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Rome in Caledonia: Eighteenth-Century
Interpretations of Scotland’s Ancient Past
Alan Montgomery
As many chapters in this book have eruditely demonstrated, eighteenth-
century Europeans were captivated by the classical world. With the ancient
Romans generally held up as paradigms of civilisation, high culture, and mili-
tary success, the classical education and Grand Tours of early modern Britons
were intended to recreate the glory of Rome in an age when Britain was de-
veloping its own world-spanning empire.1 In England, this admiration for the
classical era resulted in enthusiastic antiquarian investigations, with the aim
of establishing the nation’s own position within the Roman world. Discoveries
of Roman monuments, mosaics, inscriptions, and works of art were eagerly
received, evidence, it seemed, of the classical roots of English civility.2
In Scotland, however, the situation was rather more ambiguous. For gen-
erations, Scots had been trumpeting their position as one of the only nations
to have successfully repelled Roman domination, celebrating their supposed
ancestors as indomitable freedom fighters intent on preserving their liberty
against foreign oppression. The idea that Caledonia (the name used by Tacitus,
amongst other ancient authors, to refer to the northern regions of the British
Isles)3 had kept the Romans at bay, which was bolstered by the writings of
various medieval and humanist chroniclers, was to become one of the most
popular tropes among patriotic early modern Scots, particularly in the context
of more current threats to Scottish independence and sovereignty.
Nevertheless, the eighteenth century produced a small but dedicated band
of Romanist Scots who were determined to locate a classical heritage for their
own nation. This chapter will focus on these men, and attempt to uncover the
1 For more on the early modern admiration for ancient Rome, see Philip Ayres, Classical Ideas
and the Culture of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
2 These antiquarian endeavours are outlined in chapter five of Rosemary Sweet, Antiquar-
ies: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon and Lon-
don, 2004).
3 For example Tacitus, Agricola 10.3.
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motivations behind their attempts to present Scotland not as a fiercely inde-
pendent adversary to Rome, but rather as a settled and civilised Roman prov-
ince. As will be demonstrated, some were driven by the pervasive eighteenth-
century admiration for Rome, while others were clearly influenced by their
support for Scotland’s emerging role as a constituent in a new British state,
and indeed a larger British empire. In the end, this desire to demonstrate a
classical legacy for Scotland was to prove unsuccessful, with Scots generally
preferring to fall back on previous visions of the “noble savage,” an approach
encouraged by the late eighteenth-century taste for Romanticism which would
later evolve into nineteenth-century Highlandism and “tartanry.” Yet attempts
to establish a “classical Caledonia” reveal much about early modern Scotland’s
complex, often contentious attitude towards its own history and identity, and
by extension, about the Scots’ struggle to establish a clear role for their nation
within the wider world.4
The ancient texts available to early scholars of Scotland’s distant past fea-
tured various Roman invasions of Scotland: one under Agricola, recorded in
the biography by Tacitus; one under Antoninus Pius, alluded to in the Historia
Augusta, “Life of Antoninus Pius” 5.4; one led by Septimius Severus, described
in books seventy-five to seventy-seven of Cassius Dio’s Roman History; a fourth
during the reign of the usurper Carausius in the late third century, mentioned
in at least one manuscript copy of the ninth-century Historia Brittonum at-
tributed to Nennius; and another by Theodosius, hinted at in Claudian’s pan-
egyric to the emperor Honorius.5 While, unsurprisingly, such texts generally
suggested Roman military success in the region, they remained remarkably
unclear regarding the endurance or extent of Roman influence in northern
Britain. Meanwhile, the growing interest amongst antiquarians in the material
remains of ancient Scotland was uncovering extensive physical evidence of a
Roman presence north of Hadrian’s Wall (an ancient frontier which was often
conflated with the border between England and Scotland), and even north of
the Antonine Wall, two monuments which were still widely regarded as pow-
erful symbols of the limits of Roman power.6
4 For more on early modern Scottish uses of history in the formation of national and religious
identity, see Chapter 6 by Kelsey Jackson Williams in this volume.
5 Carausius’s invasion is now regarded as a myth perpetuated and widely disseminated by the
work of Geoffrey of Monmouth (P.J. Casey, Carausius and Allectus: The British Usurpers (Lon-
don: Batsford, 1994), 168–75).
6 For the reception of Britain’s two Roman walls, see Richard Hingley, Hadrian’s Wall: A Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Laurence Keppie, The Antiquarian Rediscovery of
the Antonine Wall (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 2012).
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Such evidence had proved no impediment to previous generations of his-
torians intent on depicting Scotland’s brave resistance to invasion. The first
was John of Fordun, whose largely fabulous Chronica Gentis Scotorum seems to
have been written around 1360. No doubt inspired by persistent English claims
of suzerainty over the Scots at this time, it presents the inhabitants of ancient
Scotland as fiercely opposed to the threat of Roman invasion.7 The humanist
historian Hector Boece, whose history of Scotland was published in Paris in
1527 and received with acclaim throughout Europe, painted a similar picture
of the Caledonians. Apparently unperturbed by the rediscovery of Tacitus’s
Agricola a century before, with its description of a late first-century invasion
of Caledonia ending in a decisive victory for the eponymous Roman general,
Boece simply fabricated his own sequel in which a fearless Caledonian chief
(referred to by Boece as “Galdus,” now known as Calgacus) regained lost terri-
tory and expelled the Roman army.8 This fiction was repeated by George Bu-
chanan in his Rerum Scoticarum Historia, published in 1582, alongside other
tales of Roman defeat in the face of Caledonian bravery.9 All three of these
books were to remain staple sources for Scottish historians in the centuries
which followed. By the late seventeenth century, the notion that Caledonia
had repelled Roman conquest had become one of Scotland’s greatest claims to
fame, a vivid reminder of the nation’s past glories at a time when its survival as
an independent state seemed increasingly perilous.
