O it’s lovely to be roamin’ in the gloamin’.4
A visit to Dumbarton Castle tells some of the older stories. It features in all the local guidebooks and websites:
Dumbarton Rock stands above the River Leven where it merges with the Clyde and is the town’s most famous ancient building. The castle, which stands 240 feet up on the Rock… forms a prominent landmark on the Clyde. The Rock… has been fortified since prehistoric times. The castle was a royal fortress long before the town became a Royal Burgh; its ownership [passed] from Scottish to English and back again. Prominent during the Wars of Independence, it was used to imprison Wallace for a short time after his capture. It was from here, too, that Mary, Queen of Scots, was conveyed to France for safety. She was trying to reach Dumbarton Castle when she suffered her final defeat at Langside.5
William Wallace, the ‘Braveheart’, and Mary Stuart are two names from Scottish history that are almost universally recognized.
On closer inspection, the twin peaks of the Rock’s summit are divided by a deep chasm: at 240 feet, ‘White Tower Crag’ is slightly higher than the ‘Beak’. The oldest surviving structure is a fourteenth-century stone arch, whence a stairway of 308 steps leads up to the top. At the bottom, the eighteenth-century Governor’s House contains a small museum. Here, one learns from the pleasant young guide that the early English historian Bede wrote about a fortified city called ‘Alcluith’, the ‘rock of the Clyde’; also that, together with Castle Dundonald in Ayrshire, Dumbarton was once the chief royal stronghold of the Kingdom of Strathclyde. ‘We were invaded in 870 by the Vikings,’ the guide informs us. On being asked who ‘we’ are, she says with a smile, ‘I’m a local girl, I’m a Pict.’
The view from White Tower Crag rewards its climbers. The modern town lies immediately below, criss-crossed by ant-like people. Central Glasgow, half a dozen miles away, is veiled in mist. But the moisture-laden air to the west increases the visibility like a magnifying glass. The Firth presents itself as a giant outstretched hand, with its fingers pointing into Gareloch and Loch Long on the right, Holy Loch in the centre, and the hills of Arran and Argyll on the horizon. In the distance to the north rise the blue-grey peaks of Ben Lomond and Ben Oss. Across the river lie the pine-clad slopes of Glennifer Braes in Renfrewshire and the Hill of Stake; and in the left foreground the airport runways.
Holy Loch is a name that frequently made the headlines in the 1960s and 1970s. It is the smallest of the sea-lochs on the Firth, only two or three miles long, but it makes a perfect, sheltered harbour. For more than thirty years it was the site of a United States Navy submarine base, and the scene of concomitant demonstrations by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Officially and euphemistically labelled as Refit Site One, the base housed the SUBRON-14 submarine fleet charged with patrolling the Atlantic. There was a floating dock, a large tender ship, a flotilla of tugs and barges, and up to ten Polaris/Poseidon Class Ballistic Missile submarines. As the underwater behemoths slipped from their dock and rode into the Firth, the captain’s periscope would have caught sight of the Rock some 20 miles upstream. These days the harbour is back with the Royal Navy, though one wonders for how long. The devolved government of Scotland is controlled by the Scottish Nationalist Party. If they ever win their proposed referendum for full independence, one of their first steps would be to demand the closure of the base.6
Dumbarton today is struggling to survive in the post-industrial age. The heyday of its ship-building came to an end in the 1960s and it has not yet found an adequate replacement. The dockside has been concreted over to form a car park, and supermarkets fill the space once used by giant warehouses. In some guidebooks to Scotland, the town is not even mentioned. Industrial decline hit the Vale of Leven earlier. Many factories there were closed down before 1939. Persistent unemployment bred radical politics, and the epithet of ‘Little Moscow’ was coined to match that of adjacent ‘Red Clydeside’. In the 1950s the run-down district was used to locate several of Glasgow’s largest projects of overspill housing. Forty and fifty years on, the massive, dilapidated estates such as the Mill of Haldane in East Balloch were the scene of equally massive campaigns of attempted urban renewal.
