Day eight

The final day of the tour began with a bus ride northwest of central Edinburgh to the town of Cramond, located at the mouth of the River Almond. The remains of the Antonine-era 4.7 acre Roman fort are now under the edge of a church. The outlines of a number of fort buildings have been prepared along with signage describing the site and its excavations. The fort was apparently reused during the Severan period. This site presentation is much like some of the Roman sites under the care of English Heritage far to the south with buildings outlined in stone or concrete and neatly mown lawns or crushed gravel. The Cramond lion funerary statue (made from white sandstone) now seen in the Museum of Scotland was found in the nearby river. A
parking lot near the shoreline offers a lovely view of the Firth of Forth. The location is difficult to access in a bus but definitely worth a visit for both historical and scenic interest.

The Roman road called Dere Street running north from Hadrian's Wall in many places is overlain by the path of the modern A68 to Edinburgh. Initially however, the Romans built the road to run from Corstopitum (Corbridge) just south of Hadrian's Wall to Inveresk ... the mouth of the Esk River some five miles east of Edinburgh. Our tour drove from Cramond, northwest of Edinburgh, around the A720 ring road to the Inveresk area, there to follow the path of Dere Street south along the much more modest road (A6124). This route allowed us to get a Roman's eye view of the geography and directed us toward the Soutra Pass, south of the Edinburgh area.

After climbing part way toward the Soutra Pass on A68, our bus made a detour west on a smaller road and headed southwest from the modern highway. Soutra Aisle offers one of the best preserved sections of Dere Street, complete with small quarry pits where material for the roadway had been assembled. The group walked across fields to the path of the Roman road and followed it some way southeast to view (on the far side of a gulley) the looping parallel swathes of medieval roadways heading south in parallel to the Roman roadway. Soutra is a windy and slightly bleak pass through the uplands, reputedly a spot where snowfall occasionally can be measured in feet. It must have been an intimidating spot for the carts and soldiers of the Roman Army. Tour leader Dr. Mike Bishop noted that the Romans may have made extensive use of roads along the east coast of Scotland to avoid the rugged conditions of places like the Soutra Pass.

The tour continued south along A68, following or diverging from Dere Street along the way. Passing on the east of Newstead (Trimontium), where only a week earlier we had visited the fortress site, it suddenly dawned on us that the trip was almost over and quickly-made friends
would soon disappear to their own lives. The tour halted in Jedburgh for lunch, then continued south into the border area with England to stop at Rochester on the A68 at an archaeological reconstruction centre called Brigantium built in the late 90's. All kinds of remains are reconstructed there: prehistoric, Celtic and Roman. It's a sincere effort at archaeological reconstruction with some spectacular results.

Uphill from Brigantium is the actual Roman fort of Bremenium... famous as one of the "outlier" forts north of Hadrian's Wall. Not surprisingly, it is located at "High" Rochester. The fort's south and west walls are in surprisingly good shape, and wrap around a current farm yard.

Of additional interest is the unusual group of tumulus burials located along the path of Dere Street running south ... consistent with the Roman practice of burying their dead outside their residential areas alongside roadways. In some ways, the amazing preservation of the remains in the Borders area made the experience all the more poignant. It was a quite beautiful sunny day with a bit of wind. The enjoyable short hike south along the Dere Street to the "cemetery" area was both a welcome break from riding in a bus and a chance to reflect on the centuries of ordinary Roman life at Bremenium, which lasted virtually to the end of Roman occupation, despite being more than 20 miles north of Hadrian's Wall as the crow flies.

A modest "roundabout" is all that can be seen where Street and Wall crossed each other for so many hundreds of years. How many soldiers, families and merchants passed through those gates in Hadrian's Wall? Our bus headed west along the modern B6318, based on the 18th century military road, in turn built in many places on the foundations of the Wall. And there on either side of the road, familiar from nine months earlier (the Roman Army in Britain 2003 tour), were the front ditch of the Wall and the vallum (mound/ditch combination) to the south. For mile
after mile, the earthworks and occasional stonework continued, past Chesters, past Brocolitia, past Housesteads and Vindolanda, to Carnovan and a quiet side road nearby where we could examine a well-preserved stretch of Hadrian's Wall at Walltown Crags.
The bus halted in a parking lot and the more energetic of our group hiked up the hillside to very well reconstructed chunk of wall, with a spectacular view northward into the Northumberland National Park. Here in the final hours of the tour, amidst sunshine, stillness, beauty and the ever-present sheep poop, we had a chance consider both the life of the frontier guard and the breadth of history and geography we'd seen in the past eight days.

It would have been nice to spend more time at the quiet park, but now the clock was becoming our enemy. There were trains to catch and hotels to book further west in Carlisle. Thoughts of friends, relatives, jobs and further travel were intruding on Roman era reflections. Eddie, our un-flappable bus driver, was headed for Carlisle train station in Monday afternoon traffic. A few sharp turns in the narrow streets of central Carlisle and suddenly the station was there. Handshakes and hugs all around. A few tears and sad faces. And the tour participants were
walking away to hotels and others hurrying off on trains to southern England or north to Glasgow. Our small band of Roman history enthusiasts were scattered within a few moments and the modern world with all its insistent demands was back.