I.—A Brief General Account of the Vallum of Antonine.
The Vallum of Antonine, variously known as Grymisdyke,1
Graem's Dyke, Graham's Dyke,2 the Wall or Vallum of
Severus,3 Graham's Sheugh,4 the Barrier of the Upper Isthmus,5
or generically, the Roman Wall, crosses Scotland at its narrowest
part, where, as Tacitus said,6 the tidal Clyde and Forth are
separated by a narrow neck of land.
From the western extremity at Old Kilpatrick on the Clyde
to the eastern terminus at Bridgeness, near Carriden, a mile
east of Bo'ness on the Forth, the distance traversed by the
vallum is about 36| standard miles.7 Quarters for the garrison
1 Fordun's Scofciohronioon (written between 1384 and 1387), iii. cap. 5.
2 The common name. Historiae Seoticae Nomenelatura (1682), by Christopher
Irvin, sub voce Severi Vallum.
s Many old writers called the work the Vallum Severi, which was the name
adopted by George Buchanan (1580) in his History of Scotland.
4 Local vernacular term. Sheugh = trench.
5 So called by recent writers, for example, in Prebendary Scarth's Roman
Britain, p. 83, to distinguish it from the southern barrier or North English
Wall and Vallum, which is called by Dr.. Bruce and Prebendary Scarth the
Barrier of the Lower Isthmus. See title page of the former's Handbook (1885)
and the latter's Roman Britain, p. 73.
6 Tacitus, Agricola, cap. 23. [The identification of Clota and Bodotria with
Clyde and Forth rests on Ptolemy II. 3, 1 and 4. Monumenta Historiea
Britannica, I., xii., xiii. F. H.]
7 Alexander Gordon, in his Itinerarium Septentrionale, p. 64, makes the
distance "36 Knglish miles and 887 paces." Horsley (Britannia Romana,
p. 160), "nearly 34jj English miles." General Roy (Military Antiquities,
p. 163), " 63,980 yards," i.e., 36 miles 620 yards, nearly equal to 39.5 Roman
miles. It is a singular commentary on the fallibility of historians that Robert
Stuart, in both editions of his Caledonia Romana (first edition, p. 280, second
edition, p. 283), in the very teeth of his own map, says (though doubtless by a
mere misprint of "twenty" for "thirty") that the entire length was "about
twenty-seven English miles."