Fieldwork
2008 saw the Project engaged in an intensified geophysical program, with two Roman forts and a number of other sites studied, along with continued excavation and air photography.

Excavation and survey: Strageath
Last year's annual report gave a preview of the large scale resistance survey we conducted at Strageath (NN 898180): the centre-most of the three Gask forts (fig 1).  This was itself an extension of smaller scale work in 1999 and was part of our continuing effort to survey almost all of the 14 known Roman forts north of the Fourth and Clyde.  It was also, at c. 32 acres, the largest geophysical survey we had yet done.  Well this year we extended it by another 5 acres, to look further to the west ahead of excavations outside the scheduled area in that direction.  We also greatly extended the area of the magnetic survey we began in 2007, to bring it to much the same size as the resistance survey.

Our initial priority in 2007 had been to examine the area around a network of roads that had been found from the air to the north of the fort and seemed likely to point to extramural activity.  Elsewhere in the Roman Empire, forts generally attracted small civilian towns called vici, which grew up around them to provided various services, from industrial activity to temples, to 'wine, women and song'.  After all, anything up to 1,000 well paid men, dumped into newly won territory in the middle of economic nowhere, represented a temptingly large pool of spending power that was almost bound to be exploited.  Despite decades of excavation and aerial reconnaissance, however, not one Romanised vicus has yet been found to the north of the Forth and Clyde, although some of the Gask Project's other geophysical surveys have revealed looser groups of Iron Age style roundhouses around some of the forts that just might have played a similar role.  This has always seemed more than a little curious and it was uncertain whether it marked a real absence, or just a temporary absence of evidence.  The road net north of Strageath seemed to offer the best possibility for a Gask vicus, by showing its street system: hence our assigning it priority over the fort itself in 2007.  In fact, time did then allow complete resistance coverage of the fort and its annexes, but with only one magnetometer, against two resistance meters, we were unable to finish the fort's magnetic survey.

As a  result, 2008 saw us back at the site and, whilst our colleague Dr Peter Morris finished the magnetic coverage of the fort, another team joined the resistance squad in extending the survey to the west.  The results (fig 2) werewonderful.  Interestingly, the roads to the north did not show at all, but it is possible to overlay the resistance data onto the magnetic survey (fig 3) to get the best of both worlds, with a pat on the head to the surveying accuracy of the teams from all three seasons, which made the overlay match perfectly.  What the magnetic data does add, however, is a wealth of new information on the fort and its surroundings.  The fort had already shown well from the air, but the two surveys combined have greatly refined our knowledge of its extremely complex, multi-period defences and annexes and so allow us to correct errors in previous site plans.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the data show that the fort defences parallel those of the much better preserved Gask fort of Ardoch and, in particular, it can be seen far more clearly than ever how the 2nd century Antonine fort overlies an earlier set of defences in the east in almost exactly the same way that is still visible at the northern end of Ardoch.  The surveys even provide information on the fort's interior.  This had already been studied by excavations conducted by Profs. Frere and Wilkes in the 1980s, but the geophysical data fills in gaps between that provided by a dig depended largely on a pattern of relatively small scale trenches.  The area of the main range area is clearly revealed, along with other parts of the street system, and there are even signs of the internal bath building against the south rampart back.  This allows us to confirm at least the basic outline of the excavation plans, much of which were really extrapolations from this limited trenching, and it also lets us tie the excavated data to the sometimes highly detailed aerial information with greater precision.

Outside the defences, we also added to the available data.  We have gained a still firmer picture of a large (c. 55m x 35m), but somewhat mysterious, rectangular enclosure immediately to the west of the fort annexes, which has shown internal postholes from the air and so might be a substantial building.  The date of this structure remains unknown.  It could well be Roman, but we have also speculated as to whether it might be rather later: perhaps, for example, a Medieval tithe barn, and it would certainly be useful to excavate here in future to investigate.  To the north of the fort, we confirmed the existence of the road network seen from the air, but we can also now follow long vanished enclosure boundaries, some of which may be Iron Age fields that complement similar so called 'Celtic' field systems which have appeared from the air to the fort's south-west.  In 2007, the potentially most interesting external discovery had been dense concentrations of magnetic anomalies over two large areas near the road net, which can be seen on fig 2 as a series of dots to the north and north-east of the fort.  At the time we said that these might represent signs of extensive extramural activity, perhaps in the form of hearths, but that this was uncertain because they were insufficiently structured to prove that they represented man made, rather than geological, features.  Last year's annual report thus said that we intended to study them further by excavation, and this was duly done in 2008.

