22 ALEXANDER GORDON, THE ANTIQUARY. 



Pennycuik House stands on the skirts of the Pentlands, where 

 the North Esk winds its way eastward to the Roman station of 

 Inveresk ; and is surrounded on all hands with antique sites and 

 historical localities, rich in treasured memories, and in not a few 

 tangible memorials of the past. The old Baron's library of learned 

 folios and quartos still survives ; and the valuable collection of 

 Roman and other antiquities which rewarded his explorations in 

 the surrounding regions, or was augmented by his father-in-law. Sir 

 John Inglis, from the old Roman seaport at the mouth of the 

 Almond, by Gordon himself, and by other contributors, furnished 

 some curious illustrations for the " Prehistoric Annals of Scot- 

 land :" including specimens of primitive bronze work, and a rai'e 

 example of ivory -carving, — a group of figures, of which the 

 central one, a queen, seated with a book and lap-dog on her knee, 



suggests its destination as the queen-piece of a set of chess-men, 



wrought, like others of its class, from the tusk of the walrus, or 

 " huel-bone " of Chaucer. It is labelled, in the handwriting of the 

 Baron, as having been found by John Adair, the old Scottish 

 geographer, in 1682, when engaged in a survey of the kingdom by 

 appointment of the Lords of the Scottish Privy Council. It must,, 

 therefox'e, have been in the Pennycuik collection when Gordon was 

 ransacking it for his Itinerary • but it lay out of the line of his 

 favourite studies, or of objects that then commanded the interest 

 of the learned. 



Only a few miles distant from Pennycuik House, in the vicinity 

 of the old Roman track, lies the village of Romana, the name of 

 which is supposed to perpetuate the memory of the constructors of 

 certain Roman works near by, and so, as Gordon says, " to prove 

 the veracity of its etymology." The stables of Pennycuik House- 

 are now surmounted with a dome-like structure, formerly erected in 

 the neighbouring grounds as a fac-simile of the Arthur's Oon of Dr. 

 Stukeley's old quarto : a singular bee-hive structui^ of squared 

 masonry twenty-five feet in diameter, which, in spite of every con- 

 flicting analogy or probability, Gordon agrees with the elder author 

 in believing to have been a Roman temple erected by Agricola. As 

 to what Dr. Stukeley did or did not believe, we need not greatly 

 concern ourselves. He visited Oxford in September, 1724, little 

 more than a year prior to the issue of Gordon's famoTis folio from 

 the press, and when he must have been in frequent correspondence- 



