Oakwood Roman Fort and Camp

There are two Roman enclosures at Oakwood and they had entirely different purposes. One is a fort. The other is where the men who built the fort slept.

The evidence for that reading is the position. The temporary camp lies on a north-west facing slope just north of the fort, approximately rectangular at 430 by 300 metres and covering 13 hectares, with a rampart and ditch and traces of two of its four supposed gates. It is close to the fort rather than in the best defensive position available — and a Roman camp that ignores good defensive ground in favour of proximity to a building site is a construction camp. That inference is worth more than it might sound, because the great majority of Roman temporary camps in Scotland are read as campaign camps, marking the movement of an army rather than a works programme.

The fort itself sits on a small flat-topped knoll on the south side of the Ettrick Valley, with good views north and west, about 5.6 kilometres south-west of Selkirk. It was square, occupying 1.4 hectares within turf ramparts and two external ditches, with four timber gates each flanked by square towers. That size suits a cohort — roughly 500 soldiers. The defences were renovated and strengthened during the occupation, so this was a position maintained rather than merely held.

Its dating rests on two kinds of find. Stratified pottery and a worn coin minted in AD 69 or 70 indicate both the likely period of occupation and the phases of construction, and point to a fort held from about AD 81, during the Flavian period, when Gnaeus Julius Agricola was campaigning in Scotland.

The most striking thing about the site is a line of sight. From the knoll the Eildon Hills are visible 14 kilometres to the north-east, close to the Roman fort at Newstead, which means communication between the two by visual signal would have been possible. The fort was placed where it could be seen from, not merely where it could see.

Its end had nothing to do with Scotland. The troops were withdrawn, probably as part of the preparations for Trajan’s Dacian Wars — a garrison on the Ettrick pulled out because of a campaign on the Danube.

Both sites were discovered in 1949 from aerial photographs, excavated in 1951 and 1952, and published by K. A. Steer and R. W. Feachem in 1954. Five years from a mark on a photograph to a report in print is brisk work, and it is why so much can be said about a place with nothing standing on it.