The entire fort field and that to the north, are scheduled as ancient monuments, and so it was easier (from a purely bureaucratic view point), to work in the unscheduled field to the west.  Unlike the fort field, however, this has been singularly unresponsive to air photography, so virtually nothing was known about it, except that the Roman road to Ardoch passed this way.  Our first step was thus to extend the geophysical scans into the area to check whether the possible hearth signatures reached this far, because there was obviously no point in excavating here if they did not.  In fact, the magnetic evidence was unequivocal.  The features did extend into the west field, albeit by only by around 25m (fig 3), and two substantial trenches were targeted on the strongest concentrations.  The results were clear, but not exactly all that had been hoped.  There was genuine archaeology, in the form of an old field boundary that had not appeared in either the aerial or geophysical data and which predates the modern field pattern.  But, although the sources of the magnetic signals were uncovered exactly where they had been expected, they proved to be natural lenses of iron bearing sand, probably left by the last Ice Age, and not the remains of Roman activity.  Our large potential vicus, thus evaporates, at least here and, although it is still possible that something was happening around the road net north of the fort, we can no longer claim any evidence.

Further south in the same field, we tried to get a better grip on the exact line of the Roman road.  One might have thought that this was unnecessary.  After all, the line is confidently marked on site plans and large scale Ordnance Survey maps, so we surely know its position.  But things are not so simple, because air photographs show a clear linear parch mark (the usual trace for a road) running to the north of the O.S. line and on a diverging heading of roughly WNW, whereas the O.S. line heads WSW, close to the modern field boundary.  The question was, therefore, which was the real line?  Indeed, was it even possible that both were real lines?  After all, our 2007 excavation just a few hundred meters across the Earn, at Innerpeffray West, produced signs that the known Gask road might belong to the mid 2nd century Antonine occupation and not, as expected, with the 1st century Flavian frontier.  We did, though, predict at the time that the earlier system was still likely to have had a road of some kind, although it seemed possible that the two lines might diverge on occasions.  if so the situation west of Strageath could have been an example.

Again, therefore, both resistance and magnetic coverage was added, but neither detected a road on the traditional line and, although both did find a linear anomaly to correspond with the aerial feature, we were surprised to find that the resistance survey produced a running band of low readings (fig 4).  This was the exact opposite of what had been expected.  Roads, being stone built, conduct electricity poorly and so should produce high resistance.  Stone, indeed, produces such a marked effect that we have found that several Roman towers in the area show high resistance from their ditches, which as damp features are usually picked up as bands of low resistance.  On excavation, we have always found that this apparent paradox was caused by the fact that post-Roman farmers had used the then open tower ditches as dumps when clearing stones from their fields, turning the ditches into what amount to inverted clearance cairns: in the process, radically reducing their electrical conductivity. To deepen the puzzle, the Strageath feature had produced a parch mark in air photographs, which also suggests a heavy stone concentration.  Yet, even the towers with high resistance, stone filled ditches still produce normal dark positive cropmarks.  A parch mark should thus indicate a great deal of stone close to the surface, and this should guarantee high resistance readings, just like those seen in the roads north of the fort.

A number of possible explanations occurred.  The lack of a signal along the O.S. line could just mean that the road had been completely ploughed out.  This is, after all, a field that has long been in cultivation.  Yet we do have clear data for the roads to the north of the fort, which have seen equally intensive agriculture, and it was difficult to see why the latter should survive if the former did not.  Likewise, the low resistance band on the possible northern line might suggest that a road here had been worn down to become a hollow way, whose surface hollow had later been filled in by ploughing, thus burying any high resistance metalling too deeply to be detected.  One might, however, have expected such a sequence to produce a dark positive cropmark and so again a degree of mystery remained.  Ultimately, there was only one way to find out what was really going on, and a long trench was opened (figs 5 & 13) to allow us a look at both lines.  This found that the northern parch mark was caused by a running band of different glacial dump, and not an archaeological feature at all.  It was softer and damper than the surrounding, free draining glacial sand, hence the lower resistance values, and we can only assume that the parch mark was due to a difference in its ability to support crop growth.  The O.S. line, however, produced a beautifully preserved road, despite centuries of ploughing, and it is difficult to understand how the resistance survey failed to detect it, since its top lay immediately below the modern plough soil.  It was c. 5.7m wide, which is at the narrow end of normal for the Gask road, and only a few centimetres narrower than our own excavation found it a few years ago in Parkneuk Wood on the other side of the Earn.  It was also typical of the Gask road in design, with a robust surface layer of rammed gravel, on a substructure of larger stones (fig 5), which appeared to be a mix of sharp edged, quarried rubble and smooth, river worn boulders.  There was no sign of the side ditches or raised earthwork agger that are such characteristic features of Roman roads elsewhere, but this too is normal for the Gask road.

