Richmond and Crawford (1949, 15) linked the vagueness of this section with third-century administrative arrangements in the Borders region. This theory was developed by Steer (1958, 106) and has proved extremely popular with historians of Roman Britain (Frere 1987, 166; Cleary 1989, 51). This should give us cause to examine Rivet and Smith’s (1979, 212) claim that Richmond and Crawford were misled into treating the term locus as a technical term rather than an example of the Cosmographer’s vagueness and sloppy use of Latin.
Rivet and Smith argue that the Cosmographer used the term purely because the first name, which they read *Locus Maponi (1979, 393) on the basis of an inscription from Birrens, wrongly seemed to him to be one of a class rather than an isolated instance. This is a strange argument. If *Locus Maponi was the sole example of the class shown on the Cosmographer’s map source, why then did he group the following six or seven names with it? Rivet and Smith (1979, 212) regard this section as if it were one of the end of chapter supplementary lists where the author picked up names he had missed out earlier or repeated those he did not recognise as having listed already (as suggested by Dillemann 1979, 63).
However, it does not appear to be a list of that kind. If the Cosmographer were to pick up on omitted names, it is curious that he only does so in an area between Hadrian’s Wall and the Tay. It is also curious that none of these names looks like a repetition of a name which has already been listed. Four of them contain recognisable tribal names – *Nouantes, *Manauii, *Selgoues and *Dumnonii – and one is originally a river-name – *Taua. This leaves only Maponi and <Mixa>/<Minox> (if the two names are a doublet, as seems probable) as potential placenames proper.
It is likely – if not actually certain – that Rivet and Smith’s identification of the Cosmographer’s Maponi with the Lo(co) <Mabomi> of the Birrens inscription is correct. However, it is not necessarily correct to regard the loco- element of the name as Celtic. Indeed, the separate treatment of the two elements in the Birrens inscription suggests that the original name was not regarded by the stonemason as a Celtic compound, *Locomaponi. Rivet and Smith (1979, 393) argue that because there are no other examples of the Latin term locus (‘place’) being used toponymically in this way, it cannot have been so used here. This need not be an overriding argument. The political circumstances of the Borders region in the early third century were unique, and called for a unique settlement. Steer’s (1958, 106) hypothesis that a buffer-zone of dependent states was created and involved the setting-up of formal meeting-places to stabilise the province’s northern frontier is a very plausible deduction about how a lasting peace might have been achieved.
In such a settlement, tailored to suit the local condition, the names of the places created to formalise the new relationship between Rome and her allies in northern Britain might well have reflected the special nature of that settlement. The term locus could have been coined for these tribal meeting-places and might also have been a Latin equivalent of the Celtic *corio-, an element encountered in a number of Romano-British placenames of the Borders region.
We do not need therefore to reject this list as one of a set of places regarded as in some way special and distinct from those which were truly ‘Roman’ places. The map source used by the Cosmographer perhaps employed a special symbol for these places (as it seems to have utilised different symbols to differentiate permanent forts, marching camps and beaching points in the far north). The diversity of this list is not a muddle; rather it is a listing of places which the map designated as being somehow different or exotic. What is most striking is that the Cosmographer has chosen to name only aliquanta (‘a few’), implying that his source showed more. Perhaps this is why we do not appear to have a locus for the Votadini.