lay the foundations of walls. Towards the end of the first week the trench was driven into a bank of yellow clay, which proved to be the southern rampart of the fort. Here, then, was the Roman station for which Roy had vainly searched. The rest was a matter of patient digging.
The Roman Road
Before describing in detail the features of the station so far as they were revealed by four years of excavation, it is desirable to notice briefly the Roman road with which it was organically connected. On the great roads of the empire, which radiated from Rome, there must have been many spots which were once the scene of a similar combination of military works. As the army pressed onward in its march of conquest, pushing out into the barbarian lands, it secured its communications by establishing such posts as that which was found at Newstead. They were a recognised feature of. the military roads, an important part of a well established system. We shall see that Newstead was undoubtedly occupied as early as the end of the first century A.D. In other words by the troops of Agricola. But there is more than one route by which a Roman army advancing northwards might have reached this point. The circumstance that Agricola's campaign of A.D. 78, if not that of the following year also, was conducted in North Wales lends some colour to the supposition that when he entered Scotland in A.D. So, he did so through Carlisle. On this assumption he might have followed the valley of the Liddell and the modern line of the North British Railway to Melrose. Another possible route was that of the ancient road known as the Wheel Causeway, which was used in the Middle Ages as a means of communication between Liddesdale and Jedburgh.[1] On neither of these lines, however, have we any evidence of Roman relics on Scottish ground. It is different with the ancient track which is known as 'the Roman road' to everyone familiar with the Borders. For miles across the uplands that separate England from Scotland, its track, and the mounds marking the site of forts that once protected it, can still he traced. It crosses the Wall of Hadrian near Corbridge on Tyne, passes Bremenium and Chew Green, the latter near the sources of the Coquet, and then plunges into the heart of the Cheviots.
1 For a more detailed description of this road, see James Macdonald, 'Notes on the 'Roman Roads of the One Inch Ordnance Map of Scotland,' Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, vol. xxix. p. 323, as also a note on the Antiquity of the Wheel Causeway by Professor Haverfield. Ibid. vol. xxxiv. p. 129.
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