The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland

by Alistair Moffat

  The impression made by the Gask Ridge frontier on the native peoples must have been startling. No doubt built quickly in the manner of most Roman military work, striking boldly across the landscape and regular in appearance, the line signalled the arrival of a phenomenon, an army and a culture able to tame the very landscape and make a mark still clearly visible 2,000 years later. Great and unprecedented power had marched north – that was the unmistakable message.

  The new frontier was also the first recorded recognition of Scotland’s most profound internal boundary, the Highland Line. And almost immediately it divided the land into Highland and Lowland, savage and subdued, what was to become Celtic in the north and English-speaking in the south.

  But all of that lay in the future. Once the Gask Ridge frontier was established, Agricola turned his army westwards:

  In the 5th year of the campaigns, he crossed in the leading ship and defeated peoples up to that time unknown in a series of successful actions. He lined up his forces in that part of Britain that faces Ireland . . .

  It is possible that the reference to a leading ship indicates an expedition across the Solway Firth to Galloway but the difficulty with that interpretation is the mention of unknown peoples. Since Cerialis’ men built the fort at Carlisle ten years before, it is inconceivable that the Romans would have had no knowledge of the kindreds on the opposite shores of the firth.

  These were the Novantae and Ptolemy’s map plots some intriguing detail. Their name may have meant ‘the Vigorous People’ and it compares with the Trinovantes, ‘the Thrice Vigorous People’, who lived in the south-east, mainly north of the Thames. The kindred name also seems to be related to Novios, the ancient version of the River Nith which runs through modern Dumfries. According to one medieval chronicler, it was seen as the eastern boundary of ‘the wild realm of Galloway’ and, more recently, it was where the counties of Kirkcudbright and Dumfries met, even though the river runs through the county town of the latter. The Novantae might simply have been the name of the first people that Roman reconnaissance patrols encountered, the kindred of the Nith, and their name was used for all those to the west of them. There are many analogies. The vast sub-continent of Siberia got its name from the Sabir, a tribe who lived immediately east of the Ural Mountains.

  Ptolemy locates two settlements in the lands of the Novantae. The first element in Lucopibia means ‘white’ and seems to be another name for Whithorn. Rerigonion is on Loch Ryan, a boiled-down rendering of the original. In Old Welsh, it was Rhionydd and it first came to notice in the cycles of poems known as the Triads. There it is joined with Gelliwig in Cornwall and Caerleon in Wales as one of the three national thrones of Britain, meaning Old Welsh-speaking western Britain. Rerigonion is ‘Very Royal Place’ and was one of the seats of the kings of the Novantae. That they were seen as a vigorous people there can be little doubt. When Hadrian’s Wall was planned and built forty years later, a line of long sea defences, a sea wall, was laid out down the Solway coast of Cumbria. Attacks from Irish raiders and the Novantae were what the Roman military architects were anticipating and one of the largest forts in the north was built at Maryport. Situated on the Sea Brows, one of the few high points on that coastline, its towers looked for trouble sailing out of Galloway or the Irish shore.

  * * *

  Desnes Cro, Mor and Ioan

  On early medieval maps of Galloway, what approximates to Kirkcudbright-shire is described as Desnes Cro and sometimes Desnes Mor and Desnes Ioan. What do these names mean and where did they appear from? The great Welsh dictionary, Y Geiriadur Mawr, offers no clues and Edward Dwelly’s classic, Faclair Gaidhlig Gu Beurla (The Illustrated Gaelic – English Dictionary), notes a root word des which means, not very helpfully, ‘land’. A desreith seems to have been an old term for ‘a judge’. Cro can mean an enclosed area but one that is more like the size of a sheepfold than a large tract of land. Mor is simple – it means ‘big’ – but ioan and any variants seem impossible to work out. Enquiries made to more learned historians have produced nothing. Perhaps an enlightened Gallovidian reader might make some sense of what seems an impenetrable mystery.