One thing archaeologists would dearly love is to get their hands on the cemetery of one of the Gask or other northern Scottish forts.  This should give us all sorts of data from human remains: on life expectancy, diet, health and possibly ethnicity (auxiliary soldiers hailed from all corners of the Roman world), and might also reveal the presence of women and children, which could be another pointer to a civilian presence.  There is even the chance of finding inscribed tombstones, which might give us information on the military units and officials present.  The Gask forts were occupied in both the Flavian and Antonine periods, for perhaps 15 years each time and, given the shorter life expectancies of Roman times, we can be sure that people would have died in the forts over such a period, even though most of the occupants were fit, young soldiers.  Strageath, for example, would have held at least a 500 strong cohort, or cavalry ala.  Auxiliary soldiers of this kind signed on for 25 years and scholars have estimated that only around 50% of recruits could expect to live out their full term, with most of the casualties resulting from natural causes, such as disease, rather than from warfare.  Such figures are only educated guesses and so more than a little approximate, but they would suggest that a 500 strong unit could expect to loose around 10 men a year in this way, so that two 15 year occupations would imply one or more cemeteries at Strageath for something in the region of 300 men.  We certainly know that Ardoch had a burial ground (although we do not know exactly where), because a single tombstone was found many years ago that commemorated a soldier of the 1st Cohort of Spaniards.  Strageath must also have had a grave yard and the only question is where.  One common position for fort cemeteries is alongside one of the main approach roads and the dig field seemed as likely a place as anywhere because, unlike the ground over which the roads to the north of the fort run, it is flat and well clear of likely flooding from the Earn.  The magnetic survey did produce a few anomalies that just might have represented cremation fires (the usual funerary rite in the early empire) and the position of the excavation trench was tweaked to include one of these.  In the event, this too turned out to be a lens of iron bearing natural sand, although the presence of a grave yard in the vicinity remains a distinct possibility.  We did, however, find two large and unusually thick, square stone flags.  Metalling from the road had piled up around these stones, but they were definitely not themselves part of its structure.  They cannot be interpreted with total certainty, but one strong possibility is that they represent bases for altars or other monuments, which might be a sign of religious activity in the area.  Needless to say, no actual altars were found.  Indeed no inscription of any kind has ever been found at Strageath, but this is interesting enough evidence to justify further work here in future.

Bertha fort
In addition to finishing Strageath, the Project also conducted another in our series of whole Roman fort surveys: the ninth of a total of 13 that we eventually hope to cover.  Again both resistance and magnetic surveys were undertaken and the target this time was the northernmost of the three Gask forts: Bertha, which lies on a promontory just outside Perth, above the confluence of the Tay and Almond, (NO 097 268).  Little previous work had taken place on the site and although it has been subject to air photography since at least 1941, it is a poor cropmark site.  Some trenching was done near the fort's NW corner in 1973 (prior to a widening of the A9), which revealed the defences and intervallum road.  The Gask Project also analysed a collection of pottery picked up during fieldwalking at the site by the Cumbernauld Historical Society, which was enough to confirm that the fort was held during both the Flavian and Antonine occupations.  Otherwise, however, remarkably little was known about the site, except for its basic outline.

Conditions on the site were far from ideal for resistivity.  The ground drains poorly and was soaked after a wet summer to the point that there was standing water in places.  The field was covered with lines of saturated unbaled straw and, with frequent further rain, water managed to get into one of the two meters and its electrode frame, so that part of the fort had to be re-surveyed.  All of this slowed progress so that we were not able to cover as much of the external area as we had hoped.  Nevertheless, the technique is more robust than is often imagined and a good image of the fort was obtained (fig 6).  This showed a clear outline of most of the defences and some of the internal road network. The site measured 257m from east to west and at least 135m from north to south, giving a minimum area of 3.47 ha (8.57 acres) over the rampart, and a virtual section through the western defences, conducted by Peter Morris, using a different resistance technique, was even able to show something of the third dimension.  The road to the north gate stood out strongly, whilst the road between the east and west gates showed more faintly.  Short sections of ditch and rampart have long been known as visible surface features just outside the southern boundary of the main fort field.  These run more or less parallel to the northern defences and have thus, been assumed to represent the southern defences.  It was not possible to survey what little remains of these earthworks, as they lie partly in a hedgerow and partly in a dense thicket above the Almond.  Nevertheless, the survey does show virtually the whole of the north, east and west sides.  The site is bisected by the railway to Perth, which has obscured a 19m wide swath, but the survey shows that there is good survival right up to the railway fence and, as the line here runs on a low embankment, it is even possible that remains might survive underneath it.  The least expected discovery was two parallel ditches, just east of the railway, which have never shown from the air, but seem to bisect the site.  These raise two possibilities.  Firstly, as the fort was occupied in both the Flavian and Antonine periods, one might have expected a complex series of defences, similar to those known from the other two Gask forts.  If so, the fort may have been cut down during its later occupations in the same manner as Ardoch.  Alternatively, it is possible that these ditches represent the true western side of the fort, whilst the area to the west of the railway is an annexe.  Certainly, in the past, the fort has seemed unusually large, and yet narrow in proportion to its length, but an annexe would reduce it to a more reasonable 2.32 ha (5.73 acres), plus a 1.15 ha (2.84 acre) annexe.  It would also explain why neither the survey, nor air photography has detected a gate through the western defences, since the annexe might only have been accessible from the fort, and not from the outside world.

