Two Centuries After This Bronze Leg Emerged From a Scottish Bog, Archaeologists Believe It May Have Belonged to a Towering Statue of a Roman Emperor on Horseback

Long thought to have been looted from northern England by Scottish tribes, the larger-than-life leg may have actually been displayed in Roman Scotland, before it was carefully dismantled and buried by retreating forces

Soumya Sagar | Correspondent

November 13, 2026 4:34 p.m.

In 1820, a larger-than-life gilded bronze lower leg was pulled out of a bog in the Scottish Borders region. For more than two centuries, historians discredited the idea that the Roman-era artifact came from Scotland, instead assuming that it was hacked off a monument in England and hauled north by marauding tribes.

But ahead of “Roman Scotland: Life on the Edge of Empire,” an exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland (NMS), researchers have determined that the so-called “Milsington leg” was not stolen from the south, nor was it violently severed. Instead, they posit that it formed part of a colossal equestrian statue of the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius that once stood in southern Scotland in the second century C.E., before it was dismantled by retreating Roman troops.

“This really turns on its head our understanding of Rome’s second attempt at conquering Scotland,” Fraser Hunter, principal curator of prehistoric and Roman archaeology at NMS, says in a statement.

Roman campaigns into modern-day Scotland began in the 70s C.E., several decades after the conquest of Britain. Emperor Hadrian, who ruled from 117 C.E. to 138 C.E., consolidated the Romans’ northernmost limit in northern England, where Hadrian’s Wall still stands.

Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius, pushed his armies north again, and in the early 140s C.E. fortified a position about 100 miles north of Hadrian’s Wall, known as the Antonine Wall. A few years after Antoninus Pius died in 161 C.E., the Roman armies retreated south, back to Hadrian’s Wall.

Did you know? Antonine Wall

• The Antonine Wall ran 37 miles across Scotland, between two bodies of water: the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde.
• It was around nine feet tall and unlike the stone fortifications of Hadrian’s Wall, the Antonine Wall was largely made out of turf.

The timeline of the second century C.E. Roman invasion of southern Scotland—and eventual withdrawal—provides the context for the bronze limb.

Close inspection reveals that rather than bearing jagged axe or saw marks, the upper edge remains intact, just as Roman metalworkers originally cast it in the 140s C.E. An absence of gilding around the knee indicates that the leg was covered by a tunic or cloak, part of a larger statue, perhaps similar to the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome

“When you look, you see it hasn’t been hacked off, it’s a complete leg,” Hunter explains to the Telegraph’s Ruby Cline. “So rather than loot, it looks as if the statue has been carefully decommissioned at the end of its life.”

When Roman forces abandoned southern Scotland, they routinely dismantled and buried prized monuments, including stone altars and inscriptions from the Antonine Wall, rather than leave them behind, per the statement.

Installing a large, visually impressive statue in a border region was purposeful for Antoninus Pius, for whom victory in Scotland was “something which was worth celebrating,” Hunter explains in the statement.

Politically, too, “it makes sense, the Romans producing propaganda right in those contested areas,” Hunter tells the Telegraph. To Scottish Iron Age communities with virtually no tradition of naturalistic human portraiture, a gleaming gilded emperor on horseback would have appeared “really, really alien,” Hunter tells the Guardian’s Severin Carrell.

Following its excavation in 1820 near Hawick, Scotland, the Milsington leg spent a century tucked away in the Dalkeith Palace, near Edinburgh.

Upon hearing of the discovery, Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott noted in a February 1820 letter to Lord Montagu that finding such a large Roman artifact “in so wild a place, has something very irritating to the curiosity,” adding that he hoped to examine the piece and possibly dig for the remaining fragments himself.

In the exhibition, the Milsington leg is mounted onto a full-scale silhouette reconstruction of horse and rider. The exhibition also features a digital facial reconstruction of a decapitated man buried near the Roman fort of Inveresk, alongside an intricate, tin-coated enamel brooch from Pathhead that may have been a diplomatic gift from Roman forces to a local leader. Other artifacts on view are a unique animal-relief earthenware bowl, the skeleton of a carefully buried cavalry horse and two altars from a temple dedicated to Mithras, a deity of the sun.

Beyond imperial grandeur, the exhibition illuminates how Rome’s presence reshaped indigenous society in the northern reaches of the province of Britannia. Hunter estimates that roughly 10,000 Roman soldiers—including auxiliaries from North Africa and modern-day Romania—alongside another 10,000 camp followers, wives and enslaved people lived across southern and eastern Scotland during the Antonine occupation, per the Guardian.

Hunter suspects that undiscovered Roman forts once stood near where the limb was deposited and hopes that future surveys or metal detectorists might finally turn up the emperor’s torso or his bronze steed, more than 200 years after the leg emerged from the bogs.

“It offers us a tantalizing glimpse into the kind of grand monuments which once stood in southern Scotland and shows the importance Pius placed on his victories in Scotland,” Hunter says in the statement. “But it begs the question ... where is the rest of the statue?”

“Roman Scotland: Life on the Edge of Empire” is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh from November 14, 2026, through April 18, 2027.

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