Saxons, Vikings, and Celts

by Bryan Sykes

  11

  THE PICTS

  On 15 July 1995 the final section of the Skye Bridge was lowered into place. Three months later, at 11.00 a.m. on 16 October, the Secretary of State for Scotland declared the bridge open and, for the first time since the Ice Age, the Isle of Skye was joined by solid connection to the mainland. The very next day the protests started. The target of the protesters was a combination of the very high toll, the loss of the ferry and the suspicion that the main financial backers, the Bank of America, were making far too much money. By 1.00 a.m. there was a queue of thirty-five cars all refusing to pay. Welcome to the spirited world of island protest. There followed years of active opposition, non-payment, even one imprisonment. Hilariously, those charged with refusing to pay the toll had to make the 140-mile round trip to the Sheriff Court at Dingwall, which once again meant crossing the bridge, where they of course refused to pay, thus incurring further criminal charges. The Skye Bridge toll became a cause célèbre until eventually the Scottish Executive bought the bridge and the tolls were scrapped on 21 December 2004.

  Though Skye is firmly Gaelic, the protests were co-ordinated by one Robbie the Pict. Not just a sobriquet but a formal change of name. Born Brian Robertson, Robbie the Pict is a celebrated campaigner against all kinds of modern evil. He has been arrested over 300 times, refuses to pay road tax and has formed his own sovereign state on one acre of land in the north end of Skye. There are one or two other people who choose to link their name to this obscure ancient people. I am regularly contacted by one ‘Nechtan the Pict’, eager to enlist my help in recovering DNA from an allegedly royal Pictish body found in Perthshire. Clearly it means something to be thought of as a Pict. So who were they?

  Although the Picts have been garlanded with an air of mystery, with book titles such as The Puzzle of the Picts that capture the imagination with hints of a lost people, the answer is almost bound to be more prosaic. The derivation of the name is Picti, the generic nickname the Romans gave to the indigenous inhabitants of the Isles. It was not just the northern tribes that were given this description. Any tribes the Romans encountered who either wore tattooes or adorned their bodies with wode earned the uncomplimentary nickname. Picti, literally ‘the Painted People’, is also from the same root as Pretani, the Gaelic term which, according to the Romans, the islanders used to describe themselves and from which, so some historians believe, the name Britain itself derives. As the Romans occupied more and more of the Isles and developed separate names for the tribes they conquered, the only peoples left with the original nickname were the tribes living in the far north. All tribes north of the Antonine Wall, which ran between the Clyde and the Forth, were automatically Picts.

  The material remains of the Picts are extremely impressive, though nowhere numerous. About 200 carved symbol stones and rock inscriptions have survived, mainly in the north and east of the Scottish mainland and on Orkney. Even though they are for the most part badly weathered, the symbol stones reveal a mastery of naturalistic relief and abstract carvings. Most of the inscriptions and carvings date from the fourth to the seventh centuries AD, the later ones incorporating Christian symbols in the wake of St Columba’s conversions. They are not close to any of the other contemporary styles to be found in the Isles, not Roman, Saxon or even Irish, adding further mystique to the Pictish enigma.

  The Picts also left behind a collection of remarkable stone structures unlike any other in the Isles–the brochs. These take your breath away, especially when you realize that they were built over 2,000 years ago. Their form is similar wherever they are found. Round towers, tapering inwards at the top rather like a power station cooling tower, these huge stone buildings were once the largest structures in the whole of the Isles. Brochs typically enclose a central area 10–12 metres in diameter, with walls only slightly lower. They have double-skinned walls, held together by flat stones which form inner galleries within the walls. As well as providing storage space, these gaps, just like cavity walls in modern houses, would have insulated the interior and kept the heat in. This is easiest to see where there has been a partial collapse, such as at Dun Telve, near Glenelg on the mainland opposite Skye, or at Dun Carloway on the west coast of Lewis, a few miles north of the stone circle at Calanais. From gaps left in the inner walls, it looks as if the central area was fitted with wooden galleries, the whole structure resembling Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in miniature. The brochs were not roofed, so fires in the central living area could vent straight into the open air.

