What We Do We do several events for the public each year, about one a month during the summer. We do this to educate and to show the way life was then. We as a unit not only talk to people in camp, but also do presentations such as Roman festivals and gods to teach people the ways of the day so they understand that not all was brutal. We also do weapons and tactics such as live fire displays of siege weapons at their finest along with facts on armor and hand weapons as well. All of the weapons are hand built, and we get together as a unit when we can to do projects. We try, when we can, to go to the field when time permits to live as Romans, work as Romans, and eat as Romans without the distraction of the public. In between events we try to do get-togethers for lunch (and in regular clothes) to discuss activities and upcoming events to better what we do and how we do it, so to be the best and most authentic we can be for the benefit of those we entertain. We must always remember that "we cannot move to the future without having knowledge of the past." Why Celtic Festivals? The Romans never conquered Scotland, but they were there. Roman Legions marched into Scotland and began construction of the Antonine Wall in 142 C.E. during the reign of Antoninus Pius and under the direction of Quintus Lollius Urbicus. It was completed in 144. The wall stretches 60 kilometers from Old Kilpatrick in the West Dunbartonshire on the Firth of Clyde to Bo'ness, Falkirk, on the Firth of Forth. The Wall was intended to replace Hadrian's Wall 160 kilometers to the south as the northern frontier of Britannia. While the Romans did establish temporary forts and camps north of The Wall, they did not conquer the Caledonians, and the Antonine Wall suffered many attacks. The Romans called the land north of the wall Caledona, though in some contexts the term may mean the area north of Hadrian's Wall. The Antonine Wall was inferior to Hadrian's Wall in terms of scale and construction, but it was still an impressive achievement, especially considering that it was completed in only two years, and was at the northern edge of the Roman Empire in what they perceived as a cold and hostile land. The wall was typically an earth bank, about four meters high, with a wide ditch on the northern side, and a millitary way or road on the southern. The Romans initially planned to bulid forts every six miles along the wall, but this was soon revised to every two miles resulting in a total of 19 forts along the wall. The best preserved but also also one of the smallest forts is Rought Castle Fort. The wall was abandoned after only twenty years when the Roman Legions withdrew to Hadrian's Wall in 164 C.E. Over time the Romans reached an accommodation with Brythonic tribes of the area whom they fostered as the buffer states which would later become The Old North. After a series of attacks in 197 C.E., Empreor Septimius Severus arrived in Scotland in 208 to secure the frontier, and repaired parts of the wall. Although this re-occupation only lasted a few years, the wall is somtimes referred to by later Roman historians as the Severan Wall. This led to later scholars like Bede mistaking references to the Antonine Wall as ones to Hadrian's Wall. Archaeologists working in Scotland's Gask Ridge Frontier, which dates to the early 70s C.E., have discovered evedence that part of the visible monument is in fact 70 years younger then previously believed, and dates from the Antonine period. The Gask Frontier is the oldest Roman frontier anywhere in the Empire, and predates Hadrian's Wall by 50 years. The Gask Ridge Frontier is a combination of forts, watch towers and a road. The watch towers must have been linked by a road or track to allow the tower teams to reach their posts from the nearby forts, but that road remains to be found. The wonderfully engineered road we see today was bulit later when the forts came back into use in the mid 2nd century. The combination of road and watch towers that was first created in Scotland was used as a model by the Roman Army in Germany 20 years later when they built the frontier from the Rhine to the Danube. Historically, II Adiutrix was stationed in the British Isles around 80 AD.