The magnetic data more than made up for the resistance problems, being the clearest we have ever had (fig 7).  It shows an almost complete plan of the internal buildings, along with other features, such as roads and probable rampart ovens.  In the process, it seems to reveal a somewhat unusual fort plan.  There is a line of six probable barrack blocks (or barrack pairs) in the fort proper, each c. 55m in length: three on each side of the road to the north gate, set with their long axes at right angles to the northern defences.  To their south, a road runs e-w along the entire length of the fort, beyond which are rather fainter traces of further buildings.  From east to west, these include at least two more rectangular buildings, this time set with their long axes parallel to the northern defences, followed by two much larger, courtyard structures that probably represent the headquarters building and commanding officer's house.  The fort would thus face north and the road running north would be the via praetoria.  If so, the east-west road is the via principalis and might be slightly non-standard, although far from unique (e.g. Burgh-by-Sands I in Cumbria (fig 10)), in running along the fort's long axis.  At first sight, however, the most unusual aspect is that there is no room for the additional barracks to the south of the main range that we would expect of a normal fort configuration, at least if the known stretches of ditch and rampart to the south really are Roman and belong to the same phase.  This would result in a fort which had all of its barracks in the praetentura, and nothing but the main range behind the via principalis, and so, in effect, no retentura.  This could, in fact, be a hint that the southern earthworks do not belong with the fort and may instead represent later defences, perhaps linked to the semi-mythical site of Rathinveralmond, the precursor of Perth, which is reputed to have lain hereabouts.  Whatever the case, at least three more long rectangular structures can be made out in the possible annexe to the west of the railway.  The most visible lies in the NW corner with its long axis parallel to the western defences, and which seems to consist of a series of rounded features inside a rectangle, which even produced an area of low readings in the resistance survey.  This might be a set of ovens protected by a timber shed, or a workshop containing furnaces, both of which might aid the conductivity of the soil as well as producing magnetic signatures.  It is even possible that it might be a bath block because, although its apparent straight-line configuration is unusual, Strageath's internal baths are this shape.

To the north of the fort, air photography has shown a series of roundhouses, but these hardly show in the magnetic data and could not be covered by the resistance thanks to the delays elsewhere.  However, the survey did detect a much larger ring feature, that might be a palisaded enclosure.  It also picked up part of a ditch that runs at an angle to the surrounding rig, but parallel to the fort's northern defences, at a range of 85m.  This is probably the same ditch as that shown on just one air photograph of the site (RCAHMS neg: PT14699, taken in 1983), which has a very Roman looking curved corner close to the Tay that parallels the fort's NE corner.  This may be part of a temporary camp, or another annexe but, whatever the case, no internal features from it can be seen in the survey.

The well preserved remains revealed at Bertha were somewhat unexpected, for the site has been under cultivation since time immemorial and has never shown well from the air, despite decades of scrutiny.  As a result, it had been widely expected that the interior would be largely ploughed out.  This is obviously not the case and the site must now be seen as a priceless monument for Perthshire, with tremendous potential to yield valuable further information.

It is perhaps worth a more general comment on just how good our magnetic results were in 2008.  Oddly, we have been told for years that geophysics does not work well in Scotland.  This was news to us, as we have now been conducting successful large and small surveys in the Gask area for over a decade.  Nevertheless, this year's data was exceptional.  Part of the explanation might be our switch to a new magnetometer, but the main reason may be the fact that we are currently in the depths of the solar minimum, the least active part of the 11 year sun spot cycle.  Sun spots are magnetic phenomena which are well known to have effects on Earth.  They can disrupt communications and jam satellites, and they can certainly effect archaeological magnetometers, so much so that there is a space weather web site to provide warnings of difficult conditions (http://www.spaceweather.com).  If geophysics practitioners look at this site they will see that the sun's usually acned face is currently staying clear for weeks at a time, which has to be good for archaeology.  Nevertheless, it is also worth making another point.  We are not alone in our program of very large Roman fort surveys.  There are currently similar series under way in Wales and on Hadrian's Wall, but these tend to use magnetometry only.  We have been asked again and again why we always insist on using resistivity as well.  After all, magnetometry tends to be faster and many archaeologists seem to believe that it is thus pointless to use res because it will only produce the same data.  The Project's 2008 results show more clearly than ever that this is not the case, however.  For example, at Bertha, the resistance shows a better picture of the defences, whilst the mag shows the interior.  At Strageath, different details of the defences are brought out by the two techniques, whilst only the res shows the roads at all clearly, and we strongly believe that the advantages of a two system approach make it well worth the additional effort.

