Cleddans

Trial trenches at Cleddans revealed a small Roman fortlet where the Wall ran between the larger forts of Duntocher and Castlehill. Its compact rampart (a defensive bank of earth or stone) was modest in scale, but it helped demonstrate that the frontier was punctuated by fortlets at roughly Roman-mile intervals.

Nearby carved slabs add a more ceremonial dimension: boars, Victories, Mars and imperial inscriptions advertise the legions that built the Wall. The site survives chiefly through these discoveries rather than through dramatic standing remains.

The fortlet was located by trial trenching in 1980, south of the main road between Duntocher and Bearsden. Hutcheson Hill lies halfway between the known forts of Duntocher to the west and Castlehill to the east, with a line of sight to both, so it had been surmised that an intermediate work might stand there. The discovery seemed to strengthen the proposal that the Antonine Wall was designed with fortlets at every Roman mile. The fort measures internally 18 metres east to west by 17.6 north to south, within a rampart set on a stone base 3.6 metres wide.

The fortlet went up somewhere in the twelve years after AD 142, on the order of an emperor who never set foot in the province. Antoninus Pius directed the whole northern advance from Rome, and the work here was begun under Quintus Lollius Urbicus as governor. Cleddans was one link in a chain of forts and fortlets strung along the barrier, with the lateral road behind them carrying troops from one to the next. What pushed the empire this far north in the first place was most likely pressure from the Caledonians.

Eight years after the barrier was finished the army walked away from it and went back to the older line in England. Septimius Severus put legions on it again in 208 and ordered repairs — the reason the barrier is occasionally given his name instead — but that second occupation lasted only a few years, and nothing was ever held here afterwards.

A garrison of some five hundred was normal along this frontier, with a nominal thousand at the biggest posts. Soldiers were forbidden to marry, which did not stop women and children living at the larger forts, and civilian settlement grew up around them regardless.

Finds include three or four Roman tablets. One, showing a running boar — the emblem of the Twentieth Legion — was discovered in 1695 at Cochno House and is now in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow. Evidence of building work on the fortlet and on the wall by units of both the Sixth and the Twentieth legions has been found in the area.