The Romans in Tayside

The Romans arrived in Tayside nearly 150 years after they had first invaded Britain under Julius Caesar in 55 BC.   Although Caesar, in order to impress public opinion in Rome, claimed that he had entirely subjected Britain, no Roman leader ever achieved this. 

Most of the Roman attacks focused on the south until, in the 60s AD, the Flavian dynasty came to power and successfully campaigned into northern England and Wales.  The next obvious target for the Roman invaders was Scotland, and under the British governor, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, armies were sent north.  Agricola’s campaigns were later recorded by his son-in-law, the noted Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus, meaning that modern historians have a written version of events that they can use alongside the archaeological record to work out where the Romans went.

Agricola’s campaigns north, which lasted from 79 AD to 85AD, ended due to the defeat of the Romans by native tribes at the battle of Mons Graupius.  This battle was probably fought somewhere in Aberdeenshire, although its exact location has never been discovered.  On his way north, Agricola established a chain of camps, including a small one at Carpow, near Abernethy, which served as one of his supply bases.  Carpow stood at the confluence of the rivers Tay and Earn, and could easily be reached by water as well as by land.  A probable Agricolan marching camp also stood at Carey, in the west of Abernethy parish. 

After their defeat, the Romans retreated from Scotland, and did not attack the north again for over fifty years.  In 138 AD armies led by Antoninus were dispatched to build a new fortification or ‘wall’.  This wall was to push the Roman frontier further north than the wall built shortly before by Hadrian, which ran between the Solway Firth and the Tyne.  The new wall stretched across Scotland at its narrowest point (from the Clyde in the west to the Forth in the east), but unlike Hadrian’s Wall, which was built of stone, the Antonine Wall was constructed from large boulders and covered with turf.  Forts and fortlets were placed regularly along the wall. 

Other forts were built north of the wall, in a line running up to the Tay.  No Roman occupation of Carpow is known at this time, but there was a large Antonine fort not far away at Bertha, to the west of Perth.  By the 170s AD, these forts had been abandoned and the Romans had largely moved back to Hadrian’s Wall.

The next Roman incursion took place in 208 AD, when Septimus Severus, the Roman emperor, came north to punish two rebelling native tribes, the Caledonii and Maeatae.  The latter were a particular threat as they had invaded the frontier zone that the Roman army then controlled to the north of Hadrian’s Wall, and they were threatening the security of the Roman province.  Although the armies travelled largely by land, they were supported by a Roman navy, who brought supplies by sea to bases that were established along the east coast.  This again included Carpow, where a new twelve-hectare (30 acre) fortress was built. 

Severus appears to have been successful in his aim of subduing the tribes, but sometime after his death in 211 AD, his successor, his son Caracalla, left for the continent in order to consolidate his position there, and Severus’ Scottish conquests were abandoned.  The Romans did not return to this area again.