Antonine Wall

A huge ditch gives some idea of the scale of the engineering the Romans put into the building of the Antonine Wall. Stretching 40 miles across Scotland between the Clyde and the Forth estuaries, it was built of the orders of the Emporer Antonius Pius in AD142 and occupied for 22 years before being abandoned with a retreat back to Hadrian’s Wall with a brief reoccupation in the early 3rd century. Unlike Hadrian’s Wall, the Antonine Wall was not built of stone but of turf. This 3-4 metre high turf wall would have been on the line of the Victorian stone wall on the far bank. This view is looking west so any infiltration would come from the right. The turf wall would have been topped by a wooden palisade. Of course, the military zone would have been cleared of trees. This well-preserved section of the wall is at Dullatur on a very dreich morning.