Blood of the Isles

by Bryan Sykes

  In the green and white Fair Corrie.

  Coire Lagain is a high place in the Cuillin Hills of Skye, hemmed in by hundreds of feet of the steep rock ramparts that protect the high ridge. But this is not at all a romanticized description of the land, for the poem goes on to another familiar theme which permeates the culture of the Highlands – that of loss and unquestionable sadness.

  Multitude of springs and fewness of young men

  today, yesterday and last night keeping me awake:

  the miserable loss of our country’s people

  clearing of tenants, exile, exploitation

  and the great island is seen with its winding shores

  a hoodie-crow squatting on each dun

  black soft squinting hoodie-crows

  who think themselves all eagles.

  The loss which Sorley mourns in this and other poems is at once the people forced to leave their homes during the notorious Highland Clearances in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and also the language, Gaelic, which was the language of his poems. At first he wrote in Gaelic and English but in 1933, when he was twenty-two, he decided to write only in Gaelic and he destroyed those of his English works that he could lay his hands on.

  Gaelic and her cousin tongues are a strong unifying force of the Celtic lands. Their fortunes, in Scotland, in Ireland, in Wales and also in Brittany, are a barometer of the self-confidence of the people who call themselves Celts. Since Celtic was a linguistic definition in the first place, this seems only appropriate.

  In Skye, as in many parts of the Highlands, there is a palpable sense of a Gaelic revival, a renaissance in poetry and music and above all in the language. The steady decline in Gaelic speakers – it is spoken as a first tongue by only a few thousand people in the Hebrides, most of them in middle age or beyond – has been halted by the welcome introduction in 1986, after decades of lobbying, of Gaelic-medium education in primary schools, where all lessons are given in that language. Most children whose parents have the choice opt for lessons in the Gaelic stream rather than the English alternative. Now Skye children can go right the way through school being taught in Gaelic and, in recent years, go on to tertiary education in Gaelic at the world’s first Gaelic College at Sabhal Mor Ostaig in Sleat on the southernmost of Skye’s many peninsulas. Whether this very hard-fought initiative will reverse the decline in the language in the long term remains to be seen, but I have never visited a higher education institute anywhere in the world that is so brimming with confidence and enthusiasm for its mission in life.

  Sabhal Mor kindly allowed me to use their library for my research – a library with what must be the best view in the world. Sabhal Mor (pronounced Sall More and meaning simply ‘Big Barn’ in Gaelic) is perched on a promontory overlooking the Sound of Sleat; the view takes in the distant outline of Ardnamurchan and the sands of Morar to the south and up to the hills above Glenelg and Kyle of Lochalsh to the north. But straight ahead, across 3 miles of blue and wind-blown sea, are the mountains of Knoydart, yellow and brown in the autumn setting sun. Knoydart, between the secret lochs of Nevis and Hiourn, was once a prosperous community of twenty-seven crofting townships and 3,500 people. Now it is empty, save for a cluster of white houses I can see on the shore at Airor. The Knoydart estate was cleared of people in the 1840s by the landlord, Sir Ranald McDonnell of Glengarry, to make way for the more profitable sheep. This is an all too familiar story in the Highlands, though nowhere was as thoroughly cleansed as Knoydart, and it has been vividly recounted many times. Here is one from Neil Gunn, a Scottish novelist of the early twentieth century:

  As always the recollection is dominated by dramatic images – the ragged remnants of a once proud peasantry hounded from the hills by the factors and police were driven aboard disease-ridden ships bound for outlandish colonies, their families broken, their ministers compliant and the collective agony sounded by the pibroch and the wailing of pathetic humanity.

  By and large, the English were blamed for this human translocation and spiritual genocide, not that the landlords were themselves English but came from a heavily anglicized Scottish aristocracy who spent most of their time in London. Still the Celtic identity, in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, and the language, defines itself in part at least as being ‘not English’. That is not to say it is an aggressive demarcation, and as an Englishman with very little Gaelic living on Skye I have never been made to feel less than welcome.