The first Scot to challenge this idea of Caledonian impregnability in print
was Sir Robert Sibbald. Born in Edinburgh in 1641, Sibbald’s education took him
to Leiden, Paris, and Angers before he returned to Scotland in 1662, marking
him as one of the increasing number of young Scots who studied on the Con-
tinent and brought back innovative ideas on their return.10 Although medicine
was to become his profession, his passion for intellectual pursuits led him into
diverse fields, including natural history and geography, and he was to become
renowned for his antiquarianism. So many and so varied are his achievements
that Roger Emerson has placed him at the heart of a late seventeenth-century
7 See for example John of Fordun, Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, ed. William F. Skene (Ed-
inburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1872), 44–45, in which the Caledonian chieftains send
a defiant letter to Julius Caesar following his demands that they concede to Roman rule.
8 Hector Boece, The History and Chronicles of Scotland … Translated by John Bellenden (Ed-
inburgh, 1821), 139–63. For the rediscovery of the Agricola, see David Schaps, “The found
and lost manuscripts of Tacitus’ Agricola,” Classical Philology 74:1 (1979).
9 George Buchanan, The History of Scotland (London, 1690), 111.
10 On Scots studying abroad at this time see Roger L. Emerson, “Scottish Cultural Change
1660–1710,” in A Union for Empire, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 12.
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“proto-Enlightenment,” the development of which was vital for the success of
its better-known eighteenth-century counterpart.11
In 1682 Sibbald was appointed Scottish Geographer Royal to Charles ii, a
post which included a commission to create a patriotic Scotish [sic] Atlas. Sib-
bald planned a two-volume chorographical tome dealing with Scotland both
ancient and modern, which the Warrant of Appointment as Geographer Royal
of 1682 stated would include a “full description … of the ancient monuments of
the said kingdom.”12 Despite many attempts by the author to get it to the press,
this Atlas ultimately remained unpublished.13 In the early years of the eigh-
teenth century, however, Sibbald began to publish his research relating to the
Atlas in various printed tracts, several of which include discussions of Roman
Scotland, most notably his Historical Inquiries, Concerning the Roman Monu-
ments and Antiquities in the North-Part of Britain Called Scotland of 1707, and
the Conjectures Concerning the Roman Ports, Colonies, and Forts, in the Firths
and a Latin commentary on the Scottish expeditions of Agricola, both pub-
lished in 1711. In these texts, as well as in his other chorographical descriptions
of Scotland, Sibbald proposes a vision of Caledonia, or at least its southern
parts reaching up towards the north of modern-day Fife, as a virtual Roman
province, dotted with evidence of Roman culture and civility:
By all which it is clear, that the Romans stayed long in this Country: They
did introduce Order and Civility where ever they came, and by the Arts
and Policy they taught our Ancestors, they tamed their Fierceness, and
brought them to affect a civil Life: The Order they established in their
Colonies and Garrisons, and Ports, gave rise to the buildings of our best
Towns.14
Sibbald identified Camelon as an important Roman city, the administrative
centre of the province, also the residence of the “chief governor.”15 His repeat-
ed assertion that numerous Scottish towns and castles were located on what
he believed to be Roman sites underlines their long-standing importance as
11 Roger L. Emerson, “Sir Robert Sibbald, Kt, The Royal Society of Scotland and the Origins
of the Scottish Enlightenment,” Annals of Science 45:1 (1988), 42.
12 eul MS Laing iii.535.
13 On Sibbald’s Atlas, see Charles W.J. Withers, Geography, Science and National
Identity: Scotland Since 1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 71–84.
14 Robert Sibbald, Historical Inquiries (Edinburgh, 1707), 51.
15 Sibbald, Historical Inquiries, 17; Sibbald Commentarius in Julii Agricolae Expeditiones
(Edinburgh, 1711), 12. Camelon is now recognised as an important Roman military site,
displaying evidence of various periods of use.
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places of power and influence.16 One of his principal sources was the Agrico-
la, particularly the twenty-first chapter, in which Tacitus detailed the project
of “Romanisation” carried out by the Roman general in Britain. Despite the
fact that this chapter appears well before the text’s description of Agricola’s
exploits in the north, Sibbald convinced himself that this civilising process also
applied to Scotland, as expressed in his 1710 history of Fife:
Without doubt, After-times may discover in this Shire, and in other Parts
of North Britain, many Roman Antiquities, when Curious Persons will
search for them: for Tacitus telleth us, that it was one of the Means that
Agricola used to Tame the Britains, that he privately exhorted and pub-
lickly joined with them to Build Temples, Houses, Seats of Justice; and by
degrees brought them to erect Portico’s and Baths.17
No doubt inspired by the publication date of Historical Inquiries, recent schol-
arship has suggested that Sibbald’s concept of a civil Roman Scotland was
concocted in a Unionist context, implying that this vision of Scotland as part
of an ancient Britannia was related to the nation’s position in the modern in-
carnation of Britain.18 In fact, a close study of his manuscript writings reveals
that Sibbald’s notion of a civil Roman Scotland dates back as far as the early
1680s, when British union was far less of an issue than it would become two
decades later. Sibbald’s own views on the Union are frustratingly opaque: em-
ulating Thomas Leighton, the principal of Edinburgh University, he seemingly
preferred to steer clear of political and religious matters, stating that he “pre-
ferred a quiet lyfe, wherein I might not be ingadged in factions of Church or
state.”19 Later, in the early eighteenth century, when debate on a possible union
was raging, Sibbald moved in distinctly anti-Unionist circles, although their
influence on him is far from clear.20 His own opinions were apparently fluid;
