The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland

by Alistair Moffat

  Thrall was the Norse translation and it survives in the phrase to be ‘in thrall to’ someone. A large slave market was established at Dublin and the longships hove to at the mouth of the Liffey with a steady supply of captives from across the Irish Sea and Ireland itself.

  Repeated raids on Lindisfarne forced the monks to move St Cuthbert’s shrine out of reach. There followed years of wandering. The saint first lay at Norham on the Tweed before being carried deeper into Bernicia, even further from the dangerous shore, possibly as far inland as Jedburgh. From the ruins of the medieval abbey, archaeologists have uncovered fragments of an elaborate and beautiful shrine which may have held the holy man’s remains for a time. Cuthbert was moved to Ripon and then to Chester-le-Street before finding his final resting-place at Durham and becoming the inspiration for the raising of the great cathedral church. This long peregrination may have had one important cultural side effect. Having protected him from pagans and many having seen his shrine in all its stopping places, Bernicians began to see themselves as living in a blessed land, St Cuthbert’s Land, and they called themselves the Haliwerfolc, ‘the Holy Man’s People’.

  This was an identity recognised by outsiders and one which cuts across modern distinctions. The hagiographer of St Wilfrid, Eddius Stephanus, wrote of two peoples, the Northumbrians and the Southumbrians, as did Bede, and they are also recorded in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. By the ninth century, Asser, biographer of Alfred the Great of Wessex, was encouraging the notion of a north–south divide for obvious political purposes – ‘a great dispute, fomented by the devil, has arisen amongst the Northumbrians, as always happens to a people which has incurred the wrath of God’. This sense of difference stuck and medieval writers reinforced it. Probably correctly, William of Malmesbury claimed that, by the twelfth century, Northumbrians spoke a different language from their Saxon cousins in the south.

  Just as the Humber and the marshland which extended to the west of the estuary (a considerable barrier) was seen as a physical, cultural and political boundary for centuries, so the notional line drawn in the midstream of the Tweed and along the Cheviot watershed between Scotland and England has influenced attitudes to our history very greatly. Because the modern border cuts through the centre of the lost kingdom of Bernicia and the name of Northumbria has come to be attached to an English county to the south of the line, we have failed to see clearly the central importance of either to Scotland’s early history. It is easily forgotten that the descendants of Ida and Aethelfrith had an absolutely determinant influence on the evolution of the Scottish nation, arguably one far greater than the Gaelic and Pictish kingdoms to the north. That is because Bernicia bequeathed the English language to Scotland or at any rate a recognisable and intelligible northern dialect of English. The ancient Celtic language of Old Welsh has been entirely effaced and, at the outset of the twenty-first century, Gaelic stands on the precipice of extinction.

  The process of the adoption of English in Lowland Scotland can be glimpsed occasionally in changing place-names and progressively through the medieval period as written records accumulated. But the pace, scale and distribution of adoption must have been halting and patchy. More remote communities in the high valleys and less accessible inland districts will have clung on longer to the mouth-filling fluidity of Old Welsh and, for those forced to speak it, early English must have seemed like stones in their mouths. But the rippling subtleties of yr iaith hen, ‘the old language’, were still heard in southern Scotland for many generations after it had withered in the Bernician east. The kingdom known as Ystrad Clud, Strathclyde, survived the longest of any of the Old Welsh-speaking polities, only retreating into the shadows in 1018 when one of its last kings, Owain, died fighting the Bernicians on the banks of the Tweed.

  8

  Strathclyde

  FOR MANY, THE ROAD to the Highlands begins when it reaches Loch Lomond and winds picturesquely around its bonny braes and bonny, bonny banks. The motorist quickly realises that he has left the Lowlands, the industrial valley of the Clyde and the bustle and busyness of Glasgow behind. As the steep sides of Ben Lomond plunge into the waters of the largest loch in Britain, travellers on the sometimes narrow and twisting road have the powerful sense of entering another culture, another country. But their instincts are premature. When the north road leaves the lochside and climbs up Glen Falloch to the watershed, a striking geological phenomenon rises up on the left of the A82. Set on a rocky knoll on a ridge, a huge jagged boulder sits, commanding the wild moorland. At more than two metres in height and its eminence much enhanced by its rocky platform, the stone is unmissable – and it was meant to be.