  Of course, the main emigration of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whether by the forced hand of the landlord or for the opportunities for a better life on offer in Glasgow and the other industrial towns of the Central Belt or the colonies, meant that as people left Scotland, and Ireland too, they arrived somewhere else. Estimates vary, but one set of figures has it that there are 28 million people of Scottish and 16 million of Irish descent spread throughout the world. Even if these figures are way off the mark, and they are conservative estimates, there are now far more Celts living overseas than in the Isles. Most made their homes in the New World, mainly the USA and Canada, but emigration to Australia, New Zealand and to a lesser extent South Africa adds millions to this list. In some places, like the southern part of South Island, New Zealand, the Scots practically took over the whole country and, tellingly, the principal town Dunedin has the Gaelic name for Edinburgh.

  Many emigrating Celts and their descendants did extremely well, of course, but ironically, given the circumstances of their leaving, they were also sometimes guilty of dispossessing the indigenous people of their tribal lands. As Paul Besu, a social anthropologist from University College London, writes:

  Scots pioneers in Victoria (Australia) were often land-grabbers and squatters who were notorious for their ruthlessness and the Scots, like the English, Welsh and Irish, played a full part in the harsh treatment of Aboriginal peoples. It was ironic that some of the most notoriously involved were Highlanders who themselves had suffered clearance and privation in the old country.

  Paul Besu was researching what it was that drew the descendants of these emigrants to search out their roots in Scotland and he interviewed people about their reasons for making these journeys from the other side of the world. Tens of thousands of Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders come to Scotland and Ireland every year to seek out and placate their innermost desires to see and feel the homelands of their ancestors. Of course there are comparable numbers of visitors on similar missions to England too, to reconnect, but theirs is a slightly different mission, perhaps less romantic and more matter of fact. The general causes of their emigration do not usually include being driven from the land.

  I have experienced the thirst for roots first hand through the company I set up to help people trace their origins using DNA. We have thousands of customers, many from precisely those locations that once received Scots and Irish emigrants. Often a DNA test will accompany a journey to the homeland and even when it does not, a DNA test which roots a person to Scotland or Ireland makes a living link between descendant and ancestor. It is all the more powerful as this talisman is carried across the generations in every cell of the body, as it was in the bodies of ancestors, including the ones who made the journeys ‘aboard disease-ridden ships bound for outlandish colonies’. It was there.

  There have been, as you may have suspected, plenty of theories about what draws people to search out their roots. Behind the sociology-speak, such as

  the contemporary quest for roots is a response to the trauma of displacement associated with migration which has become a global commonplace and individuals are able to conduct meaningful, morally defensible and authentic self-narratives from the ambiguities and discontinuities of their migrant histories, thus recovering a sense of being ‘at home’ in the ‘maelstrom’ of modernity . . .

  are much pithier and more articulate reasons, as revealed in Paul Besu’s survey. An anonymous Australian from New South Wales simply said, ‘I want to be able to tell my children where thei
r ancestors came from. It gives them a sense of belonging in a world that sometimes moves too fast.’

  Another Australian, improbably called Anne Roots, told Besu:

  I am a fourth-generation Australian but I know that the thread reaching back to the obscure past has never been broken. The process of evolution has failed to break the translucent thread that is mysteriously joined to the Isle of Skye. I cannot explain some of my experiences, or why I wanted to go to the Hebrides before I knew some of my forebears came from there. My only explanation is that the spirit of my ancestors kept calling me back.

  Janet, from Geelong, south of Melbourne, made the fascinating comparison when she visited her ancestral home of Paabay, an island in the Sound of Harris, that ‘to my mind the Celt, in a British context, is to the Anglo-Saxon what the Aboriginal, in an Australian context, is to the settler.’

  The intense spirituality of the Australian Aborigine, the connection to ancestors and the homeland, is in a muted form reflected in the search for Celtic roots. Displaced by the invader and forced to the margins before being forced into exile overseas, the Celt is perceived to be the British – or even the European – aboriginal. She continues, ‘to have Celtic roots is to demonstrate that one also has a rich, tribal heritage rooted deeply within a landscape that is both mystical and mythical.’