on 2nd December 1702, writing to the staunch anti-Unionist Robert Wodrow,
he seemed nervous but resigned: “I ame told the Union goes on a pace, God
16 See for example Sibbald, Commentarius, 4, 7–8, 13.
17 Robert Sibbald, The History, Ancient and Modern, of the Sheriffdoms of Fife and Kinross
(Edinburgh, 1710), 31–32.
18 Richard Hingley, The Recovery of Roman Britain 1586–1906 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 103.
19 Robert Sibbald, Remains of Sir Robert Sibbald … Edited by James Maidment (Edinburgh,
1837), 15.
20 Emerson, “Sir Robert Sibbald,” 51.
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grant it may be for our good.”21 Nineteen days later he wrote to Hans Sloane in
London in a much more ebullient mood: “I should wish wee were more bent
for ane Union and then wee might better advance both learning and trade, and
better oppose our foreigne enemies.”22 As such, Sibbald’s attitudes towards the
Union could be compared to his religious affiliations, which were notoriously
indecisive and susceptible to outside influence.23
In fact, it seems more likely that Sibbald’s motivation in formulating his vi-
sion of Roman Scotland lay in his admiration for Rome. Evidence of this ad-
miration can be found in his library, the catalogue of which—the Bibliothe-
ca Sibbaldiana, published for the posthumous auction of his books—reveals
countless volumes relating to the language, habits, and philosophy of the
ancients. His surviving correspondence demonstrates a desire to keep up to
date with the latest archaeological discoveries in Scotland, and Sibbald him-
self built a not inconsiderable collection of objects which he believed to be
Roman.24 Like William Camden, who cited Seneca’s claim that “the Romans
settle wherever they conquer” in his iconic late sixteenth-century book Britan-
nia, Sibbald seems to have believed that where the Romans went, their way of
life surely followed.25 For many Scots, the idea of Scotland succumbing to for-
eign invasion was anathema; for Sibbald on the other hand, the idea that Rome
had played a vital role in the development of early Scotland was something
to celebrate. While his near contemporary, the Breton Jesuit Jean Hardouin,
was attempting to debunk the canon of classical literature in his own fanciful
writings, Sibbald was doing quite the opposite by constructing an imaginary
classical legacy for Scotland, a legacy which he believed still impacted on the
landscape and society of the early modern nation.26
Sibbald died in 1722; within four years of his demise his fantasy of Cale-
donia as a Roman province was roundly debunked by the ambitious young
antiquarian Alexander Gordon in his influential Itinerarium Septentrionale, a
21 Robert Sibbald, Sir Robert Sibbald’s Memoirs of the Royal College of Physicians at Edinburgh
(Edinburgh, 1837), 32.
22 BL Sloane MS 4039, f.53.
23 Sibbald made a brief conversion to Catholicism in 1685, under the influence of his patron,
the Earl of Perth. Following an attack on his house by a mob, he fled to London, where
he quickly recanted, later describing the period as “the difficultest passage of my Lyfe”
(Robert Sibbald, The Memoirs of Sir Robert Sibbald, ed. Francis Paget Hett (London: Oxford
University Press, 1932), 86).
24 For Sibbald’s own catalogue of his collection, see Robert Sibbald, Auctarium Musaei
Balfouriani, e Musaeo Sibbaldiano (Edinburgh, 1697).
25 William Camden, Britannia, Vol. I, ed. Richard Gough (London, 1789), lxiv.
26 For more on Jean Hardouin, see Chapter 1 by Anthony Ossa-Richardson in this volume.
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volume which displayed its author’s staunchly patriotic standpoint and stuck
firmly to the traditional view of Caledonian indomitability. Gordon dedicated
an Appendix to Chapter iv of the Itinerarium to the rubbishing of his prede-
cessor’s conjectures: “I was surprized that he places whole Countries, Roman
Garrisons, Colonies and Forts in that Country, which I have very good reason to
believe were never there.”27 The three and a half pages of this “tedious digres-
sion” refute many of Sibbald’s claims, with Gordon also questioning Sibbald’s
identification of many modern towns as having Roman roots.28 According to
Gordon, Scotland had never been a Roman province at all, but instead repre-
sented a military zone, the numerous Roman sites that he discovered there
being evidence only of several failed attempts to conquer the region.
It is interesting to note, however, that Gordon’s main patron, Sir John Clerk
of Penicuik, was far more ambivalent on the subject. An early example of a
Scottish Grand Tourist who visited Rome in 1697–1698, Clerk later became
something of a Romanist obsessive, collecting relics of the ancient civilisation
sourced both at home and abroad, also claiming to have read Horace’s Ars Poet-
ica at least 50 times.29 Whilst Clerk was inclined to praise ideas of Caledonian
liberty in public (for example in a paper delivered to the Philosophical Soci-
ety of Edinburgh in 1739 on the subject of Hadrian’s Wall),30 he also seemed
intent on locating a classical heritage for the nation. As well as building one
of Scotland’s largest collections of Roman carved and inscribed stones, many
of which were sourced along the line of the Antonine Wall, he also tended
to see evidence of Roman influence even where none existed: he identified
a (probably Bronze Age) burial mound on his own estate at Penicuik as the
mausoleum of a high-status Roman, and declared a Renaissance carved relief
displayed on the side of a building in Edinburgh’s Netherbow to be the finest
Roman sculpture in northern Britain.31 He also expressed frustration at Scot-
land’s relative lack of a classical heritage, writing to the English antiquarian
27 Alexander Gordon, Itinerarium Septentrionale (London, 1726), 43.
28 Ibid., 43–46.
29 Sir John Clerk, Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, ed. John Miller Gray
(Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1892), 215.
