Muir o' Fauld Roman Signal Station
About
A square timber tower once stood inside the 15.7-meter circular earthwork that still survives here, one of the best-preserved posts on the Gask Ridge frontier. A causeway led fifteen meters north from the mound to join the Roman road it watched over, part of a chain of towers built to hold visual contact along the empire's earliest known land frontier. The Roman army abandoned the whole system in 87 CE when it withdrew from Scotland, thirty years before this snapshot.
What happened here
A small stone tower with a timber top, sited so that it can see the next one along the line. Half a dozen men live in it. They watch the ground in front, and they watch the tower on either side. A signal — fire and smoke at night, something visible by day — passes a warning down the chain far faster than a rider can, though it can only carry a message that was agreed in advance. The rest of the time it is a lookout post on a road, a river crossing or a frontier line, and the work is boredom punctuated by inspections. Supplies come up from the fort behind. Towers on a frontier stand within sight of each other for hundreds of miles.
Sources
Nearby
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Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →