Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms

by Alistair Moffat

  My grandmother had another name for the Muggers. After they struck their camp at Yetholm in the spring and they went on the road with their horses, carts and caravans, she called them the ‘Summer Walkers’. Looking back now their lives and their language seem to me to whisper the story of the Old Peoples. Far from being strangers, perhaps they have wandered home.

  4

  THE HORSEMEN

  Around 700 BC, several thousand years after the Old Peoples came, groups of horse-riding warriors were seen in the Tweed valley. They came from continental Europe and they spoke a language that I shall call P-Celtic. Tall, fair-headed and vigorous, they brought a military technology based on the horse and chariot which must have given them an immediate and terrifying dominance over the river-folk they found in southern Scotland.

  It is impossible to know exactly when and in what numbers the P-Celts came but it is clear that their culture quickly overlaid the Old Peoples’. Their names are everywhere in the Tweed and Teviot valleys, describing all kinds of geographical features, as well as settlements, fortresses and, in time, the arrival of the Roman legions in AD 80. So widespread and so versatile, the names the P-Celts gave to the landscape suggest that they were indeed numerous and that they came to the Borders in successive waves.

  Celtic languages fall into two distinct groups and the differences will need to be explained clearly at the outset. Mistakes can easily be made as one set of names are gradually adapted and changed by another, and then another. The two groups are most readily (but by no means wholly) differentiated by their treatment of the primitive Indo-European qu sound: what is approximately heard in the words equal or quiet. One group of Celtic languages retained this sound, making it later into a hard c or aspirating into a ch. These are the Q-Celtic languages which now survive as Irish and Scots Gaelic and no longer as Manx Gaelic.

  The other group changed the qu sound into p. Around 700 BC this comprised Gaulish and what I will call Old Welsh, while now it comprises Welsh, Breton and (almost extinct) Cornish. The most handy distinguishing word is that for ‘head’: in Gaelic it is ceann with the qu sound retained, while in Welsh it is pen with it changed to a p. It is the origin of the phrase ‘minding your Ps and Qs’.

  The people who appeared in the Tweed valley spoke P-Celtic and gave names which sometimes they added to those of the Old Peoples; for example at the head of the river stands the high hill Ettrick Pen. But when, centuries later, Q-Celts came to the Borders, they changed P-Celtic names into their own cousin language. For example, Dun Medler, a place that will be very important to this story, became Drummelzier, sounding similar, meaning something quite different, hiding the vital information held in the original P-Celtic name.⁷

  There are many other differences to note: in numbers ceithir is four in Gaelic and pedwar is four in Welsh; pump is five in Welsh, coig in Gaelic. But there are also many similarities which can bury meaning as well as attempts at dating. Cadair in Welsh and cathair in Gaelic both mean ‘chair’ or ‘seat’ as it is used in a topographical sense, like Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. This makes P- and Q-Celtic toponymy tricky, and often entirely conjectural. But that is only as it should be. If our history was an open book, no one would read it.

  In point of fact there is no book to open on early Celtic history; they were an illiterate people whose stories remained in the mouths of their bards until medieval monkish scribes and others took the trouble to write many of them down. But that is emphatically not to say that Celtic languages are loose or imprecise. The opposite is true. For the sake of recollection and ease of recital Gaelic and Welsh are formal in structure, even rigid, but they sound rounded and lyrical even to an uncomprehending ear. Compared to the relative harshness of English, these languages are a river flowing with the music of onomatopoeia, alliteration, rhythm and rhyme.

  They are also the transports of memory. Even in their modern forms Gaelic and Welsh hold ancient secrets in their structure and vocabulary. Because they became literary languages relatively late in their development, and because they are now spoken by fringe cultures often rural in character, they have not changed as much as English. An old lady I met in Applecross described it neatly: ‘English,’ she said in Gaelic, ‘is the commercial language; Gaelic is for talking about the day we are having.’