30 Iain Gordon Brown, “Modern Rome and Ancient Caledonia,” in The History of Scottish
Literature, Volume 2 1660–1800, ed. Andrew Hook (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,
1987), 37. Manuscript copies of the paper in the hand of an amanuensis survive in the
Clerk of Penicuik Muniments, nrs GD18/5051.
31 Gordon, Itinerarium, 170–71. For a detailed discussion of the early modern reception of
the Netherbow Heads see Iain Gordon Brown and Alan Montgomery, “The ‘Roman Heads’
at the Netherbow in Edinburgh: A Case of Antiquarian Wishful Thinking in the 18th and
19th Centuries,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 146 (2016): 253–74.
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Roger Gale in 1726, “I am, I confess, of the opinion of some learned men, that
this is a reproach to a nation to have resisted the humanity which the Romans
laboured to introduce.”32 His pride in Caledonian courage was tempered by
his discomfort with the apparent savagery of these supposed ancestors, and
his disappointment in their rejection of the civility which Roman dominance
would have offered. This ambivalence is perfectly expressed in a couplet from
his classically inspired poem, The Country Seat:
How glorious was the Cause of Liberty
Tho’ Founded in a gross barbarity.33
Clerk’s desire for a classical Caledonia was certainly driven by his obvious rev-
erence for the cultural achievements of Rome, but, unlike Sibbald, we can also
detect clear political bias in Sir John’s interpretation of the ancient past. Hav-
ing sat on the committee which helped to facilitate the Union with England in
1707, Clerk was himself a key player in the formation of modern Britain, and his
belief in the importance of union also extended to ancient Britannia. Indeed
in his manuscript History of the Union, which he began formulating around 1711
and composed between 1724 and 1730,34 Clerk asserts that the Romans offered
Britain “the first government of any name,” and claims that they rendered the
indigenous people “more sociable … more civilised … more free.”35 For Clerk,
the intention of the invading Roman force was altruistic: “To unite the Brit-
ish people along with themselves in a single well-grafted society.”36 This text,
which remained unpublished on its author’s death in 1755, also contains the
most explicit demonstration of Clerk’s ambivalence towards Caledonia’s rejec-
tion of Rome:
But the descendants of those Caledonians today should take care not to
boast of their resistance too much, for to be proud of their refusal of Ro-
man rule means admitting that one’s ancestors were barbarians with no
claim to civilization whatever.37
32 nrs GD18/5029.
33 nrs GD18/4404/15.
34 Douglas Duncan, “Introduction,” in Sir John Clerk, History of the Union of England and
Scotland (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1993), 5–6.
35 Clerk, History of the Union, 34.
36 Ibid., 38.
37 Ibid., 38–39.
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It is difficult to ascertain how far this idea of a classical Caledonia spread
beyond the boundaries of antiquarianism and into the realms of the pop-
ular imagination. Certainly, visions of a Caledonian resistance persisted in
popular poetry and the press, suggesting that Scots in general were more at-
tached to such patriotic imagery. The poetry of Allan Ramsay, another close
friend of Clerk’s and the most popular Scottish poet of the early eighteenth
century, contains numerous references to the Caledonian rejection of Rome,
surely indicative of Ramsay’s romantic, Jacobite tinged attitudes towards
Scotland’s past and present.38 Despite, or perhaps because of, the radical,
traumatic changes in national identity that resulted from the Union of 1707,
Scotland’s self-image was still largely dependent on concepts of a ncient
liberty.
William Maitland, another protégé of Clerk, further fuelled the debate with
his posthumously published History and Antiquities of Scotland of 1757. Like
Clerk, Maitland was a supporter of British union, having described it in his
strongly whiggish History of London—the city which was his home from 1733
to 1740—as “a great Blessing to the united Kingdom.”39 Like Clerk, Maitland
seems to have been ambivalent on the subject of Roman influence in Scotland,
including in his “Introduction” a conventional description of the Caledonians,
“who so gloriously maintained their independency against the Romans,”40 but
later identifying Agricola as the man who brought civilisation to Scotland. Sim-
ilar to Sibbald, Maitland located a Roman oppidum at Camelon, but also added
a Roman “town of great note” at Middleby, and “one of the most considerable
Roman towns in Scotland” at Cramond.41 He also suggested that a Roman
bath recently discovered (and destroyed before Maitland had had the chance
to visit it) at Delvin in Perthshire was one of those mentioned by Tacitus in
chapter 21 of the Agricola.42 Maitland proposed that the civilising influence of
Agricola affected even the Highlands, claiming that the Gaelic spoken in the
region included many Latin words and phrases, and that the Highland plaid
was a direct descendent of the Roman toga.43 Maitland developed this idea lat-
er in the book, claiming that a comparison of Highland dress with the drapery
38 See for example his poems Tartana, or the Plaid of 1718 and The Archer’s March of 1726.
39 William Maitland, The History of London (London, 1739), 322.
40 William Maitland, The History and Antiquities of Scotland (London, 1757), iii.
41 Ibid., 173, 192, 203. These sites are now recognised as Roman forts.
42 Ibid., 149.
43 Ibid., 80. Maitland had written to Sir John Clerk of Penicuik in 1742 asking for his opinion
“concerning some parts of the Highland Dress and arms … which of them you take to be
Roman,” nrs GD18/5058. Clerk’s response is now lost.