Yet a positive development began when one of Scotland’s leading whisky distillers moved into Dumbarton to employ the laid-off dockers. ‘George Ballantine’s Finest’ is one of the most popular and best-known brands of blended whisky in the world. Every bottle bears the proud assignations: ‘Scotch Whisky, Fully Matured, Finest Quality’, ‘George Ballantyne & Sons, Founded in 1827 in Scotland’ and ‘By Appointment to the Late Queen Victoria and the Late King Edward VII’. According to the country of its destination it also carries a marker saying, ‘Finest Skotská Whisky’, or ‘Whisky Szkocka 40%obj.’ or ‘Finest Skót Whisky… Származasi Ország: Nagy Britannia (Skocia)’. At the bottom, the label reads ‘Bottled in Scotland’, ‘Product of Scotland’ and ‘Allied Distillers Limited, Dumbarton G82 2SS’.7 In whatever language, there can be no doubt: this is Scottish Scotch from Scotland.
In the early twenty-first century Dumbarton is indeed in Scotland, and Scotland is part of the United Kingdom. But it was not always so, and it may not always be so in the future. One needs only stand atop the Rock and count the centuries. A hundred years ago, Clydeside was the lifeline of an imperial conurbation which served the Empire’s manufacturing enterprises. Two hundred years ago, it was the centre of a region of the United Kingdom, often known as ‘North Britain’, whose Scottishness was fading, but whose Britishness was rising. Three hundred years ago it had just crossed the threshold of an unprecedented constitutional union with England. Four hundred years ago it was ruled by a king who had recently migrated to London, but who remained Scotland’s sovereign. Five hundred years ago, before the Battle of Flodden, it was part of a country which regarded itself as England’s equal. A thousand years ago, under King Macbeth and others, it belonged to a realm where Gaelic was still the dominant language. One thousand five hundred years ago it belonged to the ‘Old North’.
Dumbarton is an English name, the Anglicized form of a Gaelic predecessor, Dun Breteann, meaning ‘Fort of the Britons’. This, in turn, provides the clue to the people who lived on the Clyde long before the Anglophones and the Gaels arrived. Oddly enough, when the modern County Council was formed in 1889, the older spelling of the name was revived to give ‘Dunbartonshire’ a tinge of authenticity. (The county was abolished in 1975, since when it has been joined to the wider Strathclyde Region.)
Nonetheless, the form of the name most frequently associated with the Rock has gone round the world, carried in the memories of Scots emigrants. There is a Dumbarton in Western Australia, a second in Queensland, a third in New Zealand and a fourth in New Brunswick, Canada. In the United States, the Dumbartons are legion: in Maryland, in Virginia, in South Carolina, in Louisiana, in Wisconsin… One finds Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC; Dumbarton Village in Houston, Texas; a Dumbarton Bridge across San Francisco Bay; a Dumbarton Church in Georgetown, DC; a Dumbarton School in Baltimore; and a Dumbarton College in Illinois. In the American Civil War, the US Navy once captured a Confederate vessel called Dumbarton; and the Royal Navy has a fishery protection ship called HMS Dumbarton Castle. One finds a Dunbarton in New Hampshire.8
How many Dumbartonians, one wonders, know how it all started? For them at least it may be important to know that Dumbarton was not always a minor satellite of a modern metropolis. Supported by the fertile farmlands of the adjoining Levanach – the Vale of Leven, the original homeland of Clan Lennox – it was the centre of a powerful realm, the capital of an extensive state. Indeed, it was the seat of kings.
II
Few historians these days talk of the ‘Dark Ages’. Knowing that the phrase was coined in the 1330s by the early Renaissance poet Petrarch, they feel that the implied contrast between the ‘Light’ of the ancient world and the alleged ‘intellectual Gloom’ of what followed is unjust.9 In British history, the ‘Dark Ages’ is rarely employed except
for the two or three centuries which started with the retreat of the Roman legions and which are notoriously short of sources. This is exactly the period that embraces the ‘Kingdom of the Rock’.
Obscurity, therefore, is the period’s hallmark. Coherent narratives can only be established with great difficulty, and historical investigations are a speculators’ paradise. Substantiated facts form tiny islets of sure knowledge in a vast sea of blank spots and confusion. Scarce sources are often written in eccentric languages, studied only by ultra-specialists. All judgements would benefit from being classified as undisputed (very few), deductive, analogous or tentative (most).
There is also a deep-seated problem of biased advocacy. The early history of the Isles* saw a tussle for survival between the Ancient Britons, the Irish Gaels, the Scots, the Picts and a collection of immigrant Germanic ‘Anglo-Saxons’. In modern times some of these parties have had enthusiastic fans. The English, who are now a dominant majority, have often taken the triumph of their forebears for granted, at least in popular history. They admire the imperialist Romans, and identify with the Anglo-Saxons, but despise the Celts. They venerate Bede, who was a Germanic Northumbrian and whom they call Venerable, and neglect his competitors. They dislike the Celtic sources, which they cannot read, routinely dismissing them as fanciful or unreliable. The Scots, whose ancestors ultimately triumphed in Scotland, can be equally self-centred. Nowadays, there are few people around to champion the cause of the ‘Old North’.
