Normandykes

Normandykes is a Roman marching camp set on high ground above the River Dee, near Peterculter on the western edge of Aberdeen City. Unlike a permanent fort, a marching camp was a temporary enclosure raised by troops on the move, guarded for a night or two by a bank and ditch before the army pressed on. This one is large — roughly 860 by 510 metres, enclosing around 106 acres — which points to a substantial force passing through during the Roman push into northern Scotland. Archaeologists place its construction in the Roman Iron Age, most likely during the Antonine or Severan campaigns of the second or third centuries. Its position was deliberate: the camp lies about six miles north of another camp at Raedykes, and the route between them was chosen to skirt the boggy ground of the Red Moss. The name is a later muddle. Recorded as Norman’s Dyke, the earthwork was wrongly taken for Danish work in 1795 before being correctly identified as Roman by 1845. It was first excavated in 1935, and later traced from the air in photographs taken between the 1940s and 1970s. Today it survives as a scheduled monument with public access.