Under Another Sky (23 page)

It was only when I reached the Callendar estate that there was anything very much to see: here the ditch was deep and deliberate, running through the stately gardens of Callendar House (besieged by General Monck in 1651), and then between a cluster of tower blocks, before being stamped out by the streets of modern Falkirk. Beyond the town, at the open ground of Watling Lodge, the ditch emerged again, canopied with dripping oaks and garnished with litter. At Rough Castle, one of the most famous sites on the wall, the rampart stood a metre tall; and here were the traces of a fort, with its granaries, commanding officer’s house and baths; and the curious series of deep pits, interpreted as defensive devices called ‘
lilia
’, or ‘lilies’, in which stakes might have been buried as a deadly trap against enemy incursions.

At Croy Hill, the ditch had been cut through the hard dolerite itself; even solid stone was not to stand in the implacable way of the wall. As Alexander Gordon, the Scottish antiquary, wrote in his 1726
Itinerarium Septentrionale
, the wall entered along ‘a continued Track of Rocks and frightful Precipices, the Ditch all along being cut thro’
the said Rocks, running on the Sides of these Precipices, where I think there is more of the Roman Resolution and Grandeur to be seen than on its whole Track; for it is scarcely conceivable what Pains and Expence must have been used, in cutting thro’ such an amazing and rough Scene of Nature’. At the next eminence, Bar Hill, I lost my bearings and wandered about among the trees and scrub, speculating whether this dip or that mound was ditch or fort, until at last I came upon the most magnificent sight of the whole route: the deep ditch soaring up the hill, steep and smooth, and then plunging down to the west again, through the remains of another fort and bathhouse. From here, as Gordon noted, there was an ‘extended Prospect of a vast Country on all Hands’. Through Twechar, through Kirkintilloch, through the aptly named Wilderness Plantation I walked, eluding curious cattle, sighting the ditch as the merest wrinkle in the smooth skin of fields. On a long, dead-straight length of canal, a man tried to find out where I was walking to, and why, and whether I was alone, and I felt unreasonably panicked and vulnerable. On the Balmuidy Road I paused outside the gates of the Centurion Works, an outpost of an industrial demolition firm, enjoying the notion that someone had named the premises as a nod to this Roman route, but as I stopped to sit on the soft grassy verge awhile, a security guard drew up in his car and moved me on. I followed the ditch up nettled banks and over barbed-wire fences, and crossed the Kelvin, having no choice, over a bridge marked ‘No unauthorised access; danger of falling’. Cutting through a final stubbled field, I reached Dobbie’s Garden Centre, through whose grounds the wall runs. After a morning of cross-country solitude and bovine adventure, it felt peculiar to have emerged, somehow illicitly, into a busy world of petunias, hanging baskets and plastic furniture.

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. Penicuik 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.