Note
Date 1982
Event ID 1145994
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Note
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1145994
Shirva NS 69 75 NS67NE
About 1728 a stone structure was found 'in the Fossa, close by the Wall', on 'Mr Cather of Shervy's ground'; contemporary descriptions of this and other discoveries at Shirva, suggest that it may have been a souterrain situated in the ditch of the Antonina Wall to the E of Shirva. It was aligned from E to W and was in the form of a passage about 1.4m wide, which had a semicircular terminal at its W end but was open to the E; a single
lintel 1.7m long was found close to the E end. Within the passage there were 'a good deal of ashes ... , and a piece of an urn', and on the floor at the W end 'a stone brown with ashes'. The walls were 'built of about seven or eight courses of hewn stones, many of them of raised diamond work' and they incorporated two uninscribed Roman tombstones, each showing a dead man at a sepulchral banquet. A stone to Flavius Lucianus, a soldier of the Second Legion (RIB 2181 ), was also found, besides other fragments bearinp the abbreviation D(is) M(anibus) and a number of 'pillars' and pedestals'. Four or five years previously a length of walling had been found running northwards from the E end of the N wall of the structure, and at about the same date 'upon the North side ... a stone, among several others, with Simanes posuit Simani'. This stone is probably that set up by Sal manes to a boy of fifteen of the same name ( RIB 2182), which, according
to Horsley, was 'dug up at a place a little east' of Shirva, together with a dedication slab of the Second Legion (RIB 2180) and two other tombstones, one to a woman-by the name of Verecunda (RIB 2183), and the other, uninscribed, but bearing a relief of a man standing. A terminus post quem in the late 2nd century AD for the construction of the passage is provided by the tombstones and the diamond broached stones, which were presumably robbed from either the Roman fort at Auchendavy (NS67NE 12), 1.4km to the WSW, or that at Bar Hill (NS77NW 8), 1.7km to the ENE.
RCAHMS 1982
(Gordon 1732, 6-7; Horsley 1732, 198-200, 339-40; Macdonald 1897, 63-8, nos. 24-7; 86-90, nos. 37-9; Macdonald 1934, 403-4, no. 24; 435; 437, no. 57; 438-9, nos. 59-60; 447-8; Richmond and Steer 1957, 5; Robertson 1979, 73; OS Record Card NS 77 NW 9)
