In 1963 Michael Jarrett published a short paper on ‘The Military Occupation of Roman Wales.’ It discussed the documentary evidence relating to the Roman conquest of the Welsh tribes and the differing attitudes of these tribes to Rome, but its main importance lay in the six distribution maps illustrating the forts occupied in a.d. 80, 100, 130, 150, 220 and 330. Subsequently Dr J. L. Davies has published a series of nine maps covering the first and second centuries. Two papers have recently extended the same treatment to Scotland. The north of England has never been afforded the same discussion. The most detailed distribution maps published to date are the five which appear in Professor Frere's Britannia. However, there have been maps and discussions of certain areas such as north-west England, or particular periods. It seems appropriate that a portrayal of the changing face of military deployment in north England over nearly 350 years should appear in a volume dedicated to John Gillam, who has done so much to illuminate the history of the area, not least through his work on that basic dating material, coarse pottery.

One of the difficulties facing the archaeologist when trying to use the evidence of ancient writers is to know when that writer (historian or otherwise) is relating fact, and when he is merely involved with ‘topoi’–the stock literary descriptions or situations inseparable from history as rhetoric. This note is concerned with two ‘topoi’ in the Agricola.

In the study of the structural elements of the Antonine Wall two scholars have made an outstanding contribution. The first, naturally, is Sir George Macdonald, who reduced the vast body of heterogeneous evidence to a semblance of order and put forward the earliest formal theories about the nature of the Wall and how it came to be built. For several decades thereafter the attention of scholars was concentrated upon the practical problems of individual sites along the barrier rather than the theoretical questions of origin and relationship. But it has never been appropriate to study any example of Roman military work in isolation, and it was not surprising, therefore, that the research activity on Hadrian's Wall in the years following World War II should have generated a spirit of enquiry about related problems on the more northerly frontier. In particular, it began to be asked whether the Antonine barrier might not be more closely comparable with Hadrian's Wall than had previously been suspected. Was it, for example, provided with structures corresponding to milecastles and turrets? Macdonald had already described the rare instances of minor works and enclosures, but these seemed too few in number and too irregularly disposed to fit the bill for either category. Excavation and aerial survey were soon to demonstrate, however, that fortlets bearing a close resemblance to Hadrianic milecastles had indeed formed an integral part of the defence-system. At Duntocher, Dr Anne Robertson showed that a fortlet had originally stood in isolation, some time before the curtain of the Wall itself was constructed, to be accompanied, in time, by a small secondary fort; Wilderness Plantation, on the other hand, was found to be bonded with the curtain and therefore exactly contemporary with its earliest stage. Although it was still widely argued that these minor works had been used solely to guard the longer intervals between Wall forts proper, it was not until John Gillam had presented what is rightly called ‘a seminal discussion paper’ that the hunt began in earnest for an extended series of ‘milecastles’ along the entire Antonine Wall. Like Macdonald forty years earlier, Gillam gave new impetus to mural studies; with what success several recent publications amply testify.

The fort at Auchendavy on the Antonine Wall (FIG. I), 3 km east of Kirkintilloch, was first reported in the preamble to the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Johannes Blaeu, from notes made before 1625 by the Scottish geographer Timothy Pont. Subsequent references in the antiquarian authors over the following centuries are testimony to the gradual destruction of the once impressive fort-defences. Today the traveller by road along the B 8023 from Kirkintilloch eastwards towards Twechar passes the fort-site without a glance, even though the modern road traverses it more or less on the alignment of the via principalis. No organized excavation has ever been undertaken at Auchendavy, although small finds reported over the years from the fort-site and vicinity have included pottery, a deposit of ballista balls, a nicolo paste intaglio in an iron finger-ring, and several coins. In May 1771 during construction of the Forth & Clyde Canal, which cut away some part of the southern defences of the fort, workmen recovered a group of five altars, two iron mallets (lost or disintegrated by the later 19th century) and a broken cult-statue, from a pit seemingly just outside the fort-defences to the south (below, p. 33). An aureus of Trajan (datable to a.d. 100), reported from the site, may have been found at much the same time. From the late 1940s onwards aerial reconnaissance by Professor J. K. S. St Joseph provided a useful check on the layout of the fort-defences, and recent fieldwork and ground survey have added fresh details, so that a reappraisal of our knowledge of the fort is perhaps now a worthwhile proposition.

The Roman fort at Mollins lies at about 75 m above sea level, on the south bank of the Luggie Water, a major tributary of the River Kelvin (FIG. I). The site (National Grid reference NS 714 719) lies on the side of a small ridge, and faces northwards over gently undulating ground. The substratum is glacial till and, although the site is moderately well drained, under natural conditions the broad flood plain of the Luggie Water, which borders onto the northern edge of the fort, would have been formerly very poorly drained.

The archaeological site comprises a Roman fort which was probably built and later deliberately demolished during the Agricolan campaigns around a.d. 80 to 90.

The site of Bury Barton lies on a rounded spur above the river Yeo, I kilometre south of Lapford in central Devonshire. Although the position is not notably elevated, a little over 90 metres above sea-level, it commands excellent views to the north-west along the Yeo valley, to the north-east up the little river Dalch, and to the south towards Dartmoor some 19 kilometres distant. The site is now occupied by a fine mediaeval farm and chapel, the property in the sixteenth century and earlier of the Bury family which took its name from the place. Domesday Book mentions the place-name Beria in the region and this is reasonably certainly the site under discussion. It has long been appreciated that the mediaeval establishment overlies a series of prominent earthworks, the date and purpose of which, however, have until recently remained unclear. These can now be shown to be the defences of two distinct Roman military works, the smaller a fort about 1.9 hectares (4.5 acres) in area, the larger either a camp or a campaign-base up to 8 hectares (19.2 acres) in extent.