  * * *

  Tacitus related what sounds like one of many conversations with Agricola, probably in Rome after his retirement:

  I have often heard him say that Ireland could be conquered and held with a single legion and modest numbers of auxilia. That would, he thought, be advantageous against Britain as well, if Roman arms were everywhere and freedom were, so to speak, removed from sight.

  Even though his military judgement may have been overly optimistic, the invasion was considered a serious possibility: ‘Agricola had given refuge to one of the minor kings from these people [the Irish], who had been expelled in a family quarrel. He treated him like a friend, keeping him in case an opportunity arose.’ The phrase used by Tacitus, ‘one of the minor kings’, is instructive in that it shows some understanding of the shape of Irish politics in the first century AD. And it accords with later models. Law tracts of the seventh and eighth centuries describe three classes of Irish king. A ri was the lowest and most common sort, one who ruled over a kindred descended from the same ancestor, often a name-father. In this, they resembled the much later Highland clans of Scotland who usually adopted the form of, for example, MacLeod to show descent from Leod, the same name-father. The Irish kindreds may also have held ancestral lands as the clans did.

  A ruiri was an overking of a group of several kindreds who were almost always neighbours and he, in turn, might bow to the power of a provincial overking, a ri ruirech. To top off the royal pyramid, Ireland had, from time to time, a High King who ruled over all, having been inaugurated at the sacred Hill of Tara. In reality, these relationships must have been much less tidy and they probably fluctuated as reputations waxed and waned and different traditions imposed themselves in different places. But it may be that the man who sat at Rerigonion on Loch Ryan, the Very Royal Place, was a provincial overking, the highest rank, who could control lesser rulers, perhaps all the way east to the banks of the Nith and the limit of the territories of the Novantae.

  There exists no direct evidence for the structures of northern kingship in the first century AD but Ireland’s cultural influence may have sailed across the narrows of the North Channel. A modern land-based society which thinks in terms of road transport often forgets the historical important of the sea as a highway and how people and ideas crossed it readily – much more easily than on land. And the kingdom of the Novantae was a sea-based polity, without doubt. Galloway’s indented coastline supplied shelter for ships and good beaching was available in many places. A journey from the royal centre at the top of well-defended Loch Ryan to the mouth of the Nith could be made in the fraction of the time it took a traveller to make the same trip overland. And the watchers in the fort at Maryport and the sea wall on the Cumbrian coast inhibited a response to a naval capability of some strength.

  If Atlantic Celtic spread through trade and maritime contact, it is possible that it was spoken on both shores of the North Channel and perhaps in the southern Hebrides. The names on Ptolemy’s map of the north are not all incontrovertibly Continental Celtic in character. Early links between Ireland and the western coasts of Scotland became increasingly important as time went on.

  * * *

  British Gaulish

  The Celtic dialects of France, collectively known as Gaulish and spoken on both sides of the Alps, began to die out only generations after the conquest by Julius Caesar. It lingered until the second century AD when the Bishop of Lyons, St Irenaeus from Asia Minor, reported that he could not always manage in Latin and had ‘to learn a barbarous tongue’. But a dialect of Gaulish, perhaps introduced by the Belgae in the first century BC, did survive and thrive in Britain. Personal names show the influence clearly, especially amongst kings and queens. In Gaulish, Cassivellaunos means ‘Oakdominator’, Tasciovanos is ‘Badger-slayer’, Cunobelinos is ‘the Hound of the God, Belenos’ and Boudicca means ‘
Victory’.

  * * *

  If a provincial overking ruled at Rerigonion, some measure of his power might be drawn from later sources and comparisons with the Celtic peoples of Gaul a century before. In Commentarii de Bello Gallico, Julius Caesar recorded a society of some diversity. Kindreds were sometimes governed by kings, occasionally by elected magistrates (who had to come from different families so that the grip of oligarchy was slacker), but all were dominated by a military aristocracy. The members of these leading families were themselves warriors and often maintained small war bands at their own expense. It is important to stress that numbers were not large. Few had the resources to maintain more than dozens of warriors.