Glassingall and Kinbuck Muir
For many years, the southernmost known installation on the Gask has been Glenbank fortlet (figs 1 & 8), but it has always seemed most unlikely that this was the real terminus, because Roman frontiers almost always end with full size forts, rather than more minor installations.  They also usually rest on significant topographic features, such as coast- lines or major rivers, whereas Glenbank appears to be a more or less arbitrary position, of no obvious strategic importance.  Certainly the Gask road is known to run much further to the south, reaching at least as far as the fort of Camelon in northern Falkirk.  One more intermediate fort is known at Doune.  Another has long been anticipated at Stirling, and either of these positions would make a more typical and, indeed, logical end to the system, lying as they do on rivers and the former Forth mosses.  In fact, the current status of Glenbank might result at least as much from a change in the modern agricultural regime as from any ancient reality because, although much of the Gask line between Glenbank and Bertha runs through arable land, large parts of the Forth valley and lower Stathallan, are in pasture and so far less productive of cropmarks.  To make matters worse, Gask installations are always found close to the Roman road but, partly because of the cropmark deficiency, there is a long (c. 13 km) stretch between Kinbuck and the southern suburbs of Stirling where even the approximate course of the road is unknown, so that any search for more installations is hamstrung by the difficulty of knowing where to look.  There is, though, one short exception: the 1.3 km sector between Glenbank and Kinbuck.  Here the road line is known with certainty, indeed parts of it are still visible on the surface, and much of its surroundings are in at least intermittent arable cultivation.  As a result, Gask Project flights have paid particularly close attention to searching for tower ring ditches in the area, and a number of new features have emerged as a result.  In particular, three rings have come to light beside the road: at Glassingall, Kinbuck Muir and Lower Whiteston (fig 8: 2, 3 & 4).  The latter seems rather small to be a candidate tower.  Moreover, its single entrance faces east, rather than south towards the Roman road (the pattern of all the known Gask sites), and faint signs of a possible central macula may show it to be a ring cist.  The first two sites seemed more worthy of further consideration, however, and both were subjected to geophysical surveys this year.  Both proved to be real.  Indeed two more features were found at Glassingall which had not been seen from the air.  But, although we cannot regard it as definite, we would now doubt whether either site is Roman.  Kinbuck Muir produced signs of more than one entrance break in its ditch, something no Gask tower has ever done, so it seems more likely to be a barrow.  The aerial feature at Glassingall proved to be highly oval in shape and had two entrance breaks, which again seems incompatible with a tower whilst, of the two new features one seems much too small and the other too big.  The likelihood is, therefore, that we have a barrow, a ring cist and a palisaded enclosure on the site. This is not to say that we should abandon the idea that the Gask system continued beyond Glenbank.  Quite the reverse: the hypothesis remains as valid as ever, and we will just have to carry on looking.  In the meantime we at least have more evidence for the prehistoric era.

Air Photography
Thanks to a wet summer, 2008 provided a disappointing cropmark season but, in compensation, we got excellent results photographing soil and germination marks in the spring and took almost 1,100 pictures.  We have kept the cataloguing of our 12,000+ picture archive fully up to date.  We also launched a new 'Aerial Archaeology' extra mural course in Liverpool University, which seems to have been a great success and allowed us to recruit students to help with the computer rectification of our past discoveries.

In all, we found 54 new sites ranging from unenclosed settlements, to barrows, to souterrains.  We also obtained new information on known sites, for example glorious views of the Roman road quarr pits and souterrain settlement at Spittalfield, just north of Inchtuthil (see right).  In last year's annual report we published a map of the 267 Iron Age sites then known within a 10 km radius of Inchtuthil, plotted with their relationship to the ancient environment, but this year's discoveries have already rendered this out of date by adding new sites.  The same is true of the similar study we did of the area around the fort of Cardean in 2001, and which we have since had to update every year as new sites have come to light.  This is as it should be, of course, and the reason we keep flying.  Indeed, with these and the similar surveys that we plan to undertake in future, our picture of native site distribution is likely to remain a moving target for years to come.  Nevertheless, the sheer numbers involved are already enough to provide very useful samples, which grow stronger with every flying season.

Perhaps the nicest discoveries of the year were both within a stone's throw of a site called Woodhead, near Wolfhill, which we have long had our eye on as an excavation target.  Woodhead itself is a double ditched ring feature, first found from the air and since subjected to geophysical work by ourselves.  The site strongly resembles the southern, double ditched towers on the Gask line and it is possible that it might be our first indication that the tower chain ran north of the Tay, perhaps as far as Cargill fort on the Tay/Isla confluence.  If so, it is interesting that 18th century maps show the line of a road they believed to be Roman passing the site.  We have been looking for signs of this road in our own flights ever since Woodhead first came to our attention some years ago and we have also trawled other archives, but with no luck so far.  Until recently, in fact, we tended to be dismissive about the likely existence of such a road.  After all, if there was no road from the end of the Gask at Bertha to Inchtuthil, the single most important garrison base in the entire Flavian occupation, it seemed improbable that there would be one heading for Strathmore.  But a combination of two of our recent discoveries had caused us to rethink.  The first was last year's finding that the Gask road as we currently know it is more likely to be Antonine than 1st century in date, and the second was our recovery of Hadrianic coins from Cargill fort, which raised the possibility that it may have been reoccupied in the 2nd century, as  an outpost of the Antonine Wall, in the same way as Dalginross and the three Gask forts.  Regardless of the possibility of a longer 1st century tower chain raised by Woodhead, therefore, this might provide the need for a 2nd century road, at a time long after Inchtuthil was abandoned.  In fact, a short length of road has been known for years, c. 2 km to the NW of Woodhead at Gallowhill.  This has often been thought to be Medieval, and connected with Coupar Angus Abbey.  Certainly the roughly 700m known length ran in a compatible direction.  This year, however, we found a long additional stretch, some 1.5 km long, as soil marks across a series of fields.  These showed the road to swing north to follow a natural dip straight for Cargill fort and (so far) approaching it to within a couple of hundred meters.  That doesn't of course guarantee that it is Roman, but it is a definite possibility that we will continue to monitor in future.