This term – which the Welsh call Yr Hen Ogledd – requires an explanation. The Ancient Britons, dozens of territorial tribes who had dominated the whole of Great Britain on the eve of the Roman conquest and gave the island its name, were gradually displaced or absorbed in post-Roman times, and their former dominance in all parts of the island has largely been forgotten. Their most visible descendants, known in English as the ‘Welsh’, that is, the ‘aliens’, now inhabit only one corner of their former homeland, in a remnant that the incoming English called ‘Wales’, the ‘Alien Land’.* Time was when things were different. After the passing of Roman Britannia and the influx of ‘Anglo-Saxons’, the Britons held out longest in three main regions. In one of them, modern Wales, they survived. In the other two, modern Cornwall and the ‘Old North’, they did not. Yet their presence there was very real, and lasted for centuries. The ‘Kingdom of the Rock’ was the longest-lived fragment of the Ancient Britons’ stronghold in northern Britain, the region that in due course would become Scotland.
Perhaps one should start, therefore, with an undisputed fact. The kingdom did exist. Its story is reflected in archaeological and linguistic evidence, in the chronicles of its neighbours, in king-lists and in references from poetry and legend; it existed for six or seven hundred years. Its original name and its exact boundaries are not known. But we do know with absolute certainty that it was there. Between the dusk of Roman Britannia and the dawn of England and Scotland, several Celtic kingdoms operated in northern Britain. The ‘Kingdom of the Rock’ was the last of them to succumb.
The Celts of the Isles were divided in Roman times – as they still are – into two distinctive linguistic groups. On the Green Isle, Éire, the Gaelic or Goidelic Celts spoke a tongue categorized by linguists as ‘Q-Celtic’. Their word for ‘son’ was mac. On the larger Isle of Prydain (Great Britain), the British Celts spoke Brythonic or ‘P-Celtic’. Their word for ‘son’ was map. To the uninitiated, the Goidelic and the Brythonic branches of Celtic look and sound dissimilar, but a good teacher can quickly elucidate the processes whereby common roots were transformed by successive sound changes. The characteristic word order of verb– subject–object remained unaltered, and morphological shifts often followed parallel patterns. Both Goidelic and Brythonic Celts adopted new systems of syllabic accentuation, for example; but while Goidelic chose to place the accent on the first syllable of a word, Brythonic went for stress on the penultimate syllable. Both language groups softened the consonants between vowels. Goidelic changed t to th, Brythonic to d, thus changing ciatus (battle) into cath (Irish) and cad (Welsh). The initial w-sound was replaced by f in Goidelic and gw in Brythonic, giving fir for ‘true’ in Irish and gwir in Welsh. English ears are not accustomed to these sounds. But since Goidelic/Gaelic and Brythonic ‘Old Welsh’ would in time compete to be heard on the Rock, their reverberations, however imperfectly understood, form an essential part of the background.10
During the four centuries of Roman rule, the Romano-Britons living in the imperial province of Britannia were markedly less Latinized than their Celtic kinsfolk in Gaul or Iberia. Some of them would have been bilingual, speaking Latin for official purposes and Brythonic among themselves; others less so. When the Western Empire collapsed, they did not advance to a neo-Latin idiom parallel to French or Spanish. Instead, they largely reverted to a monolingual Brythonic, until meeting new linguistic challenges posed by Germanic invaders from the Continent, by Gaelic ‘Scots’ from Ireland, and later by Norse-speaking Vikings.
In modern times, everyone has become accustomed to thinking of Great Britain in terms of England, Scotland and Wales. But this modern map must be put out of mind if one wishes to understand the island’s previous make-up. In the era when Britannia was collapsing, there was no England, since the Anglo-Saxon ancestors of the English were still arriving; there was no Scotland, since the Scots had not even started to arrive; and there was no clearly defined Wales. The former Romano-Britons and their P-Celtic speech were spread over most if not all of Prydain, and as the ethno-linguistic jigsaw changed, ‘Wales’ could be found in every pocket where Britons persisted.
One can observe several degrees of the persistence of Romanization in post-Roman Britain. The cities and surrounding hinterlands within the former province of Britannia remained highly Romanized. The upland tribes, including those living beyond Hadrian’s Wall, had been at best partially Romanized. The ‘Picts’ of the further North were virtually untouched.
