stirling-1963-vol-1/05_149

Transcription

No. 124 -- ROMAN MONUMENTS -- No. 124
wood as far as the crossing of the Tor Burn. For the
last 400 yds. of this sector the mound is clearly visible,
as Crawford observed, ¹ and some of the material for the
road may have been derived from a surface quarry,
measuring 75 ft. across, which is situated close to the
E. side of the mound and about 200 yds. from the burn.
A section cut across the S. end of the mound by the
Commission's officers in 1956 showed that a good deal
of the heavy bottoming of the road is still in situ,
particularly on the W. side; it is 18 ft. wide at this
point, and is composed of large boulders, thrown
down without order, over which a layer of clay has been
laid to serve as ballast and bedding for a gravel surface.
There is no agger, and the mound owes its appearance
partly to the bottoming, and partly to the presence of
the side-ditches noted by Nimmo - though the latter
were not clearly defined in the section in question. Some
of the stones missing from the bottoming had been
deliberately torn up, at no very distant date, and used to
build a dyke along the W. margin of the road. In a second
section, cut 70 yds. from the Tor Burn, the bottoming
was 22 ft. in width, but both here, and in a third section
on the S. bank of the burn, only a few scattered stones
survived. The mound reappears for a few yards on the
left bank of the burn, but is cut off at the edge of the
wood. There are signs that the burn may have been
deflected hereabouts, and perhaps ponded on the
upstream side of the deflection in a manner which might
have resulted from the collapse of a bridge.
At the Tor Burn the road evidently made yet another
minor change of direction and then ran in a straight line
for the next 1 1/2 miles to the school SE. of West Plean.
From a quarter of a mile NW. of Gartincaber to the
school it coincides with a modern road. This section was
one in which the remains of the Roman road were once
quite well known, as Nimmo, for example, mentions
the Muir of Plean as one of the places where it was
"quite entire" in his time ²; it was still recognised in
1796 as a "causeway" ³ taking a north-westerly course
through the parish; and a Mr. Robertson, factor of the
Plean House estate, on which the last vestiges had been
demolished some time before, was able to point out to
the Ordnance surveyors a good many places on its
source. ⁴ Beyond the school the O.S. line is no doubt
correct as far as Croftsidepark. Faint traces of a ploughed-
out road-terrace can, in fact, be seen in the field on the
N. side of Pheasantry Wood, and a trench cut across the
terrace in 1954. 80 yds. from the edge of the wood,
revealed that a little of the bottoming of the road was
still in position. No sign of the road was found however
in another trench cut across the O.S. line a quarter of a
mile to the NE., below the homestead on Common Hill
(No. 104).
Beyond Croftsidepark the line shown on former
editions of the O.S. 6-inch map is open to a great deal
of doubt as it contradicts the two earliest authorties,
Edgar and Nimmo, and it has accordingly been omitted
from the present edition. Edgar marks the Roman road
as running closely beside the Denny-Stirling highway
(A 80), and keeping to its E. side as far as St. Ninians;
here, at the junction of A 80 with the road from Kilsyth
(p. 424), it crosses to the W. side of the highway, and
then diverges slightly further to the W. before disappear-
ing just outside Stirling. Nimmo corroborates this by
his mention of Milton, which is E. of the highway and
has a ford over the Bannock Burn. The O.S. Line, how-
ever, ran parallel to A 80 on the W., at distances from it
of 130 to 230 yds., passing through the farmhouses of
Snabhead and Pirnhall and missing Milton altogether; in
this it evidently followed Robertson's statement ⁵ that the
road went "by Snalehead [presumably Snabhead], by
Pirnhall Farmhouse, and from the latter place nearly in a
straight line to Stirling Castle". The mention of Pirn-
hall Farmhouse would negative Edgar's course flanking
the highway on the E., and although Robertson's state-
ment seems definite enough it must be remembered that
he was a century later than Edgar and that Pirnhall
cannot have been one of the places "adjacent to Plean-
house" where "the last vestige of it [i.e. the road] was
removed some time ago when some improvements were
making on the Plean estate". ⁶ It is probably now too late
to recover the truth unless by some chance discovery.
The next fixed points beyond the road-junction in
St. Ninians (796911) are those recorded by Crawford in
the outskirts of Stirling. ⁷ The Roman road was found
on both sides of Snowdon Place - at Number 27 on the
S. and at Numbers 18 and 19 on the N. - as well as at
19 Park Terrace about 100 yds. further to the NNW.;
these remains and a bank W. of Randolphfield which
resembles a Roman causeway and another stony bank
just W. of Victoria Place, ⁸ are all nearly in alinement and
would locate the road approximately along, or very
slightly to the W. of, Randolph Terrace and the Main
Street of St. Ninians. This alinement would correspond
very well with that of the next section to the N. as given
by Edgar, and to that extent supports his and Nimmo's
version of it against Robertson's version as formerly
shown on the O.S. map (supra). Though it is safe to
assume that a fort existed at Stirling to guard the river-
crossing (cf. No. 123), its position is unknown and it
thus does not give a fixed point on the road's course.
Beyond Stirling no remains of a road survive, and the
18th-century records are difficult to interpret. They
agree in stating that the road struck off in a W. or NW.
direction, ⁹ but it is clear that, beyond a certain point,
they refer to two different roads, one leading north to
Dunblane, Ardoch and beyond, and the other NW., to
Bochastle at the foot of the Pass of Leny. The evidence
for the Bochastle road is contained in a paper ¹⁰ by the

1 Loc. cit.
2 Op. cit., 24.
3 Stat. Acct., xviii (1796), 388.
4 See Ordinance Survey Name Book, St. Ninians parish,
35, 169.
5 Ibid., 169.
6 Ibid.
7 Op. cit., 23 ff., with plan.
8 Discovered by Crawford and recorded ibid.
9 Cf. also Castles and Mansions, 145.
10 Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. iii,
pt. ii, 266 ff., read on 2nd July 1792.

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