Archaeologists now believe the Milsington leg from a Scottish bog belonged to a vast bronze statue of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius on horseback near Hawick. The interpretation goes on display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh on Saturday, when Roman Scotland: Life on the Edge of Empire opens.
The leg was dug up in 1820 and had languished for 100 years in the charter room at Dalkeith House near Edinburgh. Dr Fraser Hunter, principal curator of the exhibition, said such statues would have had a profound impact on iron-age communities.
James Curle and Hawick
Curle had already set out the problem in 1932. He said, "We cannot visualise the conditions which would have led to its erection anywhere north of the Great Wall,". The new reading places the bronze in the Scottish Borders and ties it to Antoninus Pius after his armies had wrested control of southern Scotland in about AD140.
Hunter said imperial figures of this scale would have dominated the landscape. "These kind of things are not only visually dominant but they look really, really alien," he said. He also said, "There is effectively no naturalist art in the iron age – very, very little. The whole idea of depicting a person is absolutely alien to the iron-age worldview."
Roman Scotland at Edinburgh
The exhibition is the largest ever staged on the Romans in Scotland, and the curators believe the Romans were a far more significant force north of Hadrian's Wall than previously realised. Hunter estimates that about 10,000 troops were stationed across southern and eastern Scotland during the Antonine period, with another 10,000 camp followers, wives and enslaved people also present.
That wider setting frames the bronze leg as more than a stray object. It points to a military and visual presence in Scotland that was large enough to leave durable traces in stone, bronze and settlement.
Inveresk for the
Bethany Simpson, assistant curator, said the Inveresk bowl has a unique combination of animal reliefs involving dolphins, stags and a stylised hunting dog. "You only find it in Inveresk. It’s not seen anywhere else in Scotland; it’s not seen anywhere else in the UK," she said.
The museum is also showing two locally carved stone altars from a Mithraeum excavated at Inveresk for the first time. One altar has slits cut into its hollowed-out stone radiating from the carved head of Mithras, and holes carved into its eyes and mouth to allow lamplight to shine out in the smoky darkness.
The leg’s new attribution leaves the old story behind: rather than a piece hacked off and carried north, archaeologists now see a carefully removed monument from southern Scotland, one that was meant to be seen from a distance.
