This photo shows the hills rising clearly above the rest of the landscape. There was a Roman fort on the northernmost – but do you think these imposing landmarks escaped our earlier ancestors? Of course not :) There are still traces of burial cairns, the previous Iron Age fort, and if you want to see the Bronze Age axes once found hereabouts they are now apparently at stcuthbertsway.fsnet.co.uk/add29.html – the Three Hills ‘Roman’ Heritage Centre.
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It wasn't a roman fort on Eildon Hill North, it was a wee roman signal tower. The massive roman fort of Trimontium lay a thousand feet below, laid out between the foot of the Eildon Hills and the Tweed, just upstream from the river's confluence with the Leader Water. Trimontium is probably the very earliest named place in Scotland which can be identified and corroborated through written records. The Ingleston Milestone (the only roman milestone yet found in Scotland) records the distance from Hully Hill to Trimontium. Trimontium also appears on Ptolemy's map and is named in the Ravenna Cosmology.
It appears that Agricola's boys decided to make their supply base at the foot of the Votadini's old county town. In an excavation in 1986 there were nearly three hundred hut floors identified within the Bronze Age native hillfort on the top of Eildon Hill North, however there was some local re-occupation between the Flavian and Severan Periods (80 - 210 CE) so the roman signalmen would have had some Votadini company up there at the dizzy 1385 foot summit.