History

Hadrian’s Wall had been complete for less than fifteen years when, in 138 CE, Antoninus Pius succeeded Hadrian as emperor. The new emperor needed a military victory to consolidate his authority, and the governor of Britain, Quintus Lollius Urbicus, provided one: a campaign pushing deep into Caledonia (modern Scotland) that reached the narrow waist of Scotland between the Forth and Clyde estuaries. Here, at the narrowest point of the island — just 56 km from coast to coast — the Romans decided to build a new frontier wall.

Construction began around 142 CE. Unlike Hadrian’s stone wall, the new barrier was built of cut turf — faster to build with local materials and adequate for the purpose. But the engineering was no less sophisticated: the wall sat on a stone base, a military road ran along its south side connecting the forts, and a massive ditch was excavated to the north. The construction was divided among units of the three Roman legions then stationed in Britain — Legion II Augusta, Legion VI Victrix, and Legion XX Valeria Victrix — each responsible for a sector. Their pride in the work is recorded on 19 decorative distance slabs: carved sandstone panels set into the wall at sector boundaries, each identifying the unit, recording the length of wall built, and often depicting scenes of Roman military triumph over barbarian enemies.

The wall was occupied by auxiliary troops — soldiers recruited from across the Roman world: Gauls, Belgians, Germans, Dacians, North Africans, Thracians — who garrisoned the 17 forts and smaller intermediate fortlets. For roughly twenty years, these men lived on the edge of the known Roman world, looking north towards the unconquered Caledonian tribes. Then, around 163 CE, the emperor Marcus Aurelius ordered the frontier withdrawn back to Hadrian’s Wall. The reasons remain debated — a major rebellion in the Pennines to the south, strategic overextension, the difficulty of maintaining two walls simultaneously — but the result was that the Antonine Wall was decommissioned after barely a generation of use.

The wall’s short occupation paradoxically preserved much of its archaeological record. Because it was never substantially rebuilt or modified, its original form — the turf rampart, the ditch, the fort outlines — survives in legible form at multiple points along its length. The distance slabs, removed and buried by the Romans themselves when they left (possibly to prevent their capture and desecration), were rediscovered from the 17th century onwards and are now held primarily by the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, which holds the largest collection of Roman artefacts in Scotland.