  For the sake of respect for an old person I spoke to her formally using sibh for ‘you’ instead of the more familiar thu; something like the difference between vous and tu in French. For Celtic languages have retained not just the elaborate forms of politeness, they also appear to be as lexically tight as Ciceronian Latin. That is partly because they are actually close kin to the Italic group of dialects. Gaelic athair for ‘father’ is the same as Latin pater with the loss of the initial ‘p’. This also happens when the Latin plenus for ‘full’ becomes Gaelic lan. And when the Indo-European ‘e’ mutates to ‘i’ in Gaelic, verus for ‘true’ becomes fir. There are hundreds of close similarities like this.

  Which is not surprising when we see the long frontier that existed between both Latin and Greek and the Celtic languages. The root word gal shows how long. It means ‘land of the Gaels or the Gauls’ and it runs eastwards from Portugal (where now extinct Celtiberian was spoken) through Galicia over the Pyrenees to Gaul then over the Alps to Lombardy which the Romans called Cisalpine Gaul. Thence to Galicia in southern Poland, even to Galatia in Turkey. Of course gal appears in many places to the north-west of this frontier: Donegal, Galloway (from Gaidheal-Gall which means ‘the stranger-Gaels’ or more simply the Q-Celtic Irish), Calais and the French term for Wales, Pays de Galles.

  This long and ancient line of contact meant that the literate Romans wrote a good deal about the illiterate Celts, but before examining their sometimes prejudicial views I want to unpack one of the transports of memory carried even now by the Gaelic language.

  Its colour spectrum is different. The Gaels see the same rainbows that English speakers see but they interpret them very differently. This is nothing to do with that whiskery piece of nonsense about climate affecting language. The Eskimos do not have forty-nine words for snow (that is racist-tinged balderdash), and the Gaels do not have twenty words for rain and a different language for colour because the sun never shines north of the Great Glen. They simply deal with it differently.

  For example, English has no adjectives for ‘streaked with irregular dark shades’ which is riabhach in Gaelic; or a word for a colour somewhere between parchment and porridge, which is odhar, or for ‘dark and blotchy’, which is lachdann.

  In using these and a dozen other adjectives, Gaels deal with colours at a level that would test the perceptional muscles of any English speaker. Like Latin, which has two words for ‘black’ (niger and nerus for matt and shiny) and two for ‘white’ (albus and Candidus for matt and shiny respectively), the Celtic languages take this sort of description seriously. Not only is this because nature is nearer the centre of a Gaelic world than an English one, but also because it was about wealth.

  If you could not produce a detailed description of a particular colour then you were likely to become a poorer man. That is because most of these adjectives come from a need to identify different colours and sorts of cattle. Particularly in the event of a dispute it was crucial to be clear that one’s cattle were lachdann, riabhach or odhar or all three. Celtic society reckoned wealth in cows and it is ho cultural accident that the most lavish term of endearment available to a Gaelic speaker is m’eudail. At the end of the twentieth century the polite translation is ‘my treasure’ but the actual, literal meaning is ‘my cattle’.

  The P-Celtic tribes of Britain operated a predominantly pastoral economy, running herds of sheep and goats as well as cattle. They hunted in the forests and supplemented their diet with cultivated cereal crops, sometimes grown at altitudes which seem impossible to us in these chillier times.⁸ When Caesar reconnoitred Britain before his abortive invasion of 55 BC, he found that the recently arrived Belgic tribes of the south coast were growing cor
n, which his troops could easily steal and cart off to hungry Rome, but disappointingly, ‘the people of the interior for the most part do not grow corn but live on milk and meat and dress in skins.’ Across 2,000 years the sound of Caesar sniffing at these useless savages is audible.

  However, the archaeological evidence does support this observation: there seem to have been no pre-Roman P-Celtic towns. Instead Britain is patterned with the remains of large enclosures which are often bounded by ditches and planted on hilltops.

  Before going on to look harder at one of these places, I think it worth making another point. No literature, no towns, ‘dressed in skins’ and so on does not add up to backwardness or lack of sophistication. If the reader is still carrying around all the ‘march of progress’ baggage of imperial British historiography, or any of the weary savoir-faire of the wordly city-dweller, then little of what follows will make much sense.

