This is probably the most contentious section of the Cosmographer’s treatment of Britain. Rivet & Smith (1979, 196) have refused to see it as a list of forts on the Antonine Wall, which is without question what the author would have us believe it to be. This has led others to criticise what has been seen as over-enthusiastic pruning of the text (Frere 1980, 422; Jones & Mattingly 1990, 33). I find it hard to accept that the Cosmographer saw a line joining place symbols in his map source and so completely bungled his reading of the words beside those symbols that he was able to attach only one correct name to them as Rivet and Smith suggest. Of all the errors in the text which are results of the author’s incompetence, this would be the greatest by far. Moreover, the one name he correctly attached to a symbol on the Wall – according to this hypothesis – happens to be the only one with epigraphic confirmation: this has to be a coincidence too far.
Alternatively we can take the approach I am advocating here: to assume that the list is basically trustworthy – if corrupt and too short – and only to dismiss a name if there are compelling reasons to identify it with a place not on the line of the Wall. Without epigraphic confirmation of the names there can be no guarantee that the identifications I shall propose are correct, but we would be foolish to abandon the Cosmographer’s plain statement about what he is listing.