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of a Roman sculpture substantiated this claim, and adding that the Highland
bonnet was a descendant of the Roman pileus.44
If eighteenth-century Scots apparently remained divided on just how “Ro-
man” their home nation had once been, a new source emerged in the late
1750s which seemed finally to settle the argument. “Discovered” in a Copen-
hagen library by the English expatriate Charles Bertram, a manuscript source
which was to become known as the De Situ Britanniae appeared dramatically
to improve understandings of the geography and society of Roman Britain.
It also seemed to confirm that Scotland had, in fact, been largely subdued
by Rome. News of the discovery first arrived in Britain when Bertram wrote
to the English antiquarian William Stukeley, striking up a correspondence,
one side of which (Bertram to Stukeley) is preserved in the collection of the
Bodleian Library, Oxford. A fervent Romanist, Stukeley had himself written
An Account of a Roman Temple and Other Antiquities Near Graham’s Dike in
Scotland almost two decades previously.45 Towards the end of his second let-
ter, Bertram mentioned that he had recently obtained an “old manuscript
fragment” entitled Richardi Monachi Westmonasteriensis Commentariolum
Geographicum de Situ Britanniae & Stationum quas Romani ipsi in ea Insula
Aedificaverunt (“A geographical description of the places of Britain and the
stations which the Romans themselves built in that island by Richard, Monk
of Westminster”).46
Stukeley wrote back enthusiastically, declaring the manuscript to be “a
Cimelium & Great curiosity,” and suggesting that it should be printed. In the
postscript of his next letter, dated 27th November 1747, Bertram revealed more
about its specific content, focusing exclusively on what it revealed about Ro-
man Scotland, and placing it within the context of recent scholarship:
I have perused Mr Gordon’s Iter Septentrionale with great delight: it is
well wrote, & tho I cannot agree with his opinion at all times, believe
good use can be made of him in illustrating the Monk of Westminster.
I could wish I were acquainted with him, that I might enquire some
44 Maitland, History and Antiquities, 149–50. Anne MacLeod notes other later eighteenth-
century attempts to link Highland and Roman dress, with Thomas Pennant comparing a
brooch worn in Skye to a fibula, and William Gilpin comparing the plaid to Roman drap-
ery. See Anne MacLeod, From an Antique Land (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2012), 74.
45 Although ostensibly a study of Arthur’s O’on, an unusual domed and possibly Roman
structure which stood in central Scotland until its demolition by the local landowner in
1743, Stukeley’s 1720 Account of a Roman Temple includes a detailed account of southern
Scotland as a settled Roman province.
46 Bodl.MS.Eng.Lett.b.2, f.7.
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things concerning Scotland beyond the Tay, the Monk placing several sta-
tions there & makes the Roman roads to run as far as the Varar Aestuary
[Moray Firth], tho hitherto none, that I have heard of, have discovered
any vestigia in those parts.47
As the correspondence developed, more revelations regarding Scotland were
included. Stukeley quickly leapt to the conclusion that the manuscript had
been written by the medieval historian Richard of Cirencester, and was based
on the lost memoirs of no less a figure than Agricola himself.48 Most notably,
the text apparently showed that Scotland had not only been almost completely
conquered, with two altars north of modern-day Inverness marking the limit
of Roman control, but also split into two provinces called Valentia and Vespasi-
ana. These provinces contained three important cities: Victoria (Perth), Ptero-
ton or Castra Alata (Inverness), and Theodosia (Dumbarton).49 All of these
were listed by Richard as being among the thirty-three “more eminent” Roman
cities in Britain, and among the ten described as Civitates Latio jure donatae,
translated by Stukeley as “Cities honor’d with the Italian Freedom.”50 Bertram
seems to have banked on the fact that such ground-breaking new information
on the extent of Roman Scotland would pique Stukeley’s interest. His hopes
were not to be disappointed. Despite the fact the Bertram seemed unable, or
unwilling, to send over the original manuscript, Stukeley was well and truly
hooked, even updating and correcting his own copy of his Account of a Roman
Temple with numerous manuscript notes.51
Disseminating the text, however, was a slow process, and it was only in the
late 1750s that the De Situ Britanniae was to become more widely available
to other antiquarians and historians. In 1757, Stukeley published an English
abridgement of the text in his Account of Richard of Cirencester, Monk of West-
minster, and of His Works. That that same year Bertram published the original
Latin text of the manuscript, alongside well-known texts by Nennius and Gil-
das, under the title Britannicarum Gentium Historiae Antiquae Scriptores Tres.
That the manuscript was an elaborate, if rather clumsily written, hoax created
by Bertram himself would finally emerge a century later, when close analysis
of the Latin revealed numerous flaws and anachronisms. In the intervening
47 Bodl.MS.Eng.Lett.b.2, f.10.
48 William Stukeley, An Account of Richard of Cirencester (London, 1757), 12.
49 Charles Bertram, The Description of Britain (London, 1809), 1.6.xliv; xlvii.
50 William Stukeley, Itinerarium Curiosum (London, 1776), Centuria ii, 118; Bodl.MS.Top.
gen.e.68, f.1–2.
