Carriden 8 - The Viewpoint
If you are walking from the previous cache in the series, the best way to get to this one is to walk along Acre Road from Muirhouses Cross, towards The Drum housing development. The cache coordinates are a small stream at the edge of a grassy walking area next to the site of the former Drum Farm. This area gives a nice view of the Forth across to Fife.
Across the other side of the stream from the cache, to the south, is a field which was one of a few areas locally that were used as a Temporary Camp during the Roman era. A similar site has been found by archaeologists near Birkhill on the western side of Bo'Ness, again very close to an area of the Antonine Wall.
Dating to the mid-second century AD, the camp is associated with the construction of the Antonine Wall, situated approximately 785m to the north-west, and with the Roman fort at Carriden, situated around 880m to the north-east. The cropmarks visible on aerial photographs of the area represent negative or buried archaeological features, which retain different levels of moisture than the surrounding subsoil, resulting in the variant growth of the crops above. These cropmarks reveal three sides of a rectangular enclosure with two rounded corners visible. On the NW corner of the field is a C-shaped cropmark, which is thought to indicate the hidden presence of a souterrain, a stone-built subterranean structure or passage, possibly dating to the late first millennium BC/early first millennium AD, before even the Romans arrived here. Some of these C-shaped subterranean structures were created by Celts/Picts to store food, or to use as a place of refuge during an attack. They seem to have been a practice emulated from early Gaul cultures, that spread to Britain and have been found as far north as Orkney and Sutherland, as well in several Irish locations.