Gilded bronze leg dug from Scottish bog rewrites Rome's northern frontier

Images

×

Assistant curator Bethany Simpson examines the gilded bronze leg, a centrepiece of the exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA theguardian.com

A marble bust of the emperor Antoninus Pius, during whose reign the Romans occupied parts of Scotland from AD142 to 165. Photograph: World History Archive/Alamy theguardian.com

Bethany Simpson, an assistant curator, with the ancient bronze leg. Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA theguardian.com

The two spectacular altars from the Roman fort Inveresk’s mithraeum (a temple to the god Mithras). Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian theguardian.com

‹ ›

A gilded bronze leg that lay in a duke's storeroom for a century goes on show on Saturday as the centrepiece of the largest exhibition ever staged on the Romans in Scotland. Dug from a bog in rural Scotland in 1820, the leg was kept in the charter room at Dalkeith House near Edinburgh, one of the Duke of Buccleuch's stately homes, and is known as the Mislington leg. The exhibition, Roman Scotland: Life on the Edge of Empire, opens at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

For most of its documented life the leg was catalogued as plunder. Antiquarians argued it had been looted — perhaps from York — hacked off by Scottish tribes and carried north over Hadrian's Wall. In 1932 the scholar James Curle stated the consensus flatly: "We cannot visualise the conditions which would have led to its erection anywhere north of the Great Wall."

Archaeologists now believe the opposite. The leg came from the Scottish Borders and formed part of a vast statue of the emperor Antoninus Pius on horseback, erected near Hawick after his armies wrested control of southern Scotland in about AD140. It bears significant similarities to imperial statues in other frontier regions. Fraser Hunter, the exhibition's principal curator, says the leg was carefully removed and deposited where it was found rather than hacked off, and that such monuments would have struck iron-age communities as alien. "There is effectively no naturalist art in the iron age," he said. "The whole idea of depicting a person is absolutely alien to the iron-age worldview."

The exhibition extends the revision across the whole occupation. At Inveresk, east of Edinburgh — the site of a large Roman fort and town — a new reconstruction shows a heavily decorated earthenware bowl whose combination of dolphins, stags and a stylised hunting dog is seen nowhere else in Scotland or the UK. Two locally carved stone altars from a mithraeum excavated at Inveresk go on display for the first time, one with slits cut into it. Hunter estimates some 10,000 troops were stationed across southern and eastern Scotland during the Antonine period, including auxiliaries from as far away as modern-day Romania and north Africa, alongside perhaps another 10,000 camp followers, wives and enslaved people. The curators' conclusion is that the Romans were a far more significant force north of Hadrian's Wall than previously realised — occupying large areas, producing new artworks and shaping the politics of Scotland long after they retreated.

The leg was carefully removed from its statue and deposited in the bog, where it waited 1,700 years, followed by a century in the Duke of Buccleuch's charter room.