.png?width=800)
Witch Knowe Signal Station
About
Excavation around 1900 revealed a circular timber-tower platform here about 13.4 meters across, ringed by a ditch nearly 2 meters deep with an entrance causeway facing the Roman road to the south. It stood roughly 650 meters northeast of the Gask House tower, part of a signalling chain built along the ridge in the late first century CE. Rome abandoned the post in 87 CE together with the rest of the Gask frontier, three decades 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
.png?width=800)
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 →