  And it is the case that in ‘New Age’ bookshops around the world, titles on Celtic spirituality are found on the same shelves as Aboriginal and Native American material in the same genre. However, be warned that I heard the distinguished American sociologist Michael Waltzer in a recent lecture dismiss excess spirituality as ‘the solace of a conquered people’.

  Before we move on to more solid ground, let me just mention Frank from Boulder, Colorado. After spending twelve years with Native American teachers, Frank took part in the Sun Dance ceremony of the Lakota people, an experience which set him on the path to discovering his Celtic heritage. He now describes himself as ‘a poet, ecopsychologist and visionary teacher in the Celtic spiritual tradition’. Frank leads pilgrimages to the Scottish Highlands to promote what he calls ‘Highland cultural soul retrieval’.

  The range of emotion covered by the Celtic umbrella is vast, from a feeling of displacement and affinity with aboriginal groups, to a successful marketing tool, to a political rallying call, to the focus for sporting identity, even fanaticism. Can genetics lift the veil and see what lies beneath? Faced with this multiplicity of meaning for Celt and Celtic, what range of possibilities should we expect genetics to reveal? Might we be able to detect the waves of a large-scale migration envisaged by Edward Lhuyd? Or might we find evidence that what we now call Celts have been here all along? Will we find any genetic similarity between the present-day Celts and the people of the rest of Britain, or will there be a sharp divide? And where should we look for origins? Though not absolutely essential for success in historical genetics, it is always best to formulate some scenarios that can be tested.

  One of the most striking emblems of the Celtic brand, the intricate naturalistic knotwork that inspires the modern Celtic jeweller, had its origin not in the Atlantic communities linked by a common language, but in central Europe. The evolution of this highly distinctive art form coincided with the rise of rich settlements north of the Alps, centres which controlled the trade of goods like amber and tin, flowing south to the Mediterranean world and their exchange for luxuries, such as wine and jewellery. In all likelihood, these luxury imports were used by local chieftains as a badge of status and also distributed among their subordinates in exchange for favours and services.

  The trading settlements spanned the heartland of Europe where its great navigable rivers converge in a relatively small area in eastern France and Switzerland. The Loire going westward to the Atlantic, the Rhône south to the Mediterranean, the Rhine north to the North Sea and the Danube east to the Black Sea. These were the arteries of prehistoric Europe along which flowed the life-blood of trade. Whoever controlled the heads of the rivers and the land between them controlled the trade – and grew very rich on it. At the peak, around 600 BC, there was enough wealth to stimulate and support the production of a local style of craftwork, and this is where we see the first appearance, principally in the delicate metalwork, of what we now call Celtic Art. The La Tène style, which we now most strongly associate with the Celtic brand, began not on the ocean coasts of the Atlantic, but within sight of the Alps.

  But was it just the goods and the ideas that moved, or was it the people migrating en masse from central Europe to the far west? Although there is very good archaeological and historical evidence that people from this region did indeed move in numbers east and south to Greece, where they attacked the temple at Delphi in 273 BC, before finally settling in central Turkey, there is no evidence at all that the ancestors of today’s Celts of the Isles took the opposite track and ended up in Britain. Yet, although support for the popular notion that the Celtic people of the Isles travelled across land from central Europe may be entirely lacking, we may still find the evidence for it in the genetics.

  However, the most obvious of routes linking today’s Celts of the Isles is not the land at all but the sea. Motorways and fast roads have inverted in our minds the comparative difficulty of moving across land and water. In ancient times, and indeed until the last two centuries, getting around by boat was a lot easier than travelling over the land. Until the rise of, first, the railway and then the car and the lorry, water was the way to travel. Was a sea route to the Isles the more likely?

