Antonine Wall
— — the empire's last green line.
Not only on a wall.
“For twenty years in the second century, this turf rampart was the northernmost edge of the Roman Empire. Antoninus Pius pushed his frontier a hundred miles past Hadrian's Wall and held this line from the Forth to the Clyde. About sixty-three kilometres, sixteen forts, a ditch still cut into the fields above Bonnybridge. The legions left around 162. The wall sank back into the grass and stayed there.
Antonine Wall, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Antonine Wall ran for about 63 kilometres across the narrow waist of central Scotland, from Old Kilpatrick on the Firth of Clyde to Carriden on the Firth of Forth. It was built in turf and clay on a stone foundation roughly four metres wide, rising to about three metres, with a deep ditch on its northern face and a Military Way running behind. Construction began in AD 142 under the emperor Antoninus Pius, after his governor Quintus Lollius Urbicus campaigned north of Hadrian's Wall. The best-preserved stretch sits at Rough Castle near Falkirk.
Sixteen forts and a chain of fortlets studded the wall at roughly two-mile intervals: Bar Hill, Bearsden, Croy Hill, Rough Castle, and Castlecary among them. Each held a garrison of around 500 men drawn from auxiliary cohorts raised in Gaul, Spain, and Thrace. The distance slabs, ornamental sandstone panels carved with imperial victories and dedicated to Antoninus Pius, are the finest Roman sculptures recovered from Britain; nineteen of the twenty known examples sit today in the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow.
The wall was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list in 2008 as an extension of the Frontiers of the Roman Empire site. The most legible stretch runs through Rough Castle Roman Fort near Bonnybridge, with rampart, ditch, and the lilia defensive pits still visible in the turf. Access is free and unticketed; sturdy boots are sensible in the wet months from October through March. Falkirk, Kirkintilloch, and Bearsden each carry traces, and the John Muir Way long-distance footpath follows long sections of the line.