Now here is a premise for melancholy. In the splendid Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, Scotland, is a row of ancient Roman altars. They once stood at the northernmost fringes of the Roman Empire, near the Antonine Wall, built in the decades after 142 A.D.

Who was the last to use these altars and present gifts to Roman deities or local gods on their surfaces? Did worship endure longer at the borders of empire than within? In the end, were they toppled or simply forgotten and abandoned? If stones could speak…

(Photograph: Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius)