Castlehill Fort

A circular beech plantation is now the clearest marker of Castlehill Fort, where the Antonine Wall once crossed a summit with wide views. The fort itself is difficult to read on the ground, but its carved distance slabs preserve the labour claims of Rome’s legions.

Between Bearsden and Duntocher, Castlehill formed part of a tightly spaced military chain. The stones found nearby show how the Wall was measured, built and commemorated long after the timber and turf structures disappeared.

The fort lies in East Dunbartonshire, west of Bearsden and east of Duntocher, south of the A810 Duntocher Road. Its neighbouring forts are Bearsden to the east and Duntocher to the west, with a fortlet at Cleddans between them and Hutcheson Hill nearer still.

A circular enclosed plantation of beech trees is about all a visitor can see today. The summit provides a wide panorama over ground that has produced a great many historical finds. The exact line of the Antonine Wall is sometimes hard to make out here, though there is some signage. Several historians in the 1900s gave their own idiosyncratic descriptions of the site.

Two Roman distance slabs were found here. One can be compared with another found near Summerston: both, like two more from Duntocher, carry two decorative pelta shields, one on either side of the slab, the horns of each embellished with three rosettes on the Castlehill example, while the Summerston slab ends its horns in two griffins’ heads.

The first slab, badly weathered, has four rosettes between the shields and the inscription. It was found in 1803 on Low Millochan farm — later called East Millichen, near Summerston — where it had been built into a dovecote, and it records the building of 3,666 and a half paces of wall by the Sixth Legion. MacDonald described the work as coarse and noted that some of the abbreviations are unusual, suggesting it stood side by side with another slab at Summerston. On the Castlehill slab he suggested the stone-cutter blundered and cut a P where an F, for Fidelis, was intended on the fourth line. That slab also records 3,666 and a half paces, though the units used remain a matter of ongoing research. A neighbouring farmer found another in 1826.