The herds of every village hold their Beltane. They cut a square trench in the ground, leaving turf in the middle. On that they make a fire of wood, on which they dress a large caudle of eggs, oatmeal, butter and milk, and besides these they bring plenty of beer and whisky. Each of the company must contribute something to the feast. The rites begin by pouring a little of the caudle upon the ground by way of libation. Everyone then takes a cake of oatmeal, on which are raised nine square knobs, each dedicated to some particular being who is supposed to preserve their lands, or to some animal, the destroyer of them. Each person then turns to face the fire, and breaks off a knob, and flinging it over his shoulder, says, ‘This I give to thee, O fox, spare my lambs.’¹²
At Peebles, fifteen miles from Eildon Hill North, the Beltane Festival lives on but in order to fit in with a busy calendar of other towns’ celebration of themselves, it has been moved to the middle of June.
Just as Beltane remembers the god Bel, so the last in the cycles of Celtic festivals is for Lugh and in Ireland it is still widely held as Lughnasa on 1 August. In Scotland the name has been rubbed smooth over time into Lammas and it was a favoured date for the old, pre-Christian practice of handfasting.¹³ Despite the best efforts of the Kirk this persisted in country districts well into the nineteenth century. A sort of intimate engagement, handfasting involved a couple deciding to live together for a year’s trial period. If it went well then they agreed to marry on the Lammas after handfasting, often forging a permanent relationship over the blacksmith’s anvil or finding a wandering priest to pronounce the vows. If the trial year went badly then the couple could separate without social stigma being applied to either party and if a child were born out of that temporary union, he or she became the responsibility of the father. A sensible arrangement now happily revived among young people with realistic expectations.
Horses were almost as important as husbands (and in some equestrian families they still are) and in rivers and in the sea they were washed at Lammas time in a ceremony greatly frowned upon by the Kirk for reasons I cannot fathom. In any case it sounds like a similar purification act to that visited on cattle when they were driven through the fire.
These then are the four nodal points of the old Celtic year: Samhuinn on 1 November, Imbolc on 1 February, Beltane on 1 May and Lughnasa on 1 August. If Eildon Hill North was a huge ritual and royal site crowded to overflowing with feasting, celebration, lawgiving and magic, it must have had an economic function since the quarter-days reflected important points in the stock-rearing year.
Just as the sky gods of the Celts drove them to climb hills to be closer, they came down to earth to deal with matters of wealth and trade. At the foot of Eildon Mid Hill and its sister the Wester Hill there is a very extensive series of earthworks. They are difficult to see now since the ground has been heavily planted with thick conifer woods. But the Ordnance Survey traces their layout clearly. Zigzagging in several directions, the earthworks are mainly ditches with banks. Although they use the contours and features of the land, running out at the bottom of very steep slopes or just as they reach a stream, they cannot have been defensive. There is simply no military logic to their layout with ditches running at all angles, connected but not consistent in presenting an obstacle of any formidable aspect to an oncoming enemy. However it would not take a farmer a second glance to tell what this series of ditches represent. They are stock fields. Supplemented by occasional runs of hurdle fences, this complex was built to accommodate the cattle, sheep and goats of the herdsmen who climbed Eildon Hill North at Samhuinn Eve to feast and pray for a kind winter.
The dates of these ancient festivals evolved into cattle fairs which in turn attracted commerce of all sorts to them. Imbolc at Eildon Hill was remembered by the Fair of St Boswell, a local saint who left his name at St Boswells. Lughnasa or Lammas bred the greatest cattle fair in medieval Scotland. Also appropriated by a Christian saint, in this case James, it took place nine miles from Eildon Hill at another magic place. Where the arterial rivers of the Borders meet at Kelso, the Tweed and the Teviot circle a place still known as the Fairgreen and St James’ Fair has a continuous history as a cattle and horse market from 1113 and long before. It has now skipped across the Teviot to a purpose-made ground and is dignified with the modern title of the Border Union Show, second only now to the Royal Highland Show near Edinburgh. But it is still held at the end of July (close to the day of Lughnasa), and there is still much feasting, drinking, displays of horsemanship and the herdsmen lean on their crooks to talk about the weather and the price of fat calves. Conversations once held at the foot of Eildon Hill.
Fairs were handy for Celtic kings. The regular dates and locations allowed their officials to control them just as medieval Scottish kings did. But much wealth was on the ground on those days and it presented a tempting target for outsiders. The landscape to the south-west of the cattle enclosures around the Eildons reveals an extraordinary reaction to that threat.
The three hills lie in a long loop of the River Tweed. Having been joined by the Ettrick and then by the Gala Water it flows north-west past Abbotsford and then turns due west towards Melrose, Trimontium, Maolros, Dryburgh Abbey and then down to Kelso and the fertile flatlands of the Merse before washing into the North Sea at Berwick. This loop protects the Eildons to the west, north and east, leaving the only exposed flank to the south.
Here the P-Celtic kings organized another huge communal project. For at least four and a half miles (almost certainly more) there runs an earthwork of unparalleled scale in the Borders and pre-Roman Scotland. Consisting of two ditches and two banks, sometimes with an aggregate breadth of fifty-six feet, or for part of its length two ditches with a high bank between them, it stretches south-east from the Tweed near Abbotsford down to the Ale Water. There are forts at either end, remembered toponymically at the south-east as Rowchester and Blackchester, and at Cauldshiels Loch at the north-west. Its design is unquestionably defensive, expecting attack from the south either by cavalry or chariots or both. Local people still remember the purpose of this huge earthwork because they call it the Military Road even though it now leads nowhere.
