Blood of the Isles

by Bryan Sykes

  That Skara Brae is still standing and not strewn about the countryside has a lot to do with the remarkable rock found all over Orkney and Caithness. The sandstone comes in flat slabs, about 5–10 centimetres thick. Even without mortar, anything built with Orkney flagstones is not going to fall down. Ruined buildings, 100 years old, which are a not uncommon sight all over rural Scotland, are still standing. Their roof timbers have decayed and collapsed, but the walls of flagstone houses are as solid as ever. Metre-square flagstones, split even thinner, are even used as roof tiles or stuck upright in the ground as fencing.

  The charm of Skara Brae is in its ordinariness. I have to admit that, though I enjoy standing in awe amidst the great monuments from the past, I feel strangely detached from them. But at Skara Brae I really can imagine people living there, coming in from the wind to the warm, snug interiors, recounting, in whatever tongue, the events of the day. The beach at Skaill just next to Skara Brae is strewn with broken flagstones and when I was there, during the school summer holidays, families were playing on the beach. But instead of building sandcastles – and there is plenty of good sand – the children were constructing their own miniature stone circles. These rocks are just asking to be stood upright, and that’s exactly what has happened all over Orkney. The Ring of Brodgar, about 5 miles inland from Skara Brae, was originally a circle of sixty stones 7 metres high and 100 metres across. Twenty-one remain in position. A mile in one direction is the stone circle of Bookan, while the same distance in the other direction is another, Stenness, and half a mile further lies the astonishing passage tomb of Maes Howe. Like the tomb at Newgrange on the Boyne, Maes Howe is aligned so that the sun shines along the low passage at the winter solstice and floods the inner chamber with light. Once again, the wonderful building quality of the rock makes Maes Howe appear much younger than its 5,000 years, the stone slabs neatly laid and corbelled at the top to form a roof. These are only the major structures. All around are burial mounds, many not yet excavated, single standing stones and other remnants of a vibrant ritual past.

  The sheer scale of the Orkney megalithic monuments, and the equivalents in Ireland and all along the Atlantic coast, is a testament to the economic effects of agriculture. However like us they may have been, the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who first settled in Scotland simply could not have assembled the manpower to build these great monuments. There just were not enough of them. The easy life on the shoreline could support only a few thousand people. It was the coming of agriculture to Scotland, beginning about 6,000 years ago, that boosted the population so that, only a few centuries later, there was enough manpower to construct these vast monuments. But did this evidently greatly increased population mean the immigration of large numbers of people, or did the original Mesolithic inhabitants adapt and proliferate? Were the descendants of the fishermen of Cramond and Oronsay replaced, or at least overlaid, by new arrivals? There is no firm archaeological evidence either way, and it is one of the principal questions to ask of the genetic evidence.

  There is, however, on Orkney, ample evidence that, whether or not the inhabitants of Skara Brae and the builders of Maes Howe were descended from the original stock, they were not by any means the last people to take an interest in this green and fertile land. In the centre of Kirkwall, the capital of Orkney, stands the magnificent medieval cathedral of St Magnus, built in the mid-twelfth century. It is as impressive a piece of late Norman architecture as anything in England. But Norman it is not. This is a Viking cathedral, started in 1137 by Rognvald, Earl of Orkney. Vikings began to arrive in Orkney, and in Shetland to the north, at the end of the eighth century. There is no exact date, but this coincides with the first of the Viking raids in England on the undefended monastery of Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast of England. The date of that raid is known very precisely. It took place on 8 June 793. The raiders carried off the rich monastery treasures and returned whence they came. That may have been Norway, but it is more likely that the base for the raid on Lindisfarne was Orkney.