The other little gem was an unenclosed settlement at Pleasance, just 500m to the SW of Woodhead.  The possible tower also sits beside such a settlement, so we were not expecting another so close, and its presence is just one more sign of the intensive nature of the Iron Age settlement pattern of this area.

Finally, it is worth recounting an amusing incident on our final flight of the year, if only as a cautionary tale for other workers.  For years we have been teased because of the number of cameras we use when flying.  David, in particular, carries three film cameras, one of them a big medium format SLR, whilst our pilot, Bill, takes a digital.  Why do we do this?  The one word answer is redundancy.  If a camera fails, no problem: we have plenty more.  Likewise, we always try to make sure that every site we photograph is taken on more than one camera, and the films are processed by different labs.  As a result, if a camera develops a fault that we cannot detect in the air, or if one lab messes up a film, or if pictures are lost in the post, we will still have others for the same sites safe and sound.  Paranoia, I was told.  None of these problems will ever arise.  Well, this year our 70-200mm zoom lens physically disintegrated in flight and it must have been on its way out for some time, because every picture taken with it that day was slightly out of focus.  Again no problem, however, we have pictures taken with the other cameras so, although we lost a few close-ups from the zoom, we still have good data for our sites, not to mention a good excuse for replacing the old Tamron lens with an even better Leica one.

Other research
Various non field research strands have been followed during the year.  Birgitta has completed her huge study of the glass finds from almost a century of excavations and fieldwalking at the fort of Newstead and has also conducted studies of the beads from the Queen's View homestead, from the Viking settlement of Snusgar, in Orkney and those in the J.Roberts collection in Perth Museum.  All of this helps us to refine our picture of the material culture of our study area in the 1st millennium AD.  Other research has stemmed from the discovery of a cache of small finds and records belonging to the late Prof Barri Jones of Manchester University when the Archaeology Dept there moved building.  These related to work in both Scotland and Hadrian's Wall and, as Barri was David's Ph.D supervisor long ago, and the material had relevance to our Gask interests, we agreed to study it.

In the 1980s Barri and Charles Daniels of Newcastle University claimed to have found two Roman forts in Moray, well to the north of any other known permanent fort.  Excavations were conducted, but sadly both died before the results could be published.  If these sites proved to be real it would have radical implications for our own work: particularly for any attempt to explain the strategy behind the 1st century military deployment.  Even in Jones and Daniels' lifetimes, however, there was a good deal of scepticism, mostly because the sites' morphologies, as revealed by air photography, do not match other Flavian forts.  The excavations were finally published by Richard Gregory, Barri's last postgraduate, and his report cast further doubts on the Roman identification.  Unfortunately, though, many of the finds had vanished, which meant that it was difficult to provide a correct date.  The new Manchester material has now solved this deficit for one of the sites: Cawdor, to the south of Inverness, and our member Dan Boddice has examined it and completely reanalysed the site.  His study is still underway, but so far it is looking probable that Cawdor actually dates to the Viking period.  It is a shame in a way.  It would have been nice to trace the Romans further than we had thought possible.  It might also have helped us to explain the contradictions between the traditional story of Agricola's campaigns and our growing evidence that Rome reached the Gask area well before his time, because we could have argued that Agricola was really operating further north.  On the whole, though, Romanists will be relieved to be rid of these sites and they will certainly be a coup for Viking scholars.

The Hadrian's Wall material relates to the fort (actually the three forts) of Burgh-by-Sands, which lies to the west of Carlisle on the Solway Firth sector.  It is obvious why the Gask Project would be interested in Moray, but Hadrian's Wall might seem an odd study target.  In fact, however, we have always seized opportunities to make comparative studies between our frontier and others, either by co-operating and exchanging data with scholars elsewhere in the Roman Empire, or by direct studies of our own.  In 2007, for example, we worked on the so called 'wet sector' of the German Limes, along the River Main at the invitation of the museum of Aschaffenburg, Perth's twin town, and the chance to work with the Burgh-by-Sands material was timely because it provided directly relevant parallels for our current activities in Scotland.

Part of the significance of the Gask and its accompanying wider system is the simple fact that they appear to be Rome's first fortified land frontier.  This is not just important as a record, but because in time there came to be thousands of miles of such frontiers around the Empire as a whole and archaeologists want to know how they developed over time.  As the prototype, the Gask gives us the base line for this process and it is this that gives it such value.  But what came next?  One answer is the German Limes, which is one reason why our collaboration with Aschaffenburg has been so useful.  In Britain, however, the next frontier development was the Stanegate.  This is probably the least known of Britain's Roman frontiers, largely because it was itself replaced by the best known: Hadrian's Wall.  Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that the Stanegate evolved into the Wall and it could be argued that these are not two separate frontiers, but opposite ends of a single continuum, which changed radically over time.  Nevertheless, the Stanegate is a fascinating system in its own right.