  This is the Clach nam Breatann, the ‘Stone of the Britons’, and it marked an ancient frontier between three lost kingdoms. The lands of the Gaelic-speaking Scots of Dalriada lay to the west, the Pictish kingdom to the north and east and the Britons of Strathclyde to the south. Beneath the clichés and the sentimental music brought to mind by the bonnie banks rumbles the hidden history of a violent border between different languages and different politics. Lomond derives from the Old Welsh llumon, ‘a beacon’, and Ben Lomond was the beacon mountain where fires were lit if hostile ships were seen in the loch below. The Lomond Hills in the centre of Fife can also be seen from a great distance and they got their name in the same way.

  Through the brilliant and tenacious research conducted over many years by Elizabeth Rennie and her colleagues in the Cowal Archaeological and Historical Society, a complete land border between the realm of the Strathclyde kings and the men of Dalriada has been traced. It runs south-west from the Clach nam Breatann and follows the line of the burn known as Allt na Criche to a low but conspicuous hill called Cnap na Criche. In Gaelic, cnap is ‘a hill’ and the word criche or crioch means ‘a frontier’. Na criochan is the Gaelic term for ‘the borders’.

  South of the Cnap and at the head of Loch Goil in a very prominent position stands another unambiguous marker. At 8 metres high and 10 metres broad, Clach a Breatunnach is truly massive. Its name is a slight variant on its more famous cousin’s in Glen Falloch and it means ‘the Stone of the British’. Below it lies another beacon site at Blairlomond, ‘the Field of the Beacon’, on the loch shore. It was probably visible from another lochside location now lost which could have conveyed an alarm down to the mouth of Loch Goil where it joins Loch Long. The stone and the beacon site guard the high pass called Hell’s Glen, a difficult but short through-route from Dalriadan territory along Loch Fyne.

  Identifiable by a string of criche names and other Gaelic boundary names, the ancient frontier extends all the way south to Toward Point where it looks across to the Isle of Bute. To understand why it was placed some way inland, it is necessary to cast aside modern perceptions of geography.

  When it is borne firmly in mind that, until the coming of the railways in the nineteenth century and a road network in the twentieth, the sea was not seen as a barrier but as a highway, then this recently discovered frontier comes into focus and makes every sort of economic, social and military sense. The upper reaches of the Firth of Clyde were an integral part of the kingdom of Strathclyde – in a real sense, its beating heart – and the communities who lived, farmed, hunted and fished on the shores of the Holy Loch, Loch Long, Loch Goil and Gare Loch were all linked by busy seaborne traffic. Navigation was easy. The coastlines are all intervisible except in the very worst of the weather and the crossing distances are short. When the tiderip is powerful, sailors will have used the age-old practice of ‘aiming off’ – picking a landmark some way to the left or right of where they actually wish to make landfall – and knowing that the tide will alter their course. These devices and their seasonal variations will have been well known.

  Easy navigation was not the sole consequence of the geography of the upper Clyde. The network of sea lochs and their settlements were protected to the south, where the firth ultimately opens out to the Irish Sea and the ocean beyond. The bulk of the Isle of Bute and the islands of the
Cumbraes guard these approaches. The name of the Cumbraes resembles those of the great marker stones to the north of them for it simply means ‘the Isles of the Britons’, reinforcing the sense of a frontier zone. These sentinels encourage the impression of a near-landlocked Strathclyde lake. Elizabeth Rennie has identified a ring of coastal fortresses on Bute, Cumbrae and the mainland which are intervisible and could quickly be in communication through beacons or signals in the event of any emergency. In addition, she and her colleagues have shown, through meticulous archaeology, that there was a homogenous cultural community living on the shores of the upper firth and its sea lochs.

  Inspired by these findings, David Dorren and Nina Hendry, members of the Cowal Archaeological and Historical Society, began to look in the other direction, investigating the landscape to the north-east of the Clach nam Breatann. They discovered another clearly marked frontier. And in the wilder country many of its markers had survived more or less in situ. A series of cairns, standing stones and pointer stones (known as merkie stanes in Scots) divided the kingdoms of Dalriada and southern Pictland over a long distance – for nearly forty miles. The frontier extended to Glen Lochy, near Tyndrum, and, there, Dorren and Hendry made another discovery. Across the glen there runs a striking-looking ridge which glitters with deposits of quartz. This, they believe, was the Druim Albainn, ‘the Ridge of Britain’, referred to by Adomnan and others. It had been assumed that Drumalban was simply the name of the range of high mountains running north from the heads of lochs Long and Lomond but it may be that, in the Dark Ages, it was understood as a man-enhanced physical and demarcated line. As it descends to Glen Lochy, the easiest pass through the high mountains from east to west below the Great Glen, the frontier becomes necessarily more defined and it ran along the quartz ridge. It cannot be insignificant that the nearest settlement is Tyndrum, Taigh an Droma, ‘the Farm on the Ridge’ – droma is an older Gaelic rendering of druim.

