The Cat Stane is a large, roughly shaped boulder standing near the River Almond at the edge of Edinburgh Airport, almost certainly a prehistoric monolith (probably Neolithic or Bronze Age) that was reused as a grave-marker in the post-Roman period. Its weathered Latin inscription, conventionally read as "IN OC TVMVLO IACIT VETTA F(ILIA) VICTI" ("In this tomb lies Vetta, daughter of Victus" or "son of Victricius"), dates the burial use to the fifth or sixth century AD.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The stone is significant as one of the northernmost examples of a sub-Roman Christian-style memorial inscription in the British Isles, attesting to the persistence of Latin literacy and Romanised commemorative practice in the territory of the Votadini/Gododdin well after the formal end of Roman Britain. It belongs to a small but important group of early inscribed stones in southern Scotland (alongside the Yarrowkirk Stone and the Catstane at Kirkliston's wider milieu) that mark the emergence of a Christianised British elite.
Excavations directed by Kenneth Steer and others in 1864 and again in 1977 revealed a substantial long-cist cemetery clustered around the stone, with numerous extended inhumations in slab-lined graves oriented broadly east–west, radiocarbon-dated to the fifth to
The Cat Stane is a large, roughly shaped boulder standing near the River Almond at the edge of Edinburgh Airport, almost certainly a prehistoric monolith (probably Neolithic or Bronze Age) that was reused as a grave-marker in the post-Roman period. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a tomb site from the Roman period in Britain.
Cat Stane is classified as a Roman tomb — a civilian site in the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer. Roman Britain's archaeology encompasses thousands of sites ranging from legionary fortresses and marching camps to villas, temples and towns.
Several Roman sites lie within a short distance, including Cramond (4.7 km), Velunia(te) (13.9 km), Castle Greg (18 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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