  Lindisfarne was the first of many raids. The next year a Viking fleet attacked Jarrow, down the coast from Lindisfarne. The following year, 795, the raids switched to the west coast of Scotland and St Columba’s church on Iona was attacked. Iona suffered twice more, in 802 and 806. Enough was enough and the monastery was evacuated back to Kells in Ireland – well away from the coast. The Viking raids were only the first flurries in a campaign of invasion and settlement that dominated the Isles for the next 400 years. By the time Rognvald began to build his magnificent cathedral, the Vikings had long been in control of Orkney and Shetland. They had established bases in Ireland at Dublin, Waterford, Wexford and Limerick, though their hold there was always precarious and they never managed to get control of Ireland from the High Kings. But that was not for lack of trying. In the 830s a large Viking raiding fleet appeared regularly around the Irish coast and by the 840s they had built Dublin up as a major base for slaving and for attacking Britain. The Dublin Vikings took sides in the ceaseless wars between the feuding Irish kings, but made the bad mistake of joining the losing side and, in 902, quickly evacuated Dublin and retreated to the Isle of Man to escape the advancing army of their conquerors. But they were back in force by 907.

  The Irish bases were at the end of a supply chain of men and weapons, based on Orkney and extending from the Hebrides to the Isle of Man and, on the mainland, to parts of Argyll. By AD 1000, Norse power had reached its peak and the Vikings were gradually forced back towards Orkney. They lost Limerick in 965, Dublin in 999 and were finally beaten at the battle of Clontarf in 1014. This famous battle is remembered not only for the Irish victory but also for the death of Brian Boru, King of Cashel and High King of Ireland. The Norsemen maintained their grip in Man and the Western Isles until well into the twelfth century, when they were driven out by Somerled, a Celtic hero we will hear more about. Eventually they lost Orkney and Shetland when the two island groups were annexed by James III of Scotland in 1468.

  Although the initial Viking raids on Lindisfarne and the other coastal monasteries were motivated by material avarice, and the glory of returning home with conspicuous wealth, it was not long before the Vikings began to settle. Confined to a coastal strip of western Norway between the mountains and the sea, it is not hard to understand the attraction of the rich farmland of Orkney and the northern Scottish mainland. Shetland, too, which was much nearer home, was also attractive for settlement, though less fertile than Orkney. As well as being scarce, farmland in Norway was handed down to the eldest son. Younger sons had few prospects at home and the chance of getting land overseas was a great temptation. How extensive the Norse settlement of Scotland eventually became is one more question I hoped to answer using genetics. Certainly their cultural influence has been overwhelming. All place-names in Orkney and Shetland have a Norse origin, and Norn, a hybrid Scots/Norse dialect, was spoken there until the end of the eighteenth century. And yet positively identified Viking archaeological remains are few and far between in Scotland.

  An exception is the site at Jarlshof on the southern tip of Shetland, where a small indigenous community was replaced by a series of Viking longhouses some time in the ninth century. These were impressive structures. Though only the base of the walls survives – the building stone is far more irregular in Shetland than in Orkney – the typical layout of a Norse longhouse is easy to see. Built of stone with an earth core, the houses are typically 20 metres long by 5 across, with door spaces opposite each other in the long wall. There are two or possibly three houses at Jarlshof and their position on the site of early, circular, houses might indicate a violent settlement, although that cannot be taken for granted. Grouped longhouses, as at Jarlshof, are unusual; single isolated farmhouses are more the rule, giving no indication of whether the settlement was amicable or violent.

  If the genetics proved that the Norse settlement in Scotland had been extensive, then who was it that had been replaced? This is the time to introduce the people who, ab
ove all others in the Isles, are surrounded by the greatest mystery – the Picts.

  11

  THE PICTS

  On 15 July 1995 the final section of the Skye Bridge was lowered into place. Three months later, at 11.00 a.m. on 16 October, the Secretary of State for Scotland declared the bridge open and, for the first time since the Ice Age, the Isle of Skye was joined by solid connection to the mainland. The very next day the protests started. The target of the protesters was a combination of the very high toll, the loss of the ferry and the suspicion that the main financial backers, the Bank of America, were making far too much money. By 1.00 a.m. there was a queue of thirty-five cars all refusing to pay. Welcome to the spirited world of island protest. There followed years of active opposition, non-payment, even one imprisonment. Hilariously, those charged with refusing to pay the toll had to make the 140-mile round trip to the Sheriff Court at Dingwall, which once again meant crossing the bridge, where they of course refused to pay, thus incurring further criminal charges. The Skye Bridge toll became a cause célèbre until eventually the Scottish Executive bought the bridge and the tolls were scrapped on 21 December 2004.

