LOL. Gotta love the Scots. No foreign power ever controlled them. Ever. And if you dare suggest it ever happened at any time every in their history, well them's fightin words!! One of my favorite quotes (admittedly it may be fictional) is from the Roman attempt at occupation of what today is Scotland - "ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant." Roughly translated as the Romans make a desert and call it peace.
Yeah, I get a kick out of that.
The Scots cowered in Ireland, wetting their kilts, for nearly 100 years after the Roman legions left Britain.
During the early Middle Ages, the Scots left Ireland and carved out what is now Scotland because there wasn’t much competition, and because they were careful not to tick off the Vikings who were all over the north and Ireland itself.
The Romans’ last big encursion north of the wall was to take care of the local ne’er-do-wells who’d made trouble for Rome’s allies and trading partners up there. Rome’s reach was always well beyond its borders.
That was in the 2nd c.
The impression on Roman commanders was that there wasn’t anything or anyone of much value in Caledonia. Had the conquest been wrapped up by Agricola, as he intended, history might have been marginally different. There’s evidence of a Roman presence in Ireland, in the form of perhaps a fortified trading post, north of Dublin, and perhaps there was a reconnaissance in force, a la Julius Caesar’s two landings in SE England.
Britain was nearly entirely quiet under Roman rule, and was a popular place to settle thanks to the easier winters (the Gulf stream). Summers not too hot, winters not too cold. Ruins of Roman-era villas all seem to have hypercausts for under-the-floor heating.
The Romans built a drainage and navigation canal (the Cardyke) late in the 1st or early in the 2nd century, and I think most of it is still there, doing its drainage job. It probably served Roman-era Britons well (midlands coal wound up in Roman contexts, iron metallurgy, that kind of thing), but after the legions left, the Angles probably found it a convenient method of settling in the middle of the island (the Kdm of Mercia was Angle). Whoops.
“Gotta love the Scots. No foreign power ever controlled them. Ever. “
Well:
1. The Scotti were an Irish tribe who conquered the Picts (the aboriginal tribes of Scotland)
2. The Danes conquered parts of it
3. The Britons conquered part of it around Strathclyde.
4. The Normans conquered the lowlands (Robert the Bruce had Norman blood,)
5. The English conquered them under Edward I Longshanks
The Scots didn't yet exist during the Roman occupation of (parts of) Britain.
Also, the Scots willingly surrendered their sovereignty to the English in 1707, largely because they'd dumped a sizeable portion of their treasury into a disasterous real estate deal gone bad in Panama, and the English agreed to help cover their markers.