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Roundlaw Signal Station
About
The Hunterian Museum's 1972 excavation found a rock-cut tower base here about 3.7 by 4.3 meters, encircled by a distinctive V-profile ditch some 14.6 meters in overall diameter. It was one of roughly a dozen linked lookout posts spaced about 1.3 kilometers apart along the Gask Ridge road, Rome's first attempt at a fortified land frontier anywhere in the empire. Troops abandoned the post in 87 CE, long before this snapshot, when the army pulled back south.
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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