The Stanegate ran just behind the later Wall line, along the east-west running Roman road across the Tyne-Solway isthmus.  Indeed its very name comes from the Viking word for a stone road.  The line has been known for many years running between Corbridge and Carlisle (where it met major north-south running roads) and the processes by which it morphed into the central sector of Hadrian's Wall are reasonably well understood.  In the 1970s and 80s, however, air photography by Barri Jones detected a road and a series of Roman looking sites to the south of the Solway, between Carlisle and Kirkbride on the coast and he suspected that these may have made up a western extension of the same frontier.  A series of excavations followed which revealed a Gask like series of forts and towers (no fortlets), but there was one great difference: parts of the road were fronted by a substantial running ditch which was sometimes accompanied by a heavy timber fence.  This did not yet approach the scale of the later wall systems of Britain, Germany and North Africa, but it did show the dawn of the running barrier as an integral, even diagnostic component of Roman frontiers. Interestingly, however, this barrier did not form an unbroken line; it was intermittent, and it turns out that the line was run between a series of (now long drained) mosses so that the ditch and palisade were only thought necessary on the patches of higher, drier ground between these natural obstacles.  In this respect it differs from its successor, because Hadrian's Wall did form a continuous line, but the same approach was later adopted in North Africa, where the frontier barrier sometimes just blocks the passes between sections of hill country, which were also presumably regarded as enough of a barrier in themselves.  Barri also discovered two new forts in the area.  It had long been known that one of the Hadrian's Wall forts underlay the modern village of Burgh-by-Sands, but a new fort, Burgh I, came to light about a mile further south, that overlay one of the Stanegate towers (fig 10, D) and seemed to be a slightly laterdevelopment of that system.  It was thus earlier than the Wall fort, which was re-designated Burgh II (fig 11).  Eventually, Barri found yet a third fort nearby, which also seemed to predate the Wall.  But to save renumbering the Wall fort yet again, this has become known as Burgh III, purely because it was the third to be discovered.  Sadly, although brief notes did reach the public domain, Barri died with the full results of almost all of this work still unpublished.  But, given the chance to study the Gask's successor system, we agreed to take on the job, especially as Jones had also excavated part of the Burgh II vicus (fig 12), which seemed likely to help in our search for vici around the Gask forts, and Burgh I shares a number of interesting design peculiarities with Bertha.

Publications, outreach and publicity
Our outreach program this year provided opportunities for hands-on experience in both excavation and geophysical survey or, for the less active, just the chance to visit archaeological work in progress.  Our Strageath dig (fig 13) and Bertha survey was manned about half and half by local volunteers and our own regular team, and both received numerous of visitors.  We were also lucky to have another opportunity of working with Paul Smith and his network of highly disciplined archaeological metal detectorists, who made a number of useful finds from both sites, which when fully analysed should help us to form a better picture of activities around them.  This work is already in progress and as well as Roman material, we can also report a surprising concentration of spent musket balls from Bertha.  There are signs that these were all fired from a now vanished farm building marked on 18th century maps of the site.  Quite why, we do not yet know, but it should be an interesting story.

As usual, the Directors have continued to give lectures to a range of academic, student and amateur bodies, in addition to our University teaching.  As always, we made particular efforts to speak in Perthshire and its surroundings, with talks in Perth, Innerpeffray, Forfar and Glasgow, and both of us gave papers to the '1st Contact' conference in Perth, which was a very useful chance to debate the growing controversy over the date of the 1st century Roman invasion of Scotland with fellow scholars and a large, well informed audience.  Elsewhere, we gave lectures in Manchester, Macclesfield and Handforth.  Both directors gave papers to the annual Roman Army School in Durham.  David was the speaker at the annual joint session of the Roman Society and the Classical Association, at the University of Bangor.  Birgitta gave papers to the Classical Association conference and the 1st Millennium Studies Group, and gave talks elsewhere on wider issues, such as Roman trade, glass and historiography.   Media activity also continued with David making a program on Roman military communications for the History Channel, which should be broadcast in Britain and the USA in 2009. 