An important division among the post-Roman Britons resulted from the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries. As the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ pushed westwards into the Midlands, they drove a wedge between the Britons on either side of them. After the Battle of Chester in 616, Angles moving coast to coast consolidated a belt of territory from the Humber to the Mersey in the powerful state of Mercia. From then on (though contact was maintained along the western sea-lanes), the Britons of the North were cut off from the larger concentrations of their kinsfolk elsewhere. A distinction grew up between the Welsh of ‘Wales’, and the North Welsh, whose beleagured British community was obliged to wage a prolonged rearguard action.
Despite its shadowy outlines, however, the ‘Old North’ cannot be regarded as a mere footnote to the grand pageant of British history. It contained at least seven known kingdoms, whose deeds were no less derring than those of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. It left a large body of place names and a corpus of literature – known in Welsh as Hengerdd or the ‘Old Verse’ – which makes Beowulf look like an upstart latecomer.11
The language of the Old North is usually classified in the category of Cumbric, a sub-group of P-Celtic Brythonic, and related, therefore, to Welsh, Cornish and Breton. A major problem exists for historians, of course, in that Cumbric was rarely written down and can only be reconstructed by linguists from meagre scraps of information. One such scrap is the name of Cumbria (‘Land of the Welsh’) itself, which once extended over a far wider area than today. Another scrap comes from the counting systems of Cumbrian shepherds. It is well attested that people faced by the decline of their native language are particularly reluctant to abandon two things: the numbers, whereby they learned to count, and the prayers through which they addressed their God. An amazing instance of this phenomenon can be found in some of the upland communities of the Borders which nowadays straddle northern England and southern Scotland. Anglicization triumphed in those parts centuries ago either in the form of northern English or of Lowland Scots, but shepherds there continue to coun
t their sheep using the numerals of their Brythonic forebears. The correspondences are unmistakeable, and they were reflected in inscriptions still visible until recently on the old sheepmarket at Cockermouth.12 They are the very last echoes of the Old North.
Table 1. Counting in northern English, Lowland Scots and modern Welsh
Christianity was more firmly established in late Roman Britain than is often supposed. St Alban was put to death for his faith at Verulamium in c. 304, and the Emperor Theodosius I did not give Christianity an official monopoly until 380. It would have had little time to penetrate into all levels of society before the departure of the legions.13 Yet for most of the fourth century, the Edict of Milan in 313 had granted religious toleration to Christians, and Christian practices spread patchily. In the subsequent era, knowledge of Latin and adherence to the Roman religion were the twin marks of the Romanitas that civilized Britons savoured in the face of heathen invaders.
It was the Romans who came to use the term Picti for the tribes who had clung to the old ways – to tattooing, to principled illiteracy and to native religion – and both the Irish and the Britons were accustomed to treat the Picts as a race apart.14 The Irish Gaels called them Cruithne, which may be what they had once called all the inhabitants of Britain. The Welsh term Cymry, usually translated as ‘companions’ or ‘compatriots’, which was coming into use in late Roman times, was a form of self-identification both for Britons of the west (modern Wales) and for the ‘Men of the Old North’, but not, apparently, for the Picts. It possessed definite overtones of cives Romani.
Though the Roman legions had marched north beyond their province of Britannia on several occasions, they never conquered the whole of the island and they only occupied the land between the Hadrianic and the Antonine Walls, the Intervallum, for less than thirty years in the mid-second century. Nonetheless they stayed long enough to forge close ties with the more co-operative tribes and to gather basic information from them about northern Britain. The second-century geographer Ptolemy, who lived in Alexandria, had met soldiers and sailors returning from Britain, and he drew a map containing many names of rivers, towns, islands and tribes. In the far north, beyond the Antonine Wall, he noted the Caledonii. In the area between the walls, he recorded four tribes – the Damnonii, the Novantae, the Selgovae and the Votadini. In Damnonia, he recorded six oppida or ‘towns’: Alauna, Colanica, Coria, Lindon, Victoria and Vindogara (Colanica can also be found in another source known as the Ravenna Cosmography). Lindon, the Llyn Dun or ‘Lake Fort’, has been tentatively identified with Balloch on Loch Lomond. But Alauna is less uncertain. It means the ‘headland’ or ‘spur’, and nicely matches the locality of the Rock.15
Vanished Kingdoms Page 6