In 1960 during construction work for the Water's Edge Hotel, Cold Knap, Barry, the remains of a Roman building were revealed. It was not possible to excavate, but one of the authors (HJT) was able to carry out a watching brief during the demolition. From the remains visible at the time, it was believed to be a free-standing building of approximately square plan, and, since human remains had been recorded from close at hand in 1866, it was tentatively identified as a mausoleum.

In 1884 during the construction of a new road on the south side of Muncaster Fell in Eskdale, West Cumbria (grid ref. SD 131986), a Roman tile-kiln was uncovered and brought to the attention of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society. Since that date a number of chance finds of Roman material have been made and small-scale excavations have been conducted on the site. The most recent work, directed by R. L. Bellhouse from 1957 to 1960 was published in Transactions, together with a summary of the present state of knowledge concerning the site. In his excavations at Ravenglass from 1976 to 1978, Dr T. W. Potter identified a distinctive fabric type in the Roman fort which by its frequency suggested that it may have been produced locally. He also found one vessel in a fabric apparently identical to that described by Miss Fair as having been found in the fort at Ravenglass and at the kiln site itself, and thought by her to have been produced there. Potter published 22 vessels as Muncaster products from Ravenglass and one from Watercrook, as well as suggesting that vessels in an identical fabric and, therefore, presumably from the same source had been found at a number of sites in the area ranging from Watercrook in the south to Beckfoot and Papcastle in the north.

The subject of this article is a uniform group of Roman military horse-trappings of the first century a.d. found at Xanten and now in the British Museum. They were included with brief and, it is fair to say, inadequate entries in H. B. Walters' Catalogue of 1899 where it was suggested, wrongly, that the trappings were from an ornamental cuirass. Since then there has been no attempt at a comprehensive publication, or proper explanation of their purpose. The four large roundels in the group have, it is true, been frequently mentioned in the study of so-called phalerae However, discussion of these pieces has consistently ignored the related groups of harness furniture to which they belong. If this fact is surprising, it is all the more so when we reflect upon their obvious importance for the study of Roman military equipment. The publication of the, in many respects, parallel finds from Doorwerth on the Rhine in Holland by J. H. Holwerda in the 1930s has recently been challenged by M. Brouwer. While Holwerda claimed to have substantial parts of no less than five sets of horse-trappings, Brouwer argues that the horse-trappings from Doorwerth are too much of a miscellany even to attempt a reconstruction of one set. Brouwer condemns, accordingly, the plaster reconstruction (FIG. I) that used to stand in the Bronze Gallery of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden as inaccurate. The Xanten horse-trappings are, then, the most complete, single surviving set of Roman military horse-trappings of their kind. On the basis of comparison with grave reliefs, and on internal evidence, it is possible to offer here a reconstruction of the original harness. On the basis of inscriptions punched into the trappings themselves, it is possible to speculate on the ownership of the trappings and the significance they held for their owner. Not the least interesting of these graffiti is the inscription PLINIO PRAEF(ECTO) EQ(UITUM) punched into the face of one of the large roundels (A3). More than one scholar has seen here an explicit reference to the historical C. Plinius Secundus, commonly known as Pliny the Elder.

In 1980, during British Museum excavations at Stonea Grange, Cambs., a group of metal finds collected over a number of years in the fields surrounding the site, were shown to the writer. They included two examples (FIG. 1) of an enigmatic class of small cast bronze object first discussed more than sixty years ago by Reginald Smith. They are still ill-understood, but not uncommon; the present catalogue, certainly incomplete, contains 99 examples.

This article reviews the previous expansions advanced for a group of tile-stamps from London, reading P P BRI LON or the like, and supports R. G. Collingwood's claim in 1936 that it was ‘procuratorial’ by quoting evidence for minor procurators based on the headquarters-building at Combe Down, near Bath (RIB 179) and a clear instance of P(ROCVRATOR) on a bronze stamp of a bailiff of Matidia Augusta, niece of the Emperor Trajan. The writer lists seven main sites in London where these stamps have been found, and includes the tilery at Brockley Hill (Sulloniacis) as either the main or a subsidiary source for this building-material.

An assured water-supply is essential to the survival and functioning of any urban community. Aristotle was, therefore, stating the obvious when he emphasized that a secure water-source was necessary when selecting a site for a new city, for this factor had long since been appreciated by the Greek colonists of Thurii and Cyrene, for example. An assured water-supply, however, may merely depend on the proximity of rivers and springs, and on the digging of wells and the provision of cisterns, as was the case at Rome until the construction of the Aqua Appia of 312 B.C. It was probably the physical growth of cities which led to the establishment of more organized, civic water-supplies. By the classical period the presence of public fountains was taken so much for granted that Pausanias regarded them as one of the requirements without which a settlement could hardly be recognized as a polis–and only the inhabitants of poleis were civilized.

The present investigation was initiated as part of a programme of research into abandoned cliffs, focused particularly on their morphology, geomechanics and mode of development following the cessation of erosion at their foot. An excellent example of such a feature is provided by the cliffs backing the extensive littoral and alluvial accumulation of Romney Marsh in Kent (FIG 1.). At Lympne, the lower slopes of these are occupied by the remains of the Roman fort known as Stutfall Castle, which has been strongly disrupted by landslides. It was accordingly decided to concentrate the investigations in this general area, in the expectation that the archaeology of the fort would throw light on the later stages of landsliding and slope development. At the same time it was hoped that the geotechnical work would illuminate some of the long-standing archaeological problems of the site.