Saxons, Vikings, and Celts

by Bryan Sykes

  The effect of limestone, wherever it occurs, is always dramatic. It neutralizes the otherwise acidic soils and in so doing transforms the colour of the landscape from a yellow-brown to a vivid green. In the Highlands and the Hebrides, the occasional limestone out-crops are marked out by the rich growth of grass and wild flowers. But nowhere is the effect of neutralizing the soil more noticeable or more delightful than in the Western Isles, the long chains of islands that protect the mainland from the full force of the Atlantic. On the western edge of these islands are some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Brilliant white in the sunlight and lapped by turquoise, translucent seas, they are not made of the usual sands to be found on the crowded holiday beaches of southern England. The white beaches of the Western Isles are composed of the pulverized shells of countless billions of sea creatures that have been ground to a coarse powder by the pounding waves of the Atlantic. The wind, which for 300 days out of 365 roars in from the ocean, has blown the shell sand inland for a mile or two. And there it works its magic on the soil, neutralizing the acid and supplying essential phosphates that are otherwise entirely lacking. The result is the machair, a thin strip of meadows and grassland which, so long as the sheep don’t get there first, is full of wild flowers–purple orchids by the hundreds, blue harebells and the purple and yellow flowers of heartsease, the wild pansy. A couple of miles further inland, beyond the reach of the wind-blown shell sand, the moss and dark rushes are back, signalling the return of the acid lands.

  The white beaches are also spread along the north coast, but there they are not needed to help the soil. The older gneisses and schists of the Highlands, among the oldest rocks in the world, are replaced by alkaline sandstone. Green grass grows far inland in Caithness at the extreme north-east tip of the mainland, and is rich enough to support large herds of sleek black cattle. The fertility of the sandstone soil is even more remarkable in the Orkneys, now a few miles from the Caithness coast but joined to it until 7,000 years ago. On the east coast, there is good low-level farmland around the Moray Firth near Inverness and inland of Aberdeen, at the eastern edge of the Cairngorms. One deep geological fault divides the Highlands along the Great Glen, running between Inverness and Fort William. Another fault line runs between Stonehaven, on the east coast just below Aberdeen, and Loch Lomond to the north of Glasgow. This southern fault line separates the Highlands from the rich farmland of the Central Lowlands, which is also the location of the major cities of Dundee, Stirling, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Most of the 5.2 million Scots live in this Central Belt, a great many having moved there from the Highlands. Further south the ground rises again to form the hills of the Southern Uplands. Lower and less rugged than the Highlands, these hills have been eroded by glaciers into smooth-topped plateaux separated by narrow, flat-bottomed valleys. Beyond the hills, the valleys open out into the rolling farmland that surrounds the River Tweed, which flows into the North Sea at Berwick on the east coast. On the west side of the Southern Uplands, the hills give way to the Galloway peninsula and the flat lands bordering the Solway Firth.

  Since the whole of Scotland was under thick ice until the end of the Ice Age and again during the cold snap of the Younger Dryas, it isn’t surprising that no evidence, yet, has been found in Scotland of Palaeolithic settlements such as remain in the Cheddar Caves in south-west England. The first signs of human occupation are not found until well after the cold snap and, as in Ireland, these are Mesolithic settlements at or near the coast. The earliest dated site is at Cramond, on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, only 3 miles from the centre of Edinburgh. It is a picturesque spot, with a small terrace of old houses on one bank of the River Almond, where it flows into the Firth. Swans and ducks bob around in the quiet tree-lined bay and, when I visited on a crisp sunny day in November, I could not have imagined a better spot for a bit of hunter-gathering. A seashore for shellfish and wading birds, a medium-size freshwater river for salmon. All that would have been missing was the cappuccino that was steaming on the table in front of me. The Cramond remnants, a few microliths and the bony evidence of past meals, are dated to about 10,000 years ago. There are no signs of permanent settlement at Cramond, no post-holes as at Mount Sandel in Ireland, so it was probably just one of many places where the small bands of humans used to camp for a while as they moved around the country in search of food.

  The seasonal movements of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from one site to another are nowhere better illustrated than on the island of Oronsay, off the opposite coast of Scotland from Cramond. Oronsay is a small island, roughly triangular in shape and each side only 3 kilometres long. Despite its small size, no less than five Mesolithic shell middens have been discovered, each containing vast numbers of mollusc shells. Limpets, winkles, whelks, oysters and scallops were all on the menu. Curiously shaped implements, made from the antlers of red deer, have also been found. Their use is immediately obvious when you watch the staff at work in an oyster bar. They are shaped exactly like the knives which, inserted between the two shells of an oyster, then twisted, open it to reveal the silver-grey flesh inside. It is a sight to behold–as it must also have been for the children of Oronsay, 8,000 years ago, for that is the date of the Oronsay midden.

