Caledones

The Caledones held the Highlands north of the Forth-Clyde line and are the people Rome never conquered, which is the whole of their significance and was not for want of trying. They were a confederation rather than a state, and Roman writers describe them as tall and red-haired, farming little and raiding much, with chariots still in use in war generations after they had vanished from the rest of Britain. Agricola marched north in the early 80s AD and brought them to battle at Mons Graupius in 83, where Tacitus - his son-in-law - claims ten thousand Caledonian dead against three hundred and sixty Romans, and puts into the mouth of their leader Calgacus the most famous line ever written against the empire: they make a desert and call it peace. The victory settled nothing. The legions were withdrawn southward within a few years for wars elsewhere, and Rome twice built walls rather than hold the north - Hadrian's from the Tyne to the Solway in the 120s, and the Antonine Wall further north in the 140s, which was abandoned within twenty years. Septimius Severus campaigned north in person from 208 and died at York in 211 with the country still unsubdued. From the third century the sources stop saying Caledones and start saying Picti, the painted people, describing the same confederation under a new name; that polity persisted until it merged with the Scots of Dal Riata in the ninth century to form Alba. Mons Graupius has never been located, and some historians doubt the battle happened as described. The Antonine Wall was turf on a stone base rather than stone, which reflects how provisional the occupation was. Roman coins and pottery are found well north of both walls, so trade continued where conquest failed.

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