As ever, the year saw a number of Gask Project publications.  Birgitta continues to be editor of the 'Hadrianic Bulletin' and both of us published articles in the journal.  David also had a paper on Roman frontier signalling in the proceedings of a conference on Hadrian's Wall, held in 2003, whilst Birgitta published a report on a toggle from the Black Spout Homestead, in the Bead Study Trust Newsletter, and another on the glass from the vicus of the German Limes fort of Rainau Buch, in B.Greiner's book: 'Der römische Vicus von Rainau Buch'.  Likewise, we submitted pieces for future publication.  Both of our papers from the '1st Contact' conference have gone to press, to form part of the published proceedings.  Birgitta's book length report on the glass from Newstead fort has been submitted, as have her reports on the glass and beads found by excavations at the Roman fort of Alchester, and at the Snusgar Viking settlement.  Meanwhile, the Strageath report and DSR are both in progress, as are reports on our Bertha, Glassingall and Kinbuck surveys.  Dan Boddice's report on the supposed fort of Cawdor is well in hand, and the report on our excavations at the Gask fortlet of Glenbank was nearing completion at year's end.  Finally, other publications have stemmed from the upcoming 'International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies'.  This gathering, more generally known as the 'Limes Congress', is the principal conference for scholars of Roman frontiers and the Roman army.  It is held three times a decade, always in a former frontier province of the Empire and attracts 300+ academics from all over the world.  It also holds a special place in our hearts, because David and Birgitta first met at the 1989 session.  By coincidence, that was the last time the Congress was held in Britain, and venues since have included Romania, Jordan and Hungary.  2009 sees it back in these isles and by tradition a book will be produced relating the latest developments in Roman frontier studies in the host province.  Progress on the Gask has of course been rapid, so we were asked to produce the relevant chapter, which was submitted by the end of the year.  David has also edited a book with Prof David Breeze of Historic Scotland on all of the fieldwork yet done at Burgh-by-Sands.  This will include our own reports on the Burgh II vicus and the western Stanegate system (including Burgh I and III), along with work by others, and this too should be published in time for the Congress.

Sponsorship and Acknowledgements
The Project continued to be sponsored by the Perth & Kinross Heritage Trust, whose support has, as always, been both indispensable and very much appreciated.  In 2008 the Trust funded our air photographic flying program and the Strageath excavation and survey.  We are also grateful to the Roman Research Trust for a generous grant that paid for the Bertha survey.  Meanwhile our long standing corporate sponsor (which continues to insist on anonymity) astonished us by providing a brand new Bartington Grad601 magnetometer on long term loan.  The Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society paid for the preparation of the Burgh-by-Sands reports and Historic Scotland added to the coffers by paying for air photographs for use on new information boards for the visible Gask towers (as well as being most helpful during our applications for Scheduled Monument consent).  We have received a number of smaller donations from speaking engagements, voluntary bodies and private individuals and, as usual, the royalties from our books have gone to the Project, as has David's TV appearance fee.

The Project continues to owe thanks to the farmers and land owners who have allowed us access to sites and to Peter Green who has continued to do a wonderful job of maintaining our web site. We thank the staff of the Innerpeffray Library and the Perth J.K. Bell Library, for help with research.  Bill Fuller has continued to do a wonderful job as pilot on all of our air photographic flights, and Bill and Dan Boddice have put in a great deal of work on cataloguing our air photos, finds and excavation archives.  As always, we are grateful to our many field volunteers, especially our long-standing geophysics and dig team: Rachel Hunt, Paul Murdoch and Keith Miller, and we also thank geophysics expert Peter Morris and our metal detector liaison Paul Smith for their help at Bertha and Strageath.

The Future
2009 should see another in our series of large scale geophysical surveys, but this time we hope to step up to a whole new order of magnitude by taking on our local legionary fortress.  Inchtuthil has been the lynch pin of our research strategy for the last year or two and we plan to continue our collaboration with Peter Hill by surveying the fortress and, more especially, its surroundings to look for external buildings.  This is probably the largest and most ambitious geophysical project yet undertaken in Scotland (fig 14) and will take several seasons, but we hope to be hard at it by the autumn, to serve as an exhibition site when the Limes Congress participants visit Inchtuthil as part of a post congress tour of the Gask and Antonine Wall.  We are also negotiating with land owners for other fieldwork during the year, including excavation, and our flying program will continue, we hope with better summer weather.

Out of the field, we plan to finish the Glenbank report, and reports on our 2007 Aschaffenburg work.  Birgitta has been commissioned to write a book on the military history of Roman Britain, which will, of course, include the Gask.  She will also be writing a report on the beads from Leckie Broch and another on the post-Roman and pre-modern landscape around the Tay-Isla confluence (for 'Medieval Settlement Archaeology').  Both of us will be writing papers for the published proceedings of the Limes Congress and we also plan to continue our work on the hinterland of Inchtuthil.  The Directors will continue to give public lectures where invited.  Three society talks have already been booked: in Innerpeffray, Wigan and Macclesfield, and more will no doubt be booked as the year goes on.  We will both present papers to the Roman Army School and, of course, to the Limes Congress.  Birgitta will be giving a day school on 'Rome and the Barbarians' in Manchester and has also been invited to occupy a short term research fellowship at the Virginia Military Institute in mid year, in the USA.  Meanwhile Dan Boddice has been invited to speak on our 2008 field work at the Community Archaeology Conference and his work on Cawdor should be submitted by year's end.  All in all it should be another busy year and, as always, we are raring to go.

D.J. Woolliscroft and B. Hoffmann.
Directors:  The Roman Gask Project.
SACE, University of Liverpool.