  At first sight brochs appear to have been built for defence and they would certainly have been extremely difficult to attack successfully. The view from the ramparts would have given plenty of warning of any hostile approach and the blank, windowless external walls were impregnable. However, it is not at all certain whether brochs were built to withstand attack–or just to show off. Some archaeologists believe they are simply a natural evolution of the much smaller Pictish roundhouses typical of the region. Since there is no evidence of attacks, such as the reddening that discolours the stone of buildings that have been set alight, it is more likely that their impressive bulk was valued for just that purpose–to impress. The standard design, and the relatively short time over which the brochs were built, in the first and second centuries BC, suggests that there may have been mobile teams of masons and labourers who toured the Highlands and Islands and built brochs to order. That in turn must mean that the local landowners were wealthy enough to afford it–and it isn’t hard to imagine how rivalry between them would be a spur to taller and taller brochs. Finds at the broch at Gurness on Orkney show that the local aristocrat who lived there was not merely active locally. Fragments of Roman amphorae, or wine carriers, link Gurness to a recorded visit of submission by a Pictish king to the Emperor Claudius at Colchester in AD 43. Whoever the Picts were, they were certainly not primitive relics of the Stone Age.

  There has always been a lingering question about what language the Picts spoke. For many years, some linguists believed they may have spoken an ancient tongue unrelated to the Indo-European family which embraces almost all other European languages. To me, and probably to you, while I can see there might be a family connection between, say, Italian and Spanish, it is not at all obvious that German, Portuguese and French are all related. However, be assured that they are and that, along with practically every other European language and others, like Sanskrit from the Indian subcontinent, their grammatical structure shows that they have evolved from a common root. The only living exception in western Europe is Euskara, the language of the Basques of north-east Spain and south-west France. Euskara is totally different from any other European language. The grammar is different and the words have quite different roots.

  Some scholars, keen to mark out the Picts as an ancient people, relics of the Old Stone Age, have pointed to the few examples of ambiguous runic carvings as evidence that they spoke a language unrelated to any other Indo-European tongue. The truth is that, unless we have more evidence, we may never know. Since there are no written Pictish texts, and so very few surviving stone inscriptions, the language of the Picts enters the realms of the unknowable. Which all adds to the mystery.

  Unfortunately, there is virtually no guidance from mythology as to the origin of the Picts. Unlike the rich mythologies of the Irish, the Welsh and the English, the mythology of the Picts is almost non-existent. That does not mean it never existed; it surely must have done. It is more a reflection of the absence of writing or, more accurately, the absence of anyone else to write it down until it was too late. In the rest of the Isles, it fell to Christian monks to record, or rather to mould, oral myths. For some reason, this did not happen with the Picts, even though they were among the first people in Britain to have been converted to Christianity after Columba arrived from Ireland in the mid-sixth century. However, the majority of modern scholars now consider that Pictish was closely allied to the strand of Gaelic spoken throughout the rest of Britain and surviving in modern Welsh. If Ga
elic was the language of the Picts, it would have been the P-Gaelic of Britain and not the Q-Gaelic of Ireland. If so, then why is the Scottish Gaelic spoken in the Hebrides and now taught in schools in the Highlands and Islands so closely allied to Irish Q-Gaelic and not to the harsher P-Gaelic of the Welsh? For the answer we must look to the west, and to the peninsula of Kintyre, the long finger that reaches almost as far as Ireland itself.

  Across the sea from Kintyre, in County Antrim, close to the Giant’s Causeway, the Irish kings of Dál Riata began to look for new conquests, and the lands visible across the sea were the natural target. In the first centuries of the first millennium AD, the Dál Riata founded three colonies–on the islands of Islay and Mull and on the Kintyre peninsula. They called their possessions Ar-gael–hence Argyll.

  The Picts briefly regained Argyll in the sixth century. When Columba arrived we know that it was a Pictish king who gave him the land on Iona in 563. Shortly afterwards, the Dál Riata got a new king, Aidan, who set out to re-establish the colonies in Argyll. If this wasn’t enough to upset the Picts, he made matters worse by attacking their possessions on Orkney and on the Isle of Man. He also annoyed the Ui Neill High King of Ireland by these unauthorized adventures. Matters came to a head in 575 when Columba, himself a member of the Ui Neill clan, arbitrated the treaty by which Aidan agreed to pay the High King a military tribute while keeping his maritime revenue for himself. To make the most of this outcome, Aidan built up a strong navy, which is just as well, because he lost most of his land battles. The treaty of 575 kept the peace in Ireland for fifty years, but the Dál Riata never fully recovered their Irish possessions. Their centre of power switched to Argyll and their territorial ambitions were directed north and east towards the lands of the Picts.

