Although it is always more difficult to demonstrate an absence than a presence, a survey of nineteenth-century Scottish historiography, literature and popular culture exposes a distinct lack of interest in Roman Scotland. After Chalmers’ bid to reclaim the nation's classical heritage, serious scholarly discussions (which clearly excludes eccentric oddities like Andrew Small's Interesting Roman Antiquities Recently Discovered in Fife discussed in the previous chapter) were to be few and far between over the following decades. The ways in which Scots saw themselves, also how they (and indeed all Britons) thought about Rome, were changing. As Rosemary Sweet points out, ‘the admiration for all things Roman … no longer commanded the same position of intellectual dominance that had characterised the antiquarian world of the early eighteenth century’; her suggestion that ‘by the early nineteenth century, the study of Roman antiquities had been consolidated’, however, can be comfortably applied to England, but less convincingly to Scotland.

Much recent scholarship on Romanist antiquarianism focuses exclusively on the long eighteenth century and has little interest in what came directly after. Richard Hingley's The Recovery of Roman Britain continues into the following century, but makes no mention of Scotland after the 1793 publication of William Roy's Military Antiquities of the Romans in Britain; thereafter Hingley's references to ‘Roman Britain’, like those of the nineteenth-century historians he discusses, actually mean Roman England.