Inveresk Roman Fort

Beneath and around St Michael’s Church at Inveresk lies a Roman fort whose archaeology extends well beyond its ramparts. Excavations have revealed a civilian settlement, burials, horse equipment and a Mithraeum, bringing an Antonine garrison’s religious and social world into focus.

The site’s largest discoveries came from work prompted by modern infrastructure and healthcare construction. They show that the fort was not an isolated military enclosure but a place connected to local people, mobile soldiers and a substantial settlement outside its eastern side.

The fort covered 2.7 hectares, which puts it at the larger end of the range of fort sizes. For that reason the original excavator, Ian Richmond, believed a cavalry regiment had been stationed here. A Roman tombstone found at nearby Carberry in 2007 depicts a governor’s guard cavalry trooper named Crescens, who may have been living at the fort when he died.

All the datable artefacts point to Antonine occupation, so the fort is thought to have been established in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Scotland launched by Antoninus Pius in AD 139 or 140. Two clear phases of occupation have been identified archaeologically, perhaps reflecting a change of garrison during the period. The fort would have been abandoned along with the other Scottish sites around AD 160, when Hadrian’s Wall was recommissioned. A substantial civil settlement lay outside the east rampart, including a curving structure thought to be an amphitheatre.

Excavation in 2010, in the civilian part of the site, partly uncovered a Mithraeum — the earliest dated example so far found in Scotland, and the earliest dated in Britain. Two large sandstone altars were recovered and are now in the National Museum of Scotland; they date to around AD 140, when southern Scotland was reoccupied by Antoninus Pius. One was dedicated to Mithras and the other to Sol, both by a Roman centurion recorded as Gaius Cassius Fla.

Several seasons of excavation since 1946 have established the outline of the fort and recovered some of the interior detail. Work by Headland Archaeology in 2004, during renewal of the village water mains, produced Roman artefacts and possibly a boundary ditch along with evidence of the civil settlement.

In 2010 CFA Archaeology excavated an area 50 metres north of and below the fort, ahead of the construction of the Musselburgh Primary Health Care Centre. They found a Mesolithic scatter of stone tools and Iron Age burials predating the fort, dated to between 50 BC and AD 130 — just before it was built — with isotope analysis showing that those individuals were all local to the Musselburgh area.

The same excavation produced Roman remains: six human burials, four of them decapitated, and one horse burial. There was evidence that a Roman fortlet had been built and that a field system was laid out at some point to grow food, possibly for the fort. The area also served as a midden, and a significant number of discarded personal possessions were recovered, including samian bowls with personal names scratched into their bases. Those names, together with the isotope analysis of the skeletons, show that the people living in the fort came from multiple ethnic origins, and suggest there may have been a group of soldiers from Thrace among them. The large quantity of horse equipment recovered led the archaeologists to conclude that the theory of a cavalry unit being stationed here is likely correct.