  Far from unsophisticated, the P-Celtic tribes of early Britain could in their minds encompass several worlds, and while the evidence is that their lives were short, it is a distortion to think of them as nasty and brutish. They were not savages; they developed an understanding of the rhythms of the earth and a set of acute sensibilities they used to describe it to each other. As we blow holes in the sky and cover the world with car parks, we should remember that these men and women believed in the sanctity of the land, understood its wildness and revered its great beauty.

  Hills were often holy to the P-Celts and in the Borders there are several that stand by themselves, rising out of the river valleys to dominate the landscape. Chief among these are the Eildon Hills which the Romans called Trimontium. Archaeologists believe that by 1000 BC the rounded top of Eildon Hill North had been circled by a massive rampart of more than one and a quarter miles in length. The very act of being able to organize communal work on such a scale argues for social organization of complexity and reach as well as a clearly understood purpose in doing all that digging. Inside the ditches there are 300 hut platforms, suggesting a population of 2,000 to 3,000 at its zenith.⁹ Generous estimates put the population of the Tweed basin at around 25,000 at that time, which allows a sense of how Eildon Hill North dominated more than just the landscape. It was one of the largest hill forts in Britain and certainly the biggest in Scotland. And yet it is awkward to reach, needing a stiff climb up to 1,400 feet to a summit that is breezy even on still summer days. No water source exists on the hill except rainwater and around the Eildons there is almost certainly insufficient arable land to feed such a large population all the year round.

  Even though the name means ‘old fort’ in P-Celtic, it seems unfeasible as a defended settlement on that scale. The perimeter is simply too long and even if attackers could be beaten off, lack of water and food made a siege impossible to withstand. So what was it for? There are clues lying around the hill but before going on to draw them together, let me first suggest an analogy.

  Q-Celts loved their cattle as much as their British cousins and one of the greatest early Irish poems is the ‘Tain Bo Cualnge’ or ‘The Cattle Raid of Cooley’.¹⁰ It is led by the far-famed warrior Cu Chulainn and tells sometimes mystical, sometimes sexual tales of horsemen and charioteers and the magical rituals involved in the practice of the Celtic wars of the Heroic Age. As Irish kingship emerges out of legend into history, the Hill of Tara in County Meath comes into the light with them. It was the seat of kings, a place where laws were spoken – at one time and to many people so that there should be no doubt or variety of interpretation. It was a place where justice was dispensed and politics discussed. Rising high above the Tweed, visible clearly from all directions, the Eildons were also a site of huge prestige, the defining landmark of the Borders, and a place with many similarities to its distant Irish neighbour.

  At Tara on particular days there was also much fun: horse races, marriages, feasts, feats of arms and entertainment with music and tale-telling. But more than that it was a place full of magic. To understand how the magic worked it is vital to see past the mythology of the ‘Tain Bo Cualnge’ and the derring-do of Cu Chulainn. The story contains a good deal about the course of pastoral life and in particular a sense of the stock-rearing year. Rather than taking account of the solar calendar centred on solstices or equinoxes, the prime points of the Celtic year revolved around the herds of sheep and cattle that were the core of life. Both groups of British Celtic languages also remember these pivotal dates in the original meanings of certain words, sometimes resisting half-hearted attempts to Christianize them, sometimes not.

  In the strictly Presbyterian Gaelic dictionaries of the nineteenth century, Samhuinn is translated as ‘The Feast of All Souls’. In fact it is nothing of the kind. Although the real derivation suggests a meaning of samhradh or ‘summer’, Samhuinn was not the end of a period but the start of the Celtic year.¹¹ Fat cattle too numerous to feed through the winter were killed and while some were reserved for immediate use for feasting, most were dried or salted. The night before the Feast of All Souls is better known as Hallowe’en and still known in Gaelic as Oidhche Shamhna which takes place on 31 October. The remnants of the Celtic feast of Samhuinn thankfully persist, particularly in Scotland where children still dook for apples, trying to pull them out of tubs of water with only their teeth. Apples were sacred to the Celts. Sticky buns are hung on threads and children coat their cheeks with sugar trying to bite them, again without using their hands. The great bonfires of Samhuinn have been historically moved four days later to accommodate Guy Fawkes, but the most potent symbolism of all is still reserved exclusively for Hallowe’en. Turnip lanterns are the direct descendants of Druid ghost fences. As the darkness of winter closed in the Celts placed the skulls of the dead on poles to drive away evil. Now children light candles inside hollowed-out vegetables to keep that tradition unbroken.