  Though Skye is firmly Gaelic, the protests were coordinated by one Robbie the Pict. Not just a sobriquet but a formal change of name. Born Brian Robertson, Robbie the Pict is a celebrated campaigner against all kinds of modern evil. He has been arrested over 300 times, refuses to pay road tax and has formed his own sovereign state on one acre of land in the north end of Skye. There are one or two other people who choose to link their name to this obscure ancient people. I am regularly contacted by one ‘Nechtan the Pict’, eager to enlist my help in recovering DNA from an allegedly royal Pictish body found in Perthshire. Clearly it means something to be thought of as a Pict. So who were they?

  Although the Picts have been garlanded with an air of mystery, with book titles such as The Puzzle of the Picts that capture the imagination with hints of a lost people, the answer is almost bound to be more prosaic. The derivation of the name is Picti, the generic nickname the Romans gave to the indigenous inhabitants of the Isles. It was not just the northern tribes that were given this description. Any tribes the Romans encountered who either wore tattooes or adorned their bodies with wode earned the uncomplimentary nickname. Picti, literally ‘the Painted People’, is also from the same root as Pretani, the Gaelic term which, according to the Romans, the islanders used to describe themselves and from which, so some historians believe, the name Britain itself derives. As the Romans occupied more and more of the Isles and developed separate names for the tribes they conquered, the only peoples left with the original nickname were the tribes living in the far north. All tribes north of the Antonine Wall, which ran between the Clyde and the Forth, were automatically Picts.

  The material remains of the Picts are extremely impressive, though nowhere numerous. About 200 carved symbol stones and rock inscriptions have survived, mainly in the north and east of the Scottish mainland and on Orkney. Even though they are for the most part badly weathered, the symbol stones reveal a mastery of naturalistic relief and abstract carvings. Most of the inscriptions and carvings date from the fourth to the seventh centuries AD, the later ones incorporating Christian symbols in the wake of St Columba’s conversions. They are not close to any of the other contemporary styles to be found in the Isles, not Roman, Saxon or even Irish, adding further mystique to the Pictish enigma.

  The Picts also left behind a collection of remarkable stone structures unlike any other in the Isles – the brochs. These take your breath away, especially when you realize that they were built over 2,000 years ago. Their form is similar wherever they are found. Round towers, tapering inwards at the top rather like a power station cooling tower, these huge stone buildings were once the largest structures in the whole of the Isles. Brochs typically enclose a central area 10–12 metres in diameter, with walls only slightly lower. They have double-skinned walls, held together by flat stones which form inner galleries within the walls. As well as providing storage space, these gaps, just like cavity walls in modern houses, would have insulated the interior and kept the heat in. This is easiest to see where there has been a partial collapse, such as at Dun Telve, near Glenelg on the mainland opposite Skye, or at Dun Carloway on the west coast of Lewis, a few miles north of the stone circle at Calanais. From gaps left in the inner walls, it looks as if the central area was fitted with wooden galleries, the whole structure resembling Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in miniature. The brochs were not roofed, so fires in the central living area could vent straight into the open air.

  At first sight brochs appear to have been built for defence and they would certainly have been extremely difficult to attack successfully. The view from the ramparts would have given plenty of warning of any hostile approach and the blank, windowless external walls were impregnable. However, it is not at all certain whether brochs were built to withstand attack – or just to show off. Some archaeologists believe they are simply a natural evolution of the much smaller Pictish roundhouses typical of the region. Since there is no evidence of attacks, such as the reddening that discolours the stone of buildings that have been set alight, it is more likely that their impressive bulk was valued for just that purpose – to impress. The standard design, and the relatively short time over which the brochs were built, in the first and second centuries BC, suggests that there may have been mobile teams of masons and labourers who toured the Highlands and Islands and built brochs to order. That in turn must mean that the local landowners were wealthy enough to afford it – and it isn’t hard to imagine how rivalry between them would be a spur to taller and taller brochs. Finds at the broch at Gurness on Orkney show that the local aristocrat who lived there was not merely active locally. Fragments of Roman amphorae, or wine carriers, link Gurness to a recorded visit of submission by a Pictish king to the Emperor Claudius at Colchester in AD 43. Whoever the Picts were, they were certainly not primitive relics of the Stone Age.