  For the next two centuries the balance of advantage see-sawed between the Gaels of Dalriada (just another spelling of Dál Riata) and the Picts, with each side alternately gaining ground only to lose it again. Eventually the Gaels gained the upper hand and in 843 the Gaelic king Kenneth MacAlpin was crowned the first king of Alba, a unified country covering both the land of the Picts and Dalriada. Kenneth MacAlpin’s claim to the throne was a combination of the Gaelic patrilineal succession of Dalriada and the matrilineal inheritance system of the Picts. These rules did not mean that women became rulers themselves, but that a man would be able to claim the throne through his mother’s genealogy rather than his father’s. The land became called Scotland because Scotti was the label the Romans gave to all Irish immigrants into Britannia. As we have already seen, that name has its own, deeper origins in the mythology of Scota, wife of Mil.

  The unification of Scotland under a single king came shortly after the Vikings began their attacks on the coast and is widely seen as a response to this external threat, when unity against a common enemy was more prudent than being weakened by continued feuding, a solution that eluded the Irish. Kenneth MacAlpin moved his centre of operations from Dalriada to the Pictish capital near Perth on the eastern side of Scotland. To emphasize that he was there to stay, he brought the ancient ‘Stone of Destiny’ from the west and installed it at Scone, near Perth, for his coronation. These decisions, no doubt diplomatically and politically sound at the time, did mean that the centre of power shifted away from the Gaelic west. In later centuries Argyll and the Hebrides consistently refused to be governed by the kings of Scotland, and even now still see themselves as different.

  Kenneth was the first of a dynasty of Scottish kings that ruled in patrilineal succession until 1286. Towards the end, Robert the Bruce emerged victorious from a confusion of claimants. His grandson Robert II, the son of Walter, the High Steward of Scotland, and Bruce’s daughter, began the Stuart dynasty, which ruled in Scotland until 1603. This was when James VI, on the death of the childless Elizabeth I, also became King of England, and, though it is often forgotten, King of Ireland as well.

  The Stuarts were not Scottish in origin at all, but Anglo-Normans. Just as territorial ambition had spurred Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, to invade Ireland in 1166, so other Anglo-Norman lords had their eyes on Scotland. However, unlike Ireland, where the chaos of rival kings made it easy for de Clare to divide and conquer, the relative stability of the unified Scottish royal house required more subtle tactics. Anglo-Norman barons sided with the Scottish kings against the unruly Gaels of the west and it was the contingent of armoured Norman knights on horseback that defeated the Celtic chieftain Somerled’s attempted invasion of Scotland at the battle of Renfrew in 1164. Walter the Steward, whose son was to become, as Robert II, the first of the Stuart dynasty, was himself a member of the Norman Dapifer family from near Oswestry in Shropshire, where they had been granted land by Henry I. This is relevant in the genetic context because, although there was no invasion as there had been in Ireland, the Anglo-Norman presence in Scotland was very influential. It may have affected the nature of the Y-chromosome pattern that we find in much the same way that Gaelic and Anglo-Norman Y-chromosomes are distinctly different in Ireland.

  So far, we have four possible influences on the genetic structure of the people of Scotland: firstly the Picts; then the Gaels of Ireland, synonymous with the Celts; the Vikings; and, in the south of Scotland particularly, the Anglo-Normans. As we shall see later, the south of Scotland was originally the British Celtic kingdom of Strathclyde. It is known that from the fifth century AD onwards this came under pressure from Anglo-Saxons, but we will leave that to a later chapter. With the Picts, Celts, Vikings and Anglo-Normans to sort out, there is already more than enough to keep us occupied.

  12

  THE DNA OF SCOTLAND

  ‘We have just had a message,’ the pilot’s voice came over the intercom, ‘that Sumburgh is fogbound.’

  It looked as though our trip to the Shetland Isles was going to be cancelled. ‘But we’ll carry on and see if we can find a gap in the clouds.’