  Strathclyde’s boundaries in the tamer and more densely populated Lowlands can hardly have been unclear or undefined even if they may have shifted more often. To the south the watershed hills at the head of the Clyde Valley almost certainly separated the kingdom from Rheged and later, Bernician Galloway, although no detailed research exists. To the north-east, Flanders Moss will have supplied a natural divide while, to the east, a rare scrap of documentary evidence may be helpful.

  The Annals of Ulster recorded that, in the year 642, the king of Strathclyde ambushed a Dalriadan army. At Strathcarron, Eugein defeated the Scots and killed their king, Domnall Brecc, the grandson of Aedan macGabrain. This may well have been a skirmish on the frontier and it suggests that it lay somewhere along the low watershed ridge between the headwaters of the River Carron which flows into the Firth of Forth and the Kelvin which flows into the Clyde. The Bannock Burn is not far away and it is the descendant of the Dark Ages’ name for this boggy border region, Bannawg.

  Over its long history the name of Strathclyde changed. On his famous map of the second century AD, Ptolemy plotted the Damnonii on the Clyde Valley and their lands are briefly illuminated in the flicker of light that is St Patrick’s letter to Coroticus, probably a Damnonian king who commanded the great citadel called Alt Clut, the Rock of the Clyde. Like the stones in the north and the islands in the firth, the modern name of Dumbarton Rock remembers the Britons. It is from Dun Breatainn, ‘the Fort of the Britons’.

  Rising sheer and majestically out of the waters of the Clyde, Dumbarton Rock is a double summit – a split plug of volcanic basalt. More extensive fortifications were possible on the larger and flatter top of White Tower Crag but there was also a stockade on the more easterly summit known as The Beak. Boats could be beached below at the mouth of the little River Leven. It drains from Loch Lomond, less than five miles to the north and the likelihood that it was navigable gave Dumbarton Rock a strategic hinterland stretching all the way north to the Clach nam Breatann as well as an imposing command of the Clyde both up- and downriver. Admired by the chroniclers as civitas Brettonum munitissima, it was indeed ‘the best-fortified city of the Britons’. For centuries the fortress and the kingdom were synonymous – Alt Clut.

  In the 1970s, archaeologists discovered the remains of an impressive rampart on the steep eastern slopes of The Beak. Made from rammed earth and rubble with thick oak beams to support it and supply a flat fighting platform, the wall probably had a breastwork to shelter defenders. The beams had been burned at some point in a turbulent history but they allowed carbon dating. It appears that this awkward structure went up some time in the 580s or 590s.

  Other finds suggested an even longer history. There were fragments of tableware from the time of Britannia, perhaps as early as the first century AD. Opulence and the presence of a wealthy royal court on the rock were evident in shards of wine amphorae from the Mediterranean and the jugs and glasses needed to drink it in the proper style. And, as on Dunadd, there were craftsmen jewellers at work on Alt Clut making objects from precious metals and gemstones – the sort of things kings could distribute to a royal war band.

  The first ruler of the Rock of the Clyde to emerge is glimpsed only in a supporting role but his name adds to the sense of a king ‘giving gold and horses’ to his leading warriors. Rhydderch Hael means ‘Riderch the Generous’ and he reigned some time between 570 and 600. Adomnan knew of Rhydderch in his Life of St Columba and he was a contemporary of great kings in the north, Aethelfrith, Urien and Aedan. It may be that warriors from Alt Clut were at the siege of Lindisfarne when Morcant Bwlc had Urien murdered in his tent.

  When St Patrick wrote to Coroticus at the end of the fifth century, it seems that at least the royal family were Christians. And, where rulers led in matters religious, their subjects tended to follow. Rhydderch rode to war as one of Y Bedydd, and he may have been an early patron of a famous saint. Kentigern’s shadowy beginnings may have been at Traprain Law in the lands of the Gododdin but it is as the apostle of Strathclyde he is known.

