Elginhaugh

NT36NW 126.01 3207 6733 RR 2.

A section cut here in 1980 revealed the existence of an agger of sand, pebbles and gravel about 9.5m wide, lying on a band of light brown loamy soil 0.25m in average depth; the latter probably represents the Roman topsoil, but there was no trace of a buried turf-line. On each side of the agger lay a ditch about 1.5m wide and 0.3m deep. The upper filling of the ditch on the south side contained several small, badly abraded sherds of coarse pottery - mostly unidentifiable, but some probably being amphora - together with fragments of charcoal and burned daub; in the silt at the bottom of the other ditch there was discovered a small fragment of a samian dish of form 15/17 of undoubted South Gaulish manufacture and most unlikely to have been made later than AD 90; that the fragment was burned but not more than slightly abraded may be of some significance. The evidence thus confirmed that the feature was the foundation of a Roman road of late first-century date; agricultural operations over the centuries have removed the upper layers of metalling, which accounts for both the appreciable density of cobbles in the upper levels of the section and the scatter of stones projecting through modern turf in the vicinity of the agger. (See Maxwell 1983, fig. 6 for section.)

G S Maxwell 1983; RCAHMS 1988.