Westerton Watchtower
About
Aerial photography first revealed Westerton as a cropmark in 1951, and excavation in 1979 uncovered a four-post timber tower inside a single ditched enclosure about 14 meters across. A sherd of Flavian pottery recovered from the ditch confirmed its place in the Gask Ridge chain, and the postholes showed clear signs the tower had been deliberately dismantled rather than left to rot. That demolition came in 87 CE as Rome pulled back 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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