  Eildon Hill North and its environs

  I believe that on Eildon Hill North fires were lit on Samhuinn Eve, feasting began the winter and kings and holy men spoke to their people.

  Imbolc was on 1 February and again Christian accretion intrudes. St Bridget or St Bride, who in Irish tradition was the midwife of the Virgin Mary, was allocated the same day but it only reinforced the original purpose. Imbolc was associated strongly with fertility, traditionally the time of the year when ewes lactated. But it also became Candlemas Eve, the first of the ancient Scottish quarter days when agricultural rents were paid. Eildon Hill North would have been temporarily repopulated as the farmers and herdsmen climbed up to give their portions to the king and priests who stayed on the summit all year round.

  Again the bonfires roared, a symbol of the sun as farmers waited for the winter to roll back. As the flames died and fires burned low, people took the warm ashes and blackened their faces both for luck and for disguise. As a feast of fertility, Imbolc allowed promiscuity among adults symbolically unable to tell their partners apart. The Romans had a similar feast at the same time of year: the Saturnalia.

  In Scotland this custom was called ‘guising’ and in 1796 the First Statistical Account for Scotland, compiled by parish ministers, was trying hard to suppress the ancient rite. Here is an entry for the town of Lanark. ‘A sort of secret society of Guisers made itself notorious in several of the neighbouring villages, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, dancing together in a very unseemly way.’

  Guising took place on at least two of the ancient Scottish festivals but the Church of Scotland failed in its efforts in a total ban, confining it to Hallowe’en only and then only for children. Sadly this has degenerated into gangs of young people with the sketchiest of costumes roaming the streets extorting money from householders. In America they call it ‘Trick or Treat’. Despite a degree of debasement it is nevertheless warming to see the rituals of Imbolc and Samhuinn still robustly alive.

  1 May was Beltane, a springtime festival of light and optimism. Fertility ran through the ceremonies as ewes had lambed and cows were in calf. When the waxing sun rose even higher in the s
ky fires once again were lit to symbolize its power and people danced around them deasil, or in a sunwise direction. Then the herdsmen drove their animals through the Beltane fire, because they believed in its power to cleanse and protect them from evil.

  As distinct from May Day, Beltane survived well into the modern period in Scotland and the fossil remains of Celtic rituals are easily seen. As late as the nineteenth century on high hills all over southern Scotland ritual bonfires were built, often using woods sacred to Druids such as rowan, oak or birch. Two fires were set with a wide passageway between and it was through this that our great-grandfathers drove their terrified beasts. An astonishing relict of our past, but not the only one.

  The name of the Ayrshire town Tarbolton means ‘the Hill of Beltane’ and on the night preceding Tarbolton Fair, now held in June, young men re-enact long-forgotten rituals. They go around the doors with wheelbarrows and ask householders for a piece of fuel which they then take to the summit of a hill. There they build an altar to the ancient Celtic god Bel, or Belenos. When they light the three-foot-high altar a crowd gathers to watch the young men leap through the fire.

  One more surviving example of Beltane should paint as complete a picture as we will need of the uses of Eildon Hill North. 1 May is still the approximate date for the beginning of the ancient journeys of transhumance, the movement of herds up on to the high pasture for the summer. Herdsmen went up with them and lived out on the hills in their shielings. Before they left they were given a Beltane bannock, a sort of custard-covered cake with scalloped edges in imitation of the rays of the sun. Then they held a feast which was a mixture of celebration and sacrifice. Travelling in the Tweed valley in the 1760s, Thomas Pennant observed a Beltane Feast: