Bronze leg found in Scottish bog sheds new light on Roman occupation
A large bronze leg found in a bog in rural Scotland more than 200 years ago and then hidden away in a duke’s storeroom is helping to rewrite the history of the Roman empire.
Antiquarians argued that the so-called Mislington leg had been looted, perhaps from York, hacked off by marauding Scottish tribes and carried north over Hadrian’s Wall. “We cannot visualise the conditions which would have led to its erection anywhere north of the Great Wall,” said one scholar, James Curle, in 1932.
But archaeologists now believe the hefty gilded bronze limb came from the Scottish Borders and was part of a vast statue of the emperor Antoninus Pius on horseback, erected near Hawick after his armies had wrested control of southern Scotland in about AD140.