  In order to justify themselves, feed their prestige and hone their fighting skills, these warriors needed to fight. Caesar wrote that the kindreds of Gaul went to war, ‘well-nigh every year’, in the sense that they would either make wanton attacks themselves or repelling such, and other commentators saw these Celtic people as ‘war-mad’.

  Poems known as the Ulster Cycle were first transcribed in the eleventh century but scholars believe them to be very much older. The most famous, An Tain Bo Cuailgne, ‘The Great Cattle Raid of Cooley’, describes a pre-Christian Ireland and it may first have been recited in the courts of kings in the first century AD. The language used has been dated to the seventh and eighth centuries but even though much of the narrative is clearly mythic, the detail of weaponry, chariots and the traditions of the war band locate the stories even earlier, in the first and second centuries AD. Their great value is to supply atmosphere – to say something colourful and memorable about how Celtic warriors societies behaved and how they saw themselves.

  The Tain Bo is a tale of heroes and superhuman deeds. Queen Medb of Connaught has mustered a great army from all her underkings and is marching to invade Ulster to steal a considerable prize, the Brown Bull of Cooley. All that stands in their path is the boy-hero, the seventeen-year-old Cuchulainn. The following description of the ritual before battle, of how warriors worked themselves into a frenzy and intimidated the enemy in front of them, is clearly fantastical but its brilliant images light up the ferocious culture of combat in Celtic Ireland:

  The rage-fit was upon him. He shook like a bullrush in the stream. His sinews stretched and bunched, and every huge, immeasurable, vast ball of them was as big as the head of a month-old child. His face was a red bowl, fearsomely distorted, one eye sucked in so far that the beak of a wild crane could scarcely reach it, the other eye bulged out of his cheek. Teeth and jawbone strained through peeled-back lips. Lungs and liver pulsed in his throat. Flecks of fire streamed from his mouth. The booming of his heart was like the deep baying of bloodhounds, or the growl of lions attacking bears.

  In virulent clouds sparks blazed, lit by the torches of the war-goddess Badb. The sky was slashed as the mark of his fury. His hair stood about his head like the twisted branches of red hawthorn. A stream of dark blood, as tall as the mast of a ship, rose out of the top of his head, then dispersed into dark mist, like the smoke of winter fires.

  Cattle were seen as a measure of wealth in early Celtic societies and cattle-raiding was an important means of venting an over-heated warrior society. Raids and counter-raids were honourable, added status, were a cause for celebration and feasting and they involved the use of martial skills. Most of all they were much less wasteful of men than all-out battle.

  The kings of the Selgovae, the Votadini, Manau and the other kindreds of the north almost certainly sanctioned cattle-raiding, probably originating persistent traditions in the Border hills and the Highland glens. In Continental Celtic, the warriors of these royal war bands were known as the teulu, literally meaning ‘the family’. In modern Welsh the adjective teuluaidd means ‘aristocratic’ but members of the Selgovan king’s teulu need not have been related to him or even high-born. What mattered was military prowess and the numbers of these household warriors will only have been large in the halls of overkings but, even then, only exceptionally more than a hundred. In a later reference, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle defined an army as more than thirty men.

  The royal war band depended absolutely on the king and he on them. Their leader, the penteulu, was constantly in the king’s company as a bodyguard and a counsellor, and both men knew that the loyalty of the war band was the whole basis of royal authority and stability. Consequently warriors received a flow of gifts and favour, usually from a division of the spoils of raiding or war. And there was a regular cycle of feasting and drinking to reinforce these bonds of dependence. When the bardd teulu sang in their hall, he celebrated the valour and virtue of the war band collectively and by name. Healthy competition was encouraged and the traditions of feasting, such as the award of the hero’s portion, the best cut of meat from the cauldron, came to be famous.

