All of this activity, which to a great extent is known only from the archaeological remains, makes clear the Romans’ intention to occupy this region more or less permanently, but in the late eighties AD priorities changed. The Emperor Domitian, faced with serious trouble on the Danube, withdrew Legio II Adiutrix from Britain and did not replace it. It is probable that substantial numbers of auxiliaries were withdrawn at the same time, so that the provincial garrison was cut by at least a quarter. Inchtuthil and many of the other bases were abandoned, and the same thing happened a little later to the remaining sites and the Gask ridge line. No Roman base was maintained north of the Forth–Clyde line, and soon the northernmost outpost was at Trimontium or Newstead.

Several forts were maintained or built close to what would one day become the line of Hadrian’s Wall. A couple of years after our story, a proper road running between Carlisle and Corbridge was constructed and more forts and smaller outposts added. Today the road is known by its medieval name, the Stanegate or ‘stone road’, and archaeologists continue to debate its composition and purpose. By about AD 106 Newstead was abandoned in another withdrawal. Our paltry literary sources make no mention of any of this, so it is left to us to guess from the archaeology just what was going on.

A novelist has more freedom, and once again I have done my best to reconstruct these years for our purposes in a way that never conflicts with any hard evidence. At the very least I hope that our story is something that could have happened. Something made the Romans station significant numbers of troops in this area at the end of the first century AD, and then made them increase these numbers and develop the deployment along the Stanegate just a few years later. All of the forts mentioned in the story existed and were occupied in AD 98. (Precise dating is rarely possibly through excavation so it may be that the fort at Magna or Carvoran dates to a year or two later, but it is not impossible that it was there in 98). Syracuse is an invention, but typical of the many small outposts set up by the Roman army as needed. I see it as a predecessor to the excavated sites at Haltwhistle Burn and Throp, which were built alongside the Stanegate, although these were stone structures and larger than the fictional Syracuse. In the late first century AD most of the structures built by the army in Britain were in turf and timber. Some sites were being rebuilt in stone, and in the second century this became ever more common.

Vindolanda and the Writing Tablets