Cobbinshaw Moss, Crosswoodhill

NT05NW 3 c. 03 56.

Some ancient Roman silver medals about the end of last month, were found in the peat earth cast out of the bottom of a deep moss ditch at Crosswood Hill (the property of Andrew Steele, Esq., WS) in the parish of West Calder, in the county of Edinburgh. These Mr Steele has been so obliging as to communicate to us. They are in great preservation. It is probable, as there was a Roman camp in the neighbourhood (i.e. at Castle Greg: NT05NE 1), that these coins had belonged to some one of the Roman officers stationed there, perhaps in the time of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, as one of the medals bears his name, and others have the name of the Empress Faustina, his wife, and of his predecessors, Domitian, Trajan , Hadrian and Pius.

From the circumstances in which these coins were found, it is probable they were dropt on the surface of the ground upwards of sixteen hundred years ago. That the ground was then covered with a growing wood, is obvious, from the branches of birch trees in which the coins were enveloped. The medals were lying five feet beneath the present surface. The medals we have caused to be engraved are four:- 1st, of Domitian; 2nd, of Adrian; 3rd, of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus; and 4th, of the Empress Faustina.

Scots Mag 1810

The engravings show that the coin of Faustina was of Faustina I; the coin of Marcus is of AD 161 or later. Steele gives an account of the discovery, varying only slightly from the above, in his Natural and Agricultural History of Peat Moss.

G Macdonald 1918; A S Robertson 1978.