The Vindolanda Check

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A generation before the Falkirk cloth was stuffed into its coin-pot, there was already checked wool being worn on the northern frontier of Roman Britain. It comes from the fort of Vindolanda, just south of Hadrian's Wall, and it is one of the earliest checked cloths to survive from Britain at all.

The find

Vindolanda's waterlogged early levels are a textile archive: the anaerobic mud under the first timber forts preserved leather, wood, writing-tablets and cloth that would have rotted anywhere drier. Among the woollens excavated there is a simple two-colour check, deposited in the fort's earliest levels, around AD 100 — a full century or so before the Falkirk hoard was buried. The textiles were published by J. P. Wild in the Vindolanda research reports, and the fleeces themselves were analysed by M. L. Ryder.¹²

The Falkirk Tartan

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Scotland's oldest surviving tartan is not a clan sett, is not dyed, and very nearly did not survive at all. It came out of the ground as a wad of cloth stuffed into the neck of a Roman money-pot.

The find

On 9 August 1933, workmen levelling ground near Falkirk — a short way from the Antonine Wall — broke into a buried Roman earthenware jar. Inside were close to two thousand silver denarii, a coin hoard whose latest coins date its burial to around AD 230, in the first half of the 3rd century. The cloth had been pushed into the mouth of the pot as a stopper, and that is the only reason a scrap of third-century wool survived to be found at all. Hoard and cloth are both now in the National Museum of Scotland.¹

Roman-Britain on Tartan Dictionary

The Vindolanda Check

The find

The Falkirk Tartan

The find