I am in Glasgow for a preparatory meeting for this summer’s Worldcon, and for complex reasons arrived on Thursday evening and did my day job from the hotel yesterday. I took a long lunch break though for a cultural excursion in two parts.

First stop was the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, a splendid structure abut 15-20 minutes’ walk from the conference centre.

The big draw was an organ recital – the Kelvingrove organ is massive (and therefore open to much double entendre) and the sound fills the main hall well. I particularly liked the video feed of the organist’s hands and feet.

The art gallery is rather special too; the painting that particularly spoke to me was a Belgian refugee from the first world war, painted by Norah Neilson Gray. (I took my own photo but this is the official gallery one.)

The second leg of the trip was to te end of the Roman Empire. When I watched the Oscar-winning film Gladiator back in 2021, it transpired that the Antonine Wall has a bit of a marketing problem, at least among my Facebook friends (click through for vigorous discussion):

The Antonine Wall ran from what’s now northern Glasgow to northern Edinburgh. It was made of turf rather than stone, unlike the much better known Hadrian’s Wall, so almost nothing survives of the actual structure. It wasn’t actually the northernmost limit of the empire: there were the Gask Ridge Forts north of Edinburgh, and also the mysterious temple-like structure near Falkirk (which gave its name to Stenhousemuir), known as Arthur’s O’on and destroyed in 1743.

In Bearsden, now a northern suburb of Glasgow, the foundations of a Roman fort were found in 1973, and the excavated foundations of the bathhouse are visible in a little park by the road (whose name is “Roman Road”). It’s 15-20 minutes by car from the convention centre in normal traffic.

Often these sites amount to little more than a big pile of stones, but there are several decent interpretative signboards featuring manly men using the facilities.

You can imagine how the Gaulish soldiers, after a hard day’s patrolling in the rain, would have loved to settle down in the heated room and hang out with their mates. The flags and underfloor channels behind which heated air circulated have also been well preserved.

I was educated by nuns in Belfast, and although the school itself was a modern building, the convent (which we spilled into occasionally) had been built in 1874 by an engineering magnate who installed the first central heating system in any house in Ireland. A century later, it was very noisy and probably unsafe – I hope it has been replaced by now! The Roman system looks very attractive.

The Baptist church across the road is on the site of the main section of the camp, and boasts a “Roman sound garden” and a large wooden statue of a legionary.

Edward Gibbon, in one of his eloquent but inaccurate and prejudiced passages, wrote of the Antonine Wall in the context of Agricola:

Before his departure, the prudent general had provided for security as well as for dominion. He had observed that the island is almost divided into two unequal parts by the opposite gulfs, or, as they are now called, the Firths of Scotland. Across the narrow interval of about forty miles, he had drawn a line of military stations, which was afterwards fortified in the reign of Antoninus Pius, by a turf rampart erected on foundations of stone. This wall of Antoninus, at a small distance beyond the modern cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, was fixed as the limit of the Roman province. The native Caledonians preserved in the northern extremity of the island their wild independence, for which they were not less indebted to their poverty than to their valour. Their incursions were frequently repelled and chastised; but their country was never subdued. The masters of the fairest and most wealthy climates of the globe turned with contempt from gloomy hills assailed by the winter tempest, from lakes concealed in a blue mist, and from cold and lonely heaths, over which the deer of the forest were chased by a troop of naked barbarians.

The Romans did of course press quite far north of the Antonine Wall before they gave up on what is now Scotland, and the source given for the last sentence is Appian, who actually says: “Crossing the Northern ocean to Britain, a continent in itself, they took possession of the better and larger part, not caring for the remainder. Indeed, the part they do hold is not of much use to them.” That last barb about southern Britain is somehow omitted by Gibbon.