  The seasonality of the Oronsay middens has been discovered in a very curious way. As well as huge numbers of mollusc shells, the middens also contain the bones of saithe, a relative of the haddock that is still plentiful in the waters off the west coast of Scotland. The saithe grows rapidly in its first years of life and the age of a fish can be worked out from, of all things, the length of the ear bone or otolith. Otoliths within the same midden tend to be about the same length but there is a big difference in average otolith size between one midden and the next. The conclusion is that the middens marked different seasonal camps where the fish caught were at different stages of their development. What we do not know is if Oronsay was a permanent home or, like Cramond, another seasonal camp, occupied at the same time each year to take full advantage of the harvest of the sea.

  Oronsay and its close neighbour Colonsay lie about 15 miles from the larger islands of Islay and Jura, themselves 10 miles or so from the long finger of the Kintyre peninsula. Clearly, the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers–an epithet to which we must surely add fishing–were well used to making these quite substantial sea crossings between the islands and the mainland. No boats remain, destroyed by millennia of decay, but they were probably made from animal skins stretched across a framework of hazel branches. They would have resembled the coracle, still, just about, used for fishing in the rivers of west Wales, and the more substantial curraghs of the west of Ireland. Whatever they used, these boats were perfectly good enough for coastal work and island hopping.

  The sea has never been a barrier to the people of the Atlantic. It was their highway, just as the Pacific was to the Polynesians. There are confirmed Mesolithic sites on many of the islands lying off the west coast of Scotland, and where no evidence has yet been found there is a feeling among archaeologists that, with more field work, every island will be shown to have been occupied, if only for one part of the year. There is even indirect evidence, in the form of unusual patterns of soil erosion, that the Mesolithics reached Shetland, which would have involved a voyage on the open sea of 60 miles from Orkney, the nearest point. Valuable materials were also transported over long distances by sea. Flint is unknown in Scotland and other stones were used for making tools. Bloodstone quarried from the Isle of Rum, where there is a very early Mesolithic settlement, has been found in many sites around the west coast. The Mesolithic was a time of plenty for those bands who lived on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland. There was ample food within easy reach, both in the sea and in the dense woodland that lay behind the shoreline. It certainly wasn’t crowded. One recent estimate puts the total population of the whole of the Isles during the Mesolithic at less than 5,000.

  There is one tantalizing fragment of evidence–a grain of wheat pollen from the Isle of Arran in the
Firth of Clyde–that the Mesolithics were already experimenting with growing their own plant food, well before the arrival of agriculture proper. However, it is only with the arrival of farming that the whole way of life begins to change. Curiously enough, despite the major effect this transition from the Mesolithic lifestyle of thinly dispersed hunter-gatherers to full-blown farming must have had on the early inhabitants of Scotland, there is a distinct lack of material evidence from the early stages. Part of the reason is probably the later growth of thick layers of moss which have buried early field systems. In Ireland a whole patchwork of fields has been discovered at Ceidi, near Ballycastle, County Mayo in the north-west, lying under several feet of peat and visible only when this layer was cleared away. Even the megaliths suffered from the accumulation of moss and peat. The stone circle at Callanish on Lewis, where the stones reach nearly 5 metres in height, had been almost swallowed up by the peat before it was excavated in the nineteenth century. Only the tips of the tallest stones protruded above the peat.

  Covering of a different kind obscured what, in my opinion, is the most remarkable archaeological site in the whole of the Isles. The settlement at Skara Brae in Orkney does not have the grandeur of Callanish or Stonehenge. It is altogether more domestic. Following a violent storm in the 1850s, the sand dunes which back on to the beach in the Bay of Skaill, on the west coast of the largest island, were stripped back to reveal the walls of houses. Unlike today, when such a discovery would precipitate an immediate excavation, nothing much was done either to excavate or even to protect the site until the early years of the twentieth century. Hidden beneath the sand was a small group of interconnecting stone houses, each about 5 metres in diameter and complete with stone beds, stone dressers, even waterproofed stone basins sunk into the floor to keep live lobsters and to soften limpet flesh for fishing bait.

  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 long-house 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, above all others in the Isles, are surrounded by the greatest mystery–the Picts.