  There has always been a lingering question about what language the Picts spoke. For many years, some linguists believed they may have spoken an ancient tongue unrelated to the Indo-European family which embraces almost all other European languages. To me, and probably to you, while I can see there might be a family connection between, say, Italian and Spanish, it is not at all obvious that German, Portuguese and French are all related. However, be assured that they are and that, along with practically every other European language and others, like Sanskrit from the Indian subcontinent, their grammatical structure shows that they have evolved from a common root. The only living exception in western Europe is Euskara, the language of the Basques of north-east Spain and south-west France. Euskara is totally different from any other European language. The grammar is different and the words have quite different roots.

  Some scholars, keen to mark out the Picts as an ancient people, relics of the Old Stone Age, have pointed to the few examples of ambiguous runic carvings as evidence that they spoke a language unrelated to any other Indo-European tongue. The truth is that, unless we have more evidence, we may never know. Since there are no written Pictish texts, and so very few surviving stone inscriptions, the language of the Picts enters the realms of the unknowable. Which all adds to the mystery.

  Unfortunately, there is virtually no guidance from mythology as to the origin of the Picts. Unlike the rich mythologies of the Irish, the Welsh and the English, the mythology of the Picts is almost non-existent. That does not mean it never existed; it surely must have done. It is more a reflection of the absence of writing or, more accurately, the absence of anyone else to write it down until it was too late. In the rest of the Isles, it fell to Christian monks to record, or rather to mould, oral myths. For some reason, this did not happen with the Picts, even though they were among the first people in Britain to have been converted to Christianity after Columba arrived from Ireland in the mid-sixth century. However, the majority of modern scholars now consider that Pictish was closely allied to the st
rand of Gaelic spoken throughout the rest of Britain and surviving in modern Welsh. If Gaelic was the language of the Picts, it would have been the P-Gaelic of Britain and not the Q-Gaelic of Ireland. If so, then why is the Scottish Gaelic spoken in the Hebrides and now taught in schools in the Highlands and Islands so closely allied to Irish Q-Gaelic and not to the harsher P-Gaelic of the Welsh? For the answer we must look to the west, and to the peninsula of Kintyre, the long finger that reaches almost as far as Ireland itself.

  Across the sea from Kintyre, in County Antrim, close to the Giant’s Causeway, the Irish kings of Dál Riata began to look for new conquests, and the lands visible across the sea were the natural target. In the first centuries of the first millennium AD, the Dál Riata founded three colonies – on the islands of Islay and Mull and on the Kintyre peninsula. They called their possessions Ar-gael – hence Argyll.

  The Picts briefly regained Argyll in the sixth century. When Columba arrived we know that it was a Pictish king who gave him the land on Iona in 563. Shortly afterwards, the Dál Riata got a new king, Aidan, who set out to reestablish the colonies in Argyll. If this wasn’t enough to upset the Picts, he made matters worse by attacking their possessions on Orkney and on the Isle of Man. He also annoyed the Ui Neill High King of Ireland by these unauthorized adventures. Matters came to a head in 575 when Columba, himself a member of the Ui Neill clan, arbitrated the treaty by which Aidan agreed to pay the High King a military tribute while keeping his maritime revenue for himself. To make the most of this outcome, Aidan built up a strong navy, which is just as well, because he lost most of his land battles. The treaty of 575 kept the peace in Ireland for fifty years, but the Dál Riata never fully recovered their Irish possessions. Their centre of power switched to Argyll and their territorial ambitions were directed north and east towards the lands of the Picts.