Early Mapping of the Antonine Wall

Abstract

This paper considers evidence for mapping of the Antonine Wall from Roman times down to the mid eighteenth century, prior to the survey undertaken by General William Roy. Road-maps and itineraries were surely at the disposal of Roman planners, their layout subsequently reflected in the Ravenna Cosmography (c. AD 700), which reports a sequence of places along it. In the thirteenth century Matthew Paris depicted the Wall on his map of Britain. In the late sixteenth century Timothy Pont made a list of forts and sketched its constituent parts; the line of the Wall itself was added later to one of Pont's original maps. A century later John Adair assembled materials for a map of the Wall but it never achieved publication. In 1707 Sir Robert Sibbald published a map which drew heavily on Pont's work. In the eighteenth century maps were included in the treatises of the antiquaries William Stukeley (1720), Alexander Gordon (1726) and John Horsley (1732); as well as reflecting current knowledge about the monument, their maps can preserve useful details on place-names and settlement patterns across the Forth-Clyde isthmus.

Key Words:

• Pont
• Sibbald
• Stukeley
• Gordon
• Horsley

Acknowledgements

I am glad to thank Chris Fleet, NLS, for his advice and many kindnesses. The sources of the illustrations are acknowledged in the accompanying captions. Phraseology used here will be carried forward into the author's monograph, The Antiquarian Rediscovery of the Antonine Wall, to be published shortly by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (Edinburgh, 2012).