded carts (such loads can push a team so hard that they cannot hold it, lose their footing and go down in front of the cart) and a more direct, steeper approach for those returning empty to the quarry. It worked in a loop on a one-way system – and to regulate it properly there must have been Roman traffic policemen.

  Inchtuthil may have been of a singular size, no less than a large military town almost in the centre of a Scotland where everyone lived on farms, but it did not stand alone. The legionary base was the lynchpin of what historians have called the Gask Ridge Frontier. Although it was not a continuous barrier or a wall – this would come later – it was the first boundary to be marked out on an edge of the Roman Empire.

  Strung along a north-east to south-west axis, the Gask Ridge Frontier exactly echoes the Highland Line and it is the first explicit recognition of it as a political and cultural divide. It is based on a sequence of forts. Some, like Inchtuthil, are located where narrow Highland glens open out into Lowland areas. Once known as glenblocker forts, they extend from Drumquhassle near Drymen and the southern end of Loch Lomond up to Inverquharity in the north-east. Forward posts too small to resist anything except raiding parties, they
acted as listening posts in the hope of giving early warnings of hostile movements in the Highlands.

  Behind this line lay the staple and spine of Roman military practice – a road. It ran from Doune up on to the Gask Ridge and, from there, to Bertha or Perth. For part of its length, mainly along the ridge itself, the road linked watchtowers, built approximately a thousand yards apart. That meant a close observation of movement. In fact, it may be that travellers were compelled to pay customs dues on any goods they were carrying or a toll for themselves. The Gask Ridge marked the northernmost frontier of the Empire and those who crossed it were entering the Roman world. Imperial frontiers operating in exactly this way were built elsewhere.

  It also seems likely that the Gask Ridge system was no accident, no careless stroke of an imperial pen like the straight-line borders of some 19th-century African colonies. It probably lay on an older frontier, the divide between the Caledonians to the north-west and the Venicones to the south-east. The latter were Lowland arable farmers who most likely supplied the Roman army with corn and other sustenance while the former were unquestionably hostile and would probably remain so. So that their grain supply was protected, the Gask Ridge was a sensible strategic precaution. Its location also reinforces the sense of the place-names of Dunkeld and Schiehallion denoting the edges of Caledonian territory.

  Ardoch Fort lies at the southern end of the Gask Ridge, nor far from the Gleneagles Hotel. It is an extremely impressive sight. The ditches and banks around the fort are still deep and massive, grassed-over but barely disturbed, it seems. On the north and east sides there are five ditches but these were not intended as extra security in an especially hostile area. Instead, they reflect the shrinkage of the fort as smaller garrisons were posted there. Part of the ground area inside the original ditch was simply dug into more ditches so that the walls could be brought in.