51 Now in the Bodleian Library, reference Bodl.533.7 G.42 fol.
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years, almost every analysis of the history and landscape of Roman Scotland
had been infected with its many fraudulent claims.
The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a new approach to
Scotland’s Roman past: Hanoverian troops invoked the spirit of Agricola as
they subdued the Highlands in the wake of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. For
centuries, the Highlands had been viewed as a separate, troublesome place
which at times even threatened the stability of the Scottish state.52 Sir Rob-
ert Sibbald wrote in the late seventeenth century that “the Lowlanders are
more civilized and use the language and habit of the English, the Highlanders
are more rude and Barbruse [sic] and use that of the Irish.”53 Daniel Defoe,
writing at the time of the Union, linked the inhabitants of northern Scotland
with the Irish and ancient “Scoti,” noting their distinct names, manners, and
language, while also suggesting a part-Roman heritage for Lowlanders.54 The
modern inhabitants of the Highlands were at times conflated with the ancient
barbarians described by the Romans centuries before. The wording chosen by
the English scholar John Chamberlayn to describe the purpose of Agricola’s
fortification of the Forth Clyde isthmus in his book Magnae Britanniae Noti-
tia, published just after the first Jacobite rebellion, is telling: “to exclude the
Scotch-Highlanders.”55
In the years after 1745, the Hanoverian regime aimed to suppress Gaelic cul-
ture in their attempts to prevent future Highland insurrection. Recent schol-
arship has noted that this, often brutal, pacification project—with its network
of roads and fortresses constructed across the region—was largely inspired by
Roman models.56 The Britannia of 1789 notes that “troops employed in making
these roads left engraved on the rocks the names of the regiment each part be-
longed to after the manner of the Romans.”57 That the campaign was believed
to surpass Roman achievements was made explicit: General George Wade
placed an inscription on the bridge he built over the Tay at Aberfeldy, which
noted its position 250 miles beyond the limits of the Roman Empire (by which
he apparently meant Hadrian’s Wall).
A new breed of soldier antiquarians set out across Scotland, armed with
a copy of the Agricola, and later the De Situ Britanniae, turning their focus
52 For more on “Highland Separatism” pre-1707 see David Turnock, The Historical Geography
of Scotland Since 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 19–22.
53 NLS Adv.MS.33.5.16 f.81.
54 Daniel Defoe, The History of the Union Between England and Scotland (London, 1786), 34.
55 John Chamberlayne, Magnae Britanniae Notitia (London, 1716), 356.
56 See for example Hingley, Recovery of Roman Britain, 149; also Sweet, Antiquaries, 181–82.
57 Camden, Britannia, Vol. 3, 384–85.
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towards the region’s Roman military sites in their attempts to trace the route
of the first-century Roman general. Captain Robert Melville, for example, was
called back from the Austrian Wars of Succession to help suppress the ’45, and
later spent much of his leisure time scouring the landscape of Perthshire and
Angus for Roman camps and forts in his attempts to chart Agricola’s prog-
ress through Scotland. His antiquarian endeavours also inspired those of the
talented cartographer General William Roy, whose Military Antiquities of the
Romans in North Britain, published posthumously in 1793, includes numerous
maps and plans of Roman military sites throughout Scotland. Where Melville
and Roy led, others followed: the retired Colonel Alexander Shand spent his
later years exploring the regions north of the Tay in search of Roman remains,
and the collection of manuscript maps and plans produced by various mem-
bers of the Antiquarian Society of Perth (now held in Perth Museum) show
a marked interest in sites supposed to be Agricolan.58 These maps and plans
accord with eighteenth-century approaches to mapping and recording geog-
raphy both ancient and modern. Charles Withers has identified the signifi-
cance of this desire to record the landscape as a factor in nation building, and
has described the eighteenth-century Scottish drive to “understand its pres-
ent constitution and to provide a vision of the nation in the future”; forward-
thinking Scots of this period were equally intent on understanding Scotland’s
landscape in the distant past, with a view to establishing the very foundations
of the nation itself.59
This new generation of military-minded antiquarians effectively steered the
historiography of ancient Scotland in a new direction. The image of redoubt-
able Caledonians fending off an oppressive force from the South had, until now,
been useful to patriotic Scots keen to highlight their nation’s stance against the
more recent threat of English dominance. In an age where southern civility
was perceived to be threatened by uncivilised northern hordes, however, the
endeavours of the Romans in North Britain began to appear more relevant to
early modern, Lowland Scots. This ancient conflict was being revived not as an
analogy for more recent struggles between Scotland and England, but rather
Hanoverians against Highlanders. Indeed, Roy’s Military Antiquities could be
viewed, alongside the Latin inscriptions in the Highlands, as a piece of Roman-
ist Hanoverian propaganda. As a tale of an invading force bringing civilisation
to the north, the narrative portrayed in the work of these soldier antiquarians
suited the need for a new comprehensively “British” historiography, in which
58 Eighteenth-century manuscripts relating to Roman Scotland in the Perth Museum
archive include their reference numbers P.85–88, 266, 272, 300, and 307.
59 Withers, “Geography,” 142.
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political and social progress could be charted from the ancient to the modern
state.60
Fashions, however, were changing. While the historical conjectures of ear-
lier eighteenth-century Britons had been largely inspired by a reverence for
the Roman world, the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century saw the
increased influence of Romanticism and Primitivism. The incredibly success-
ful poems of Ossian—supposedly written by a third-century Caledonian bard,
“translated” and published in the early 1760s by James Macpherson, and almost
immediately provoking claims that they were largely forgeries—suggested
that the Caledonians had not been the “barbarians with no claim to civiliza-
tion whatever” described by Sir John Clerk, but rather cultured and cultivat-
ed heroes with a literature to match those of the Greeks and Romans. Anti-
quarianism too became sidelined in the wake of new approaches to history.
