Roman Activity Around Glasgow

Glasgow was never a Roman town. But for one remarkable generation in the second century, the northern frontier of the entire Roman Empire ran straight across what are now the city’s northern suburbs — the great turf barrier known as the Antonine Wall, stretching from the Clyde to the Forth. For a few decades Roman soldiers manned a chain of forts along the hills above Glasgow, holding the very edge of the known world, before Rome drew back and the land beyond returned to its own people. It is the closest the legions ever came to the site of the future city.

This page tells that story: the people here before Rome, the building of the Wall, its construction, the forts above Glasgow, the soldiers who garrisoned them, the frontier’s abandonment, and the Roman traces that survive.

Before the Romans

Long before any city stood here, the lands of the Clyde were home to a British people known to the Romans as the Damnonii. They were one of the tribes of the north, living in scattered settlements across what is now the Glasgow region, and it was their country that the Roman army moved into when it pushed north in the second century. These same Britons and their descendants would, centuries later, form the kingdom of Strathclyde, within which Glasgow itself would eventually be founded. The Roman frontier, then, was not built across empty land, but through the territory of a people who long outlasted the empire that briefly ruled over them.

The northern frontier

Around the year 142, the Emperor Antoninus Pius ordered the building of a new frontier across the narrow waist of Scotland, between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde. The work was carried out by the Roman army under the governor Quintus Lollius Urbicus, who had first campaigned against the northern tribes. The result was the Antonine Wall — the most northerly fixed frontier of the entire Roman Empire, built about a hundred miles beyond Hadrian’s Wall to the south, and intended to replace it. For a short time the empire’s furthest edge lay not in distant deserts but on the hills just north of the future Glasgow, where Rome faced the unconquered peoples of the far north.

A wall of turf

The Antonine Wall was not the great stone rampart of Hadrian’s Wall, but something built for speed. It consisted of a broad bank of turf, laid on a firm stone foundation, standing perhaps three metres high and topped by a timber walkway or palisade; in front of it ran a wide and deep defensive ditch. A military road, the Military Way, ran along the rear, linking the forts and allowing troops and supplies to move quickly along the line. The whole barrier ran for some thirty-seven miles from sea to sea, and was raised by soldiers drawn from three legions — a huge feat of engineering completed in only a few years.

The forts above Glasgow

Strung along the Wall was a chain of forts and smaller fortlets, several of them within the bounds of modern Glasgow and its suburbs. To the north of the city stood the fort of Balmuildy, one of only two on the whole Wall to be given stone ramparts; nearby lay Cadder, above present-day Bishopbriggs, and, further west, Bearsden, Duntocher and the western terminal fort at Old Kilpatrick, where the Wall met the Clyde. Between the forts, smaller fortlets and watch-posts kept constant guard over movement across the frontier. What are now quiet suburban districts were, for a generation, a tense and busy military zone at the very limit of the Roman world.

A soldier’s life on the edge

The Wall was held not by the legions who built it but by auxiliary soldiers — troops recruited from across the empire — who lived in the forts with, in time, their families and camp-followers around them. Several thousand men garrisoned the line, and they brought with them the ordinary comforts of Roman life, even here at the frontier’s end. The most vivid glimpse of that life survives at Bearsden, where archaeologists uncovered the remains of a Roman bathhouse and latrine — the changing rooms, hot and cold baths and furnaces of a proper Roman bath, built for the soldiers of the fort. Even on the edge of the world, the garrison of the Antonine Wall bathed in Roman style.

The frontier abandoned

It did not last. The Antonine Wall was garrisoned for only about a single generation before the Romans gave it up, probably in the 160s, and pulled their frontier back south to Hadrian’s Wall, which would remain the empire’s northern edge thereafter. Exactly why is uncertain — the cost of holding so remote a line, trouble elsewhere in the empire, and the difficulty of controlling the peoples beyond all played their part. Whatever the reasons, Rome’s brief tenure on the Clyde came to an end, the forts were abandoned, and the land above Glasgow passed out of the empire for good, back into the hands of the Britons.

Rome’s traces today

Though built of turf, the Wall has not vanished. Long stretches of its ditch and rampart can still be traced across central Scotland, and the whole monument is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Around Glasgow, the excavated bathhouse at Bearsden is open to visitors, and the stone base of the Wall can be seen at New Kilpatrick Cemetery. Finest of all are the Distance Slabs — carved stones set up by the legions to record the lengths of Wall each had built — many of which are displayed in the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow, among the greatest treasures to survive from Roman Scotland. They are the enduring memorial of the generation when the empire’s frontier ran past Glasgow’s door.

The essentials