  This was not the sort of thing that I, not at my very best in the air, really wanted to hear. We were heading north from Edinburgh airport over the thick layer of sea mist that was covering Scotland for as far as the eye could see. The plane was not a regular jet, but a twin-engine propeller plane, small, cramped and very noisy. Strangely, though, because the plane was small and was driven by propellers, it felt as though all of us, passengers and crew, were part of an adventure. Sure enough, when we reached the Shetlands, after a couple of circuits, the pilot did find a gap in the clouds and he dived through it to make a perfect landing. The team for Shetland was made up of Jayne Nicholson and Sara Goodacre from my research group, my son Richard, then aged eight, whose half-term it was, and me.

  For the week we were in Shetland it never really got dark at all. The sun rose at 3.30 in the morning and set at 10.30 at night. But even for the five hours that the sun dipped below the horizon, everything was illuminated by the ethereal northern twilight. It is easily light enough to walk around, and even to read a newspaper, right through the night. And everywhere the air was full of the sound of birds, the raucous clatter of terns and kittiwakes on the coasts and the sweet bubbling of curlews across the moorland away from the sea.

  Shetland is nowhere near as fertile as Orkney, but both places–to an outsider–are very different from anywhere else in the Isles. There is a tangible air of Scandinavia about both archipelagos, stronger in Shetland than in Orkney, but unmistakable in both. And it isn’t just obvious things like the ‘Viking Coach Station’ in Lerwick, the capital of Shetland, or signs in shop windows saying ‘Norwegian spoken’. It is there in the domestic architecture–the wooden A-frame houses painted with the same rust-red shade that is everywhere in Scandinavia. It is in the undemonstrative, no-nonsense feeling of the place. Although, even recently, anthropologists have written that in Lerwick, and in Kirkwall, the capital of Orkney, practically everyone they saw was blond, I have to say that was not my experience of either place. I could not see an overwhelming presence of the blond Scandinavian archetype which is such a feature of John Beddoe’s descriptions,
but then I haven’t seen it in my visits to Norway and Sweden either. However, the reason we had come to Shetland was not primarily to gaze at the exterior features of the islands’ inhabitants but to look for evidence of history hidden from view, hidden in the DNA.

  Unlike the rest of Scotland, where most of our DNA samples came from blood-transfusion donor sessions, there are none of these in Orkney or Shetland so we had to arrange other methods of getting our samples. Jayne Nicholson discovered that the Shetland Science Festival was being held in May, so she arranged for us to have a stand at the Festival and also organized a series of visits to schools for the same week. This worked extremely well: while two people manned the booth at the Festival, the others went to schools around the islands. The Festival itself was held in a smart new sports hall on the outskirts of Lerwick, one of many around the islands. The same is true of schools, all of which have brand-new buildings. Shetland Council spends a lot of the revenue it gets from the Sullom Voe oil terminal on upgrading the island infrastructure. The roads are excellent, the inter-island ferries are well equipped and run on schedule. I saw neither poverty nor extravagant wealth on Shetland.

  The Science Festival was a jolly affair. Groups from all over Scotland, including a strong contingent from the University of Aberdeen, put on displays of such varied nature as an artificial tornado generator, a giant bubble machine and a practical course in making plaster casts of fossils. Although the Festival was aimed primarily at schoolchildren, there was a healthy flow of adults coming to our stand and we had no difficulty enrolling volunteers in the Genetic Atlas Project. We were not taking blood, only cheek swabs, and I am sure that helped. For this we use a small brush like a miniature bottle-brush, 1 inch long at the end of a 5-inch plastic handle. The bristles on the brush collect cells from the inner cheek as they are rubbed gently over the surface. There is plenty of DNA in these cells and the brushes can be stored for weeks, or posted, without the DNA suffering. It is one of those seemingly unimportant practical changes that actually make all the difference. Now, instead of collecting blood samples, we can send brushes to anywhere in the world and receive DNA back through the post. These brushes can hold DNA safely under even the most extreme conditions. I have equipped a number of university expeditions with DNA brushes and nearly all of them are returned with the DNA intact, even when they have been carried for weeks in a rucksack through deserts and across mountains.