Susan Manning describes the emerging conflict between antiquarianism and
the new generation of Scottish historians, pointing out that Hume’s “Science
of Man” had a profound impact on Enlightenment historiography, which was
generally intent on explaining the past on a macro level and favoured a conjec-
tural approach, while antiquarians were increasingly criticised for focusing on
minute details and remained resistant to the “grand narratives of philosophic
history.”61 Hume himself had little interest in the Roman period, stating his
intention in the first volume of his massively popular and widely read History
of England (published 1754–1762 with numerous later editions) to “briefly run
over the events, which attended the conquest made by that Empire, as belong-
ing more to Roman than British history.”62
Despite this, attempts to claim a classical heritage for Scotland were not
quite exhausted. In 1775, Lachlan Shaw proposed that many of the towns
around the Firth of Forth were built on the foundations of Roman military and
civil sites, a suggestion surely influenced by Sibbald’s 1711 treatise Conjectures
Concerning the Roman Ports, Colonies, and Forts, in the Firths.63 Elsewhere, a
report taken from a letter written by the landowner James Wedderburn to the
60 For a discussion of the problems inherent in the use of Scottish history in the process of
creating a “British” national identity post-1689, see Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), passim.
61 Susan Manning, “Antiquarianism, the Scottish Science of Man, and the Emergence of
Modern Disciplinarity,” in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Iain
Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 59–65;
Ibid., 60.
62 David Hume, The History of England, Vol. 1 (London, 1767), 2.
63 Lachlan Shaw, History of the Province of Moray (Edinburgh, 1775), 3. Shaw also cites
Sibbald’s 1710 history of Fife in the same book (41).
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antiquarian Adam de Cardonnel on the discovery of Roman remains in the Lo-
thian village of Inveresk in 1783, which features in the 1789 edition of Britannia,
strongly suggests that Scotland had been extensively settled by the Romans:
By this post, and the camp at Ardoch the Romans meant … to have con-
sidered the river Earn as their boundary, and covered the county of Fife
completely: and they must have been in peaceable possession when they
erected stone and brick buildings of imported materials … Beyond and to
the northward of their posts they must also have extended to a high and
settled authority.64
Perhaps the last antiquarian of this period to describe the ancient nation as a
virtual Roman province was George Chalmers; the first volume of his multi-
tomed national history, Caledonia, emerged in 1807. Having spent time in
America as a young man, Chalmers’s loyalist sympathies forced him to return
to England in 1775 during the discontent preceding the War of Independence,
and he eventually settled in London. Thanks to his various official posts, he
was able to devote much of his time to writing, and following the publication
of a biography of Thomas Rudimann, Chalmers turned his attention towards
composing a history of his homeland.65 Unlike Hume, Chalmers saw the Ro-
man period as a vital part of the nation’s development, and placed the subject
at the opening of his book “from its priority in time, as well as precedence in
importance.”66
In his account of the exploits of Agricola, Chalmers sticks closely to the in-
formation contained in Tacitus. Regarding the period following Agricola’s re-
call, however, he countered the ideas of Boece and Buchanan, and dismissed
claims by previous commentators that a phrase in Tacitus’s History, perdomita
Britannia et statim omissa (“Britain was overcome and then immediately let
go”), suggested that the Romans had quickly deserted Scotland.67 Chalmers
instead claimed that the “querulous historian” Tacitus was not to be trusted,
and that the “silence of history” in fact proved that Scotland had been quietly
subdued thanks to “the power of the governors, and the weakness of the gov-
erned.”68 Citing the De Situ Britanniae as evidence, Chalmers proposed that
64 Camden, Britannia, Vol. 3, 311.
65 Although six volumes were planned, only three were published before Chalmers’s death
in 1825.
66 George Chalmers, Caledonia, Vol. 1 (London, 1807), viii.
67 Chalmers specifically refers to the English antiquarian John Horsley as having proposed
that the Romans retreated soon after Agricola’s victory.
68 Chalmers, Caledonia, 115, 183.
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the Roman walls had never indicated the full extent of Roman imperium, and
that during the rule of Antoninus Pius, “every inhabitant of North-Britain, who
resided along the east coast, from the Tweed to the Murray Firth, might have
claimed … every privilege, which particularly belonged to a Roman citizen.”69
Chalmers’s discussion of Scotland’s Roman remains includes much details
on roads, and also mentions Roman towns at Cramond and Camelon, and a
villa at Linlithgow.70 In his Preface, he notes the recent discovery of a supposed