  * * *

  Bonedd Gwyr Y Gogledd

  The Descent of the Men of the North is a set of two lineages for the kings of Rheged, Gododdin and Alt Clut, and it lists the names of twenty kings of the sixth century. First transcribed in the twelfth century, the genealogies contain several ahistorical elements and connect two dynasties which had no connection. Nevertheless, there are famous names, real kings and a passion for a link to the Roman past. The first list descends from Coel Hen, thought to be the last Dux Britanniarum, ‘the Duke of the Britains’ (meaning all the four provinces of Britain in the late fourth century) and the last commander appointed by an Emperor. Two lines issue from Coel. Urien appears in the Rheged king list but not Owain. On the Gododdin side are Gwrgi and Peredur, the kings of Ebrauc who defeated Gwenddolau at Arthuret and also Cadrawd Calchvynydd, the king who ruled from Kelso. The second group descends from Macsen Wledig and, although Aedan macGabrain makes an unlikely appearance, it lists the Alt Clut or Strathclyde kings ending with Rhydderch Hael. These genealogies are too easily dismissed as fanciful and they have a good deal to say about attitudes and aspirations in north Britain in the sixth century.

  * * *

  To become properly culted, all early saints needed their hagiographers to record miracles and an exemplary life but Kentigern’s seems to have appeared very late. Jocelyn of Furness’ Life was composed in the late twelfth century but it may have drawn on much earlier sources. The author claimed to have used old legends and a biography in Gaelic. Kentigern is certainly a Gaelicised version of Old Welsh Cyndeyrn and both mean something like ‘Chief Lord’ – a title rather than a name. The saint was also known as Mungo and that is a smoother version of mwyn-gwr or ‘dear lad’. The nickname was said to have been coined by Kentigern’s first patron, St Serf, when he and his refugee mother, Princess Thenu, turned up at the diseart at Culross in a coracle after a fabled journey across the Forth.

  The story becomes less blurred when Jocelyn relates that the saint built a church on the Clyde, where the Mole
ndinar Burn joins it. Now the site of Glasgow Cathedral, the foundation echoes the Celtic love of sanctity when it is bounded by water and God’s own hand. A more prosaic reason for the location might be in the name for Molendinar means ‘Mill Burn’. Kentigern went on to live, pray and preach on its banks for thirteen years before some unreported incident, perhaps a dispute with the royal family at Alt Clut, drove him south.

  It seems that Kentigern established himself at the monastery at Hoddom in Dumfriesshire and archaeologists have discovered the remains of a baptistery he himself might have used. It is difficult to establish whether or not Kentigern was a founder of Hoddom (not least because his own dates are uncertain) but his association will have added prestige. After a return to the Clyde, possibly with the generous sponsorship of Rhydderch Hael, the saint built up a substantial community of monks on the Molendinar Burn. Familia was a versatile Latin term which could apply to such a community and some toponymists believe that clas-gu, an Old Welsh translation meaning ‘dear family’, is the origin of the place-name of Glasgow.

  * * *

  Mungo’s Miracles

  Every saint needed a stock of miracles to prove his holiness and Mungo performed four. They have become famous as the result of a verse which describes Glasgow’s coat of arms, although quite why any of them seemed at all miraculous is difficult to see:

  Here is the bird that never flew

  Here is the tree that never grew

  Here is the bell that never rang

  Here is the fish that never swam.

  Mungo brought back to life the pet robin of his first patron St Serf – although the point surely is that the bird did fly. Perhaps the reference is to its state before Mungo laid on his saintly hands. The second miracle seems not to have been a miracle at all. Again, at St Serf’s community at Culross, Mungo fell asleep and allowed the fire to go out. To rekindle it, he took some branches from a tree. Perhaps it was a fire burning with green wood that amazed everyone. The bell sounds as though it was a preaching bell brought back from Rome by Mungo but why it should never ring is a mystery. The final miracle is based on a fable. King Rhydderch of Strathclyde believed that his queen, Languoreth, had given a ring to her lover. In fact, the king had thrown it in the Clyde. When told that she faced execution if the ring could not be produced, Languoreth appealed to Mungo for help. He had a fish caught in the Clyde (perhaps that is the miraculous part) and the ring was found inside it. This story harks back to the gospels and St Peter and the Tribute Money. An identical miracle was performed by St Asaph in Wales at the court of Maelgwyn of Gwynedd.