  At school we are taught that ‘civilization’ arose around the Mediterranean, in the ancient cities of Egypt, and that we trace the origins of our culture and our political processes to the countries bordering that almost landlocked sea. Our taught impression of life beyond the Strait of Gibraltar is one of barbarism and savagery, rather like the Greeks’ view of the Keltoi. We are taught nothing of the vigorous culture and the technological achievements of the Atlantic seaboard, the coastline stretching from North Africa in the south 2,000 miles to Shetland off the north coast of Scotland and beyond to Scandinavia. But this Atlantic zone has a prehistory as ancient and as colourful as any in the Mediterranean. There were people living along this coastline 8,000 years ago and they were using boats not just for cruising close to the shore but for venturing out into deep water, judging by the types of fish whose remains litter their encampments. None of these sea-going vessels survives, which is no surprise since they would have been made of perishable wood and animal skins. By 6,000 years ago, agriculture had seeped into the region via the Mediterranean coastline, evidence once again of the maritime traffic. The first, literally, hard evidence of widespread exchanges along the coast came in the form of distinctive polished stone axes, manufactured in Brittany, which found their way all along the coast of France and Spain to the south, and north across the sea to Cornwall. But the most dramatic examples of continuity along the Atlantic zone are the great stone monuments, the megaliths, which rise from the ground from Orkney and Lewis in the north to Spain and Portugal in the south. These are a purely Atlantic phenomenon, owing nothing at all to the Mediterranean world. Could it be that it was by this route that the Celts of the Isles first arrived?

  4

  THE SKULL SNATCHERS

  The first forays of science into the highly charged arguments about British origins came at the height of the Victorian enthusiasm for Saxon superiority. It is hard to imagine how ingrained was the sense that the people of Britain were split into two entirely different ‘races’ and how superior the Saxons felt about themselves. Just to remind us, I quote again from the extremely popular if eccentric author, the surgeon Robert Knox. He wrote that ‘Race is everything, literature, science, art – in a word, civilisation depends on it.’ And Knox left his readers in no doubt where his sympathies lay in the debate on the racial character of Celt and Saxon. The Saxon, he claims, ‘cannot sit still an instant, so powerful is the desire for work, labour, excitement, muscular exertion’. The
Celts, on the other hand – judging by such woodcut illustrations as ‘A Celtic groupe, such as may be seen at any time in Marylebone, London’, in which a group of deformed and decidedly dodgy characters glowers from the page – are the complete opposite: irredeemable malingerers.

  The text is no more flattering. On the notorious Highland Clearances, he writes: ‘the dreamy Celt exclaims at the parting moment from the horrid land of his birth “we’ll maybe return to Lochaber no more.” And why should you return, miserable and wretched man, to the dark and filthy hovel you never sought to purify?’

  Knox pulls out all the stops when it comes to the Celts of Ireland: ‘the source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland. The race must be forced from the soil, by fair means if possible, still they must leave.’ A few sentences later is an entreaty to genocide no less chilling in intent than in Bosnia or Rwanda:

  The Orange Club of Ireland [an extreme protestant group] is a Saxon confederation for the clearing of the land of all papists and jacobites; this means Celts. If left to themselves they would clear them out, as Cromwell proposed, by the sword; it would not require six weeks to accomplish this work.

  By the time Knox was penning his poisonous invective, in the mid-nineteenth century, science was making itself felt in all walks of life. The appeal to rational arbitration of such issues as the racial purity, or otherwise, of Celt and Saxon had obvious attractions to those with a more liberal outlook than the likes of Robert Knox. The most articulate of these, Matthew Arnold, literary critic and a prominent champion of Celtic literature, despaired of the wedge being driven between Celt and Saxon, not just by fanatics like Knox, but by powerful and influential members of the British Establishment. Men like Lord Lyndhurst, whose description of the Irish as ‘Aliens in speech, in religion, in blood, makes the estrangement [of Celtic and Saxon] immense, incurable, fatal.’ Feeling forced to react, Matthew Arnold makes an optimistic appeal: ‘Fanciful as this notion may seem, I am inclined to think that the march of science will insist that there is no such original chasm between the Celt and the Saxon as we once popularly imagined.’