Roman bath at Burghead in Moray, evidence which apparently extended the
limits of Roman power into the region where the author himself was born.71
When relating a partial Roman retreat during the 160s CE, he presents an or-
ganised, peaceful withdrawal, Roman troops remaining in key locations, and
the Caledonians so accustomed to subjugation that they remained tranquil
even after the Romans’ departure.72 Unlike many Scots, Chalmers was sceptical
of the authenticity of the poems of Ossian, pointing out that “elegant poetry
requires not authentic history to support its elegant narratives,” and reminding
readers that the Gaelic in which the poems were supposedly composed was
not spoken until long after the end of the Roman Empire.73
Although he often cites Gordon’s Itinerarium, and so must have been aware
of its criticism of Robert Sibbald’s conjectures, Chalmers’s early nineteenth-
century vision of Roman Scotland was not too different from that conjured
up by Sibbald over 120 years previously. While he was not the first historian to
be inspired by the fake De Situ Britanniae, Chalmers was the first to use it to
map a civil Roman landscape in the north. His explanation of why the Romans
eventually retreated is distinctly negative towards Scotland: “The Romans re-
linquished the country, which experience had taught them to regard, neither
as useful nor agreeable.”74 When he is viewed as an enthusiastic supporter
of Britain’s imperial ambitions who spent much of his adult life in England,
Chalmers’s approach towards Caledonia’s place within the Roman world per-
haps begins to make more sense. In his writings about Roman Scotland, his
sympathies clearly lie with the invading and civilising force rather than with
the defeated indigenous peoples. Du Toit notes that, while he could indulge in
69 Ibid., 116, 119.
70 Ibid., 166, 170.
71 This is presumably a reference to Burghead Well, a subterranean construction of unknown
date. Although there are various modern theories regarding its origins and purpose, it is
not considered Roman today.
72 Chalmers, Caledonia, 183–84.
73 Ibid., 189.
74 Ibid., 183.
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sentimental Jacobitism, Chalmers tended to back the standing British regime,
and viewed opposition to authority as sedition.75 Such an approach seems to
have encouraged a negative reception of his book. Contemporary commen-
tators were highly critical; Caledonia was widely regarded as derivative, old
fashioned, and unreliable, and was compared unfavourably with the work of
Chalmers’s English contemporaries.76
As the nineteenth century rolled on, Scots seemed to lose interest in hero-
ic tales of Roman Scotland, looking elsewhere for their patriotic histories.77
It is perhaps no coincidence that, as Scotland became more confident of its
own civility and more urbanised, its capital city transformed by a neo-classical
New Town, its streets apparently thronging with influential thinkers, its peo-
ple turned towards more Romantic visions of their past, searching for a place
of primitive nobility and wide, open landscapes. As has been noted by Frank
Turner and others, Greece began to overtake Rome in the minds of nineteenth-
century Britons.78 Edinburgh, of course, became known as the “Athens of the
North” for a time; in presenting their capital city in such a way, Scots demon-
strated their continued interest in the classical past, but now in a foreign con-
text, with no direct link to the history of their own nation.
The only nineteenth-century monograph dedicated to the history, geogra-
phy and material remains of Roman Scotland did not appear until 1845, when
Robert Stuart published his Caledonia Romana. Given his reliance on the work
of Sibbald and Chalmers, as well as his belief in the authenticity of the De Situ
Britanniae, it is no surprise that Stuart assumes a level of Roman civility in
Scotland—he proposes the location of various “Roman or Romanised” towns,
and the book’s subtitle talks of “The Roman Occupation of North Britain”—
but he seems less intent than his predecessors on proving Roman influence
in his home nation, or on representing the Caledonians as heroes who cou-
rageously repelled Rome.79 While previous generations of antiquarians had
made dogmatic claims regarding the state of Roman Scotland, Stuart is more
75 Alexander du Toit, “George Chalmers,” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 10
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), 870.
76 Ibid., 871.
77 For a discussion of nineteenth-century commemoration of Scotland’s historical heroes,
most notably William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, see James Coleman, Remembering
the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2014).
78 See Frank M. Turner, “Why the Greeks and not the Romans in Victorian Britain?,” in
Rediscovering Hellenism, ed. G.W. Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989): 61–81.
79 Robert Stuart, Caledonia Romana (Edinburgh, 1852), 154.
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reticent, unwilling to leap to conclusions when the evidence does not exist. His
attitude towards the problem of identifying how long the Romans remained in
Scotland after Agricola’s invasion is suitably dismissive: “The question is not
one that can be decided; nor is it indeed of any material importance.”80
The various attempts to establish a classical heritage for Scotland over the
course of the long eighteenth century had come to nothing. In their analyses
of ancient literary sources and material remains, men like Sibbald, Clerk, and
Chalmers had allowed their own admiration for Rome, and their own beliefs
in the importance of union and empire, to lead them towards ambitious con-
jectures regarding the state of ancient Scotland, conjuring up in the process a
Caledonia filled with Roman cities, temples, baths, and villas. In doing so, they
contradicted the prevalent belief, held not just by the majority of the nation’s
antiquarians, but also by proudly patriotic Scots in general, that the Romans
had failed to conquer northern Britain due to the invincibility of the indige-
nous tribes still widely viewed in the eighteenth century as the ancestors of
the nation’s modern inhabitants. Although they seem to have failed to capture
the imagination of the wider population, these Romanist antiquarians offer
an important example of how Scottish history has been manipulated and mis-
interpreted to suit more current concerns, their interpretations often suggest-
ing a nostalgic and emotional connection with the nation and its distant past.
Ultimately, their fantastical accounts of ancient Scotland tell us much more
about ideas of “Scottishness” and “Britishness” during the long eighteenth
century, about what Scots thought they and their nation should and could be,
than they do about the region’s Roman past. In attempting to pull their own
nation into the boundaries of the Roman Empire, these antiquarians sought
to gild their own heritage with a hint of classical elegance, creating a decid-
edly whiggish picture of ancient Britannia; but ultimately Scots preferred to
portray themselves as gallant outsiders, more kilted Highland warriors than
toga-clad Roman generals. A truly classical Caledonia, it seems, was just never
meant to be.
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