A vivid tour through the route of the Roman invasion of prehistoric Scotland prompts reflections on Scotland as a colonised and colonising nation, finds Chris Bambery

This book is in part a travelog, but don’t let that put you off because it touches on matters of Scotland’s pre-history (before such a kingdom ever existed) and on the wider subject of the Roman Empire and its relations with the ‘barbarians’, in reality people who lived beyond the Empire’s formal borders.

Alan Montgomery has previously written a book about his walk along the Antonine Wall, built at the order of the Emperor Antoninus Pius around 142CE, twenty years after Hadrian’s Wall. It was an earth and timber fortification stretching from modern Bo’ness on the Firth of Forth to Old Kilpatrick on the Firth of Clyde, a border forty miles long across central Scotland and garrisoned for two decades.

The Romans then withdrew to Hadrian’s Wall. Modern Scottish nationalists would like to believe this was because of the resistance of the natives. Perhaps. Perhaps too the Romans had reached an agreement with the tribes south of the Forth-Clyde line, creating a sort of buffer zone.

Legends and imagined Scotland

In this book, Montgomery sets out to follow the road built for a Roman army, earlier in 79-84AD, by the Roman governor Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who led the first significant Roman invasion of Scotland (known to the Romans as Caledonia), culminating in a supposedly decisive victory at Mons Graupius in north-east Scotland. Montgomery wishes to find the site of that battle, it being the subject of much debate for some three centuries.

What we know about Agricola comes from the pen of the Roman historian, Tacitus, the general’s son-in-law, who was never in the island of Britain. In his description of the Battle of Mons Graupius, Tacitus sets down the speech of the Caledonian leader, Calgacus, to his men, ‘they make a desert and they call it peace’. Or more precisely: ‘To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.’

Now aside from the fact Tacitus was not there, how likely would it have been for the Caledonians to allow a Roman scribe to come within listening distance? It must also be added that Calgacus may not have existed. The Caledonians, it is supposed, were a confederation of Brythonic tribes, and there may or may not have been a battle. No matter! Calgacus is the first native of the lands that are present-day Scotland who we know, and his words took on a power of their own, as legends often do. In my People’s History of Scotland, I point out that in 1827 during Scotland’s Radical Wars, a failed insurrection and mass strike, weavers from Strathaven in South Lanarkshire marched on Glasgow behind a banner reading ‘Scotland Free or a Desart’ [sic].

This book is much more than a travelog because it also touches on debates around Scottish history and identity, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century when modern Scotland was coming into being following the 1707 Act of Union, which created one British parliament and the British state, and the defeat in 1746 of the final Jacobite rising aimed at restoring the exiled Stuarts to the throne. That was followed by the British state abolishing feudalism and clearing the way for an agricultural and then an industrial revolution.

For those keen on a new British identity, often those employed by the British state in the armed forces or colonial administrations, Agricola seemed to be a forerunner of themselves. In was taught at school that he was chivalrous and brave. We know little of him beyond Tacitus but these are unlikely virtues in a Roman general, or, later, in a British governor general.

In the late eighteenth century, antiquarians (amateur archaeologists) excavated Roman sites along the line of Agricola’s road to try to prove that his conquest was not a fleeting episode but that the Romans had stayed. The appeal of all this paled when the French Revolutionary Republic identified itself with the Roman Republic. But it persisted, certainly into my schooling. I was taught that Agricola was a noble Roman.

Ian Richmond, who excavated the Roman fort at Inchtuthil, overlooking the north bank of the River Tay southwest of Blairgowrie, was Professor of Archaeology at Oxford University in the 1950s and saw it as lying on the border between civilisation and savagery, claiming, ‘nowhere did the disciplined might of Rome come to closer grips with Highland lawlessness.’ Richmond was from Rochdale but he was saying what generations of North Britons believed. They wanted Scotland, at least the lowlands, to have been occupied by the Romans so they could claim its mantle.

The alternative view was akin to that of the ‘noble savage’ portraying the Caledonians as being undefeated, withstanding the might of Rome. The truth is in between. From the little we know of prehistoric Scotland, it was like many so-called ‘barbarian’ territories adjacent to the formal Empire, in contact with it and influenced by it. That was true from Denmark to Moldavia. The inhabitants of lowland Scotland might not have been wearing togas and speaking Latin but their chiefs and families were drinking wine from Gaul, eating off Roman pottery and wearing its jewellery. Some might have served as Roman auxiliaries, a step down in the Roman military from being a legionnaire. The sons of the elite (not the daughters) might have crossed into the Empire to be schooled.

Remains of Rome

Montgomery sets out on foot, by bike and car from an iron-age hill fort on Woden Law, in the western Cheviot hills just across the border in Scotland. It pre-dates Agricola’s invasion and may have been besieged by him. Or it may have been used by him as a practice ground for later sieges. Whichever, it looks out across the Roman road Agricola built northwards. Near it are a number of Roman camps. Each evening, the Romans would stop and build a rectangular camp with a ditch around it and the earth from that piled up to make a palisade. Inside this, they pitched their leather tents for the night.

The remains of such camps are to be found all over the Empire. Montgomery will visit more as he follows Agricola’s road northwards, some built by Agricola’s men some later, to the time of the Antonine occupation of southern Scotland and others later still to another campaign led by Emperor Septimius Severus in 209 and 210 before dying in a freezing British February in 211CE.

Montgomery takes us to the lovely Eildon Hills and nearby Melrose, with a small but excellent museum of finds from the nearby Roman fort at Trimontium. I won’t discuss his journey north until he arrives at a line of Roman forts, camps and signal stations running just south of the Highland line along the valleys of the rivers Earn, Tay and Almond through southern Perthshire and Angus.

This seems to have been a fortified border line, aimed at intimidating the locals more than keeping out the hill tribes. The Roman road pushes north touching the North Sea near Stonehaven and continuing to the Moray Firth. If Mons Graupius took place, or was a battle more than a skirmish, Montgomery settles on the vicinity of Bennachie, a hill north west of Aberdeen.

Agricola did not, however, stay to occupy lowland Scotland (he may have made incursions into the Cairngorm Mountains but he was not interested in conquering the modern Highlands). Back in Rome, the Emperor Domitian, whose war in Dacia (Romania) was going badly, ordered his troops back.

I found myself thinking Montgomery would make a good companion on such a journey but then he shares a similar background to me being raised in Edinburgh and loving to visit the historical monuments all around the city, including two Roman forts and ports at Inveresk and Cramond. But, as I say, this is much more than a travelog, and that’s why I enjoyed it. Throughout, I wanted to be standing on a hilltop looking out across the wonderful scenery of the Scottish lowlands. And as for Agricola being chivalrous, he, like any Roman general, would have used terror to subjugate the conquered and to sell his captives into slavery: a real role model for the rulers of the British Empire, so many of whom were Scots.