  Soldiers have always spent most of their time not fighting and so the war band took on other responsibilities in the royal household from an early date. Gwestfa or ‘food rents’ were owed to the king by his kindred and, in order to collect and consume these efficiently, the household was peripatetic, moving on from each place as the rents ran down. In the territory of the Novantae, this annual journey was probably undertaken by sea since at least three ancient royal sites, at Loch Ryan, Cruggleton and the Mote of Mark, are on the Galloway coast. Known as the cylch in later Welsh sources, it was organised and its collections enforced by the penteulu and his men.

  At each royal centre it is likely that the king took care to show himself and restate his authority. While the teulu was the core, he needed a larger force to augment it if war became imminent. When Agricola’s legions appeared in the north after AD 79, there can be little doubt that farmers and shepherds were pressed into service, even if only for show. Such a host was called the gosgordd. But, by itself, it is unlikely that the host of any northern king could hope to be a match for the armies of Rome.

  When Agricola crossed in the leading ship to defeat unknown peoples before, in a curious gesture of intent or perhaps defiance, lining up his forces to face Ireland, he was probably campaigning in the Kintyre peninsula. From the Mull of Kintyre, it is possible to make out Fair Head and the Antrim coast even on a cloudy day. And the unknown peoples his men defeated could credibly have been the Epidii, ‘the Horsemen’. When Ptolemy marked their name on Kintyre, he added a little more when he identified the Mull as Epidion Akron, ‘the Promontory of the Horse People’. In a fascinating survival, Kintyre was seen in the eighteenth century as the homelands of the Clan MacEachern. The extended version of the name is Mac Each Thighearna and it means ‘the Son of the Horse Master’.

  Horses were central to Celtic warfare in the first century AD and for long after. But not in the same way as the great destriers which carried armoured medieval knights or those brave juggernauts which galloped with the Light Brigade into the valley of death. These were big, heavy and sometimes aggressive beasts trained to trample over opponents in the ruck of battle or to knock them down with the irresistible impetus of a determined charge. The horses bred and broken by the horsemen of the Epidii or Kintyre were not at all like that. They were small ponies, their withers often reaching no higher than a man’s chest. Archaeology confirms (both with skeletal remains and tack) that these were most likely bred from wild native stock. Tough, nimble, intelligent and with tremendous stamina, these fell ponies (to use a much later definition) were also very adaptable. Warriors could use their ponies for riding in cattle raids, they were able to travel long distances over difficult country and then be used as herders on the way home with the spoils. Or they could become cavalry ponies and fight at close quarter, responding to a rider’s shift in seat or to guidance with the legs as he used both hands for a weapon and shield. The impetus of a horse could add immense weight to the delivery of a blow or its fast reactions avoid the full force of one.

  Celtic warriors adored their horses, even venerated them, and, when they harnessed the smaller ones to the yoke of a chariot, their bards became ly
rical. Here is another passage from the Tain Bo Cuailgne:

  Cuchulainn’s war chariot was both broad and fine, shining like white crystal, with a yoke of gold, great panels of copper, shafts of bronze, wheel-rims of white metal, light-framed. It could reach the speed of a swallow or a wild deer racing over the plains of Mag Slebe. The chariot was drawn by two well-yoked horses, swift, strong, roan-breasted and long-striding. One was supple, hard-pulling and great-hoofed. The other was curly-maned, slender-hoofed and sleek.

  The habit of plaiting the manes and tails was not something dreamed up by modern Pony Club competitors for the County Show. It was done by the grooms of the war band to avoid tangles with harness and bridles, a matter not of decoration but potentially of life and death if the manoeuvrability of horses was not to be fatally impaired. While a groom drove a chariot (no mean feat to keep it steady on rough ground), probably crouching low on his haunches as a warrior stood behind with his weapons, bracing on the bouncing floor to keep his balance. Often charioteers drove warriors into the midst of a battle where they dismounted to fight. And as they moved about a battlefield, flicking and checking with the long reins, drivers could display tremendous skill. Julius Caesar watched amazed as charioteers ran back and forth along the pole between their galloping ponies and stood like acrobats on the curved double yokes.