The ditches and banks presented a real barrier to horse-borne assault and their orientation reveals the threatening shadow of an enemy based in the hill country south-west of the Eildons.
Cattle needed to be watered as well as protected. Seasonal streams border the ditched enclosures at the foot of the Eildon Hills but a more certain source of water lay in a series of wells concentrated around them, no doubt influencing the original choice of the site. Now sadly disguised by Christian names, St Dunstan’s Well, St Mary’s and Monkswell are all handily placed for the herdsmen.
They were also magic places, a source of much more than water. But it is important not to see this as simply more information about Celtic religion, the fact is that the Celts did not believe in their religion in the modern way; they lived it. Their sky gods, their earth gods all gave meaning, forward purpose and structure to their lives.
Here is a good example of how the religious practices of the Celts persist. All over the western world there are fountains, rivers, pools and wells full of coins. ‘Three Coins in a Fountain’ was a popular song for my father’s generation and it combined the magic number of three with the ancient Celtic practice of throwing items of great value into water. These were material sacrifices intended to placate earth and water gods. The most reliable source for archaeological finds of bronze objects are watery places. Metal weapons were of great value to the Celts and they threw them away regularly and in some quantity. A hoard of spears, swords and arrowheads was discovered in Duddingston Loch in 1778. They must have belonged to the P-Celts who knew the place as Trauerlen. The most vivid memory of weapons thrown into water is the story of Excalibur. On Arthur’s death Tennyson¹⁴ gives the magic sword to Sir Bedevere who rides to the lake, wheels it above his head, closes his eyes and with both hands hurls the great blade into the deep. Where a hand shimmers t
hrough the surface, catches it by the hilt and draws it downwards. As good an account as any of the rituals of Celtic warriors. Excalibur, incidentally, is only one of many magic P-Celtic swords; its name means ‘hard dinter’.
For another perspective on the world of Celtic cattlemen and their use of Eildon Hill North, it is worth turning to the Ravenna Cosmography. This is a set of Roman maps of their world compiled in the fifth century in Italy. They draw together the cartographic traditions of Ptolemy and Avienus and many others and because the empire had occasionally compassed southern Scotland, places there are plotted. One of them is Medionemeton. It means the ‘Middle Shrine’ and although the location is imprecise, it looks to me as though it marks Eildon Hill North. The Romans knew it as an important shrine, probably the most important between Hadrian’s Wall and the later Antonine Wall to the north. There exists clear archaeological evidence that the Great Hill was occupied in the first and second centuries AD. This was previously the period when the Roman legions were at Trimontium, their depot and camp which acted as the military headquarters for all of intramural Scotland. It lay astride Dere Street, the north-south artery of northern Britannia and around the camp was a vicus or town which served the material needs of the garrison as well as the travellers on the road. Including the legionaries and their cavalry auxiliaries, perhaps 5,000 people lived at Trimontium.¹⁵
Above them lowered the bulk of Eildon Hill North. It is impossible to imagine the Roman commander allowing a military or even administrative occupation of the hill of any permanence. According to the archaeologists the Romans seem to have permitted temporary occupation and even then maintained a signal station on the summit which doubtless doubled as an observation post. The Romans were practical local politicians and it seems likely to me that they allowed the kings of tribes friendly to them to maintain the yearly cycle of the festivals of Samhuinn, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasa. The cattle fairs would have made it logistically easy for Trimontium’s quartermasters to levy tribute in kind and to provision their fort for the year.
The name of Medionemeton might be remembered in the name of a house: Cragnethan lies a hundred or so yards south of the hamlet of Eildon. But the substance of it and its historical continuity are much more striking and vivid. Close by runs the Boglie Burn, past the Eildon Tree, while over Eildon Hill there is the wooded ravine known as the Rhymer’s Glen. This is the landscape of True Thomas, Thomas of Ersildoune, perhaps best known as Thomas the Rhymer.
He was undoubtedly a real person who lived at Ersildoune or modern Earlston, a small town to be found near the line of Dere Street less than three miles north of Eildon Hill. Another Bannatyne Club publication, the Melrose Liber,¹⁶ reprints a charter of the 1260s where Peter Haig of Bemersyde is compelled to pay half a stone of beeswax each year to the chapel of St Cuthbert at Old Melrose. Among others the charter is witnessed by Thomas Rymor de Ersildoune.
His defining work was a fascinating poem usually titled ‘The Romance of Thomas the Rhymer’.¹⁷1 While out hunting on the slopes of Eildon Hill at Hallowe’en, Thomas meets a beautiful woman riding a splendidly harnessed horse. Thomas is literally enchanted as she points out to him three roads.
Oh see ye not yon narrow road
So thick beset with thorns and briers?
That is the path of righteousness,
Though after it but few enquires.
And see ye not yon braid braid road
That lies across yon lily leven?
That is the path of wickedness
Thoug some call it heaven.
And see ye not that bonny road
That winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to Elfland
Where you and I this night maun gae.
Thomas spends what he believes is one night in Elfland but is in earth time actually seven years. He makes love to the Faerie Queen and then escapes with the gift of prophecy.
Now this poem, this man and this episode are much more substantial than an echo of Eildon Hill’s P-Celtic past. They are its lineal descendant. The place-names stand witness: the queen met Thomas by the Eildon Tree; the crack in the earth and the crack in time through which they slipped into Elfland is the Boglie Burn. A bogle is a Scots word for an elf or faerie, not always a benign one. Huntly Bank, where the poem opens, is on the other side of the hill near the cattle enclosures and Rhymer’s Glen is a more recent toponymic affirmation of the story.
The poem was first reproduced in the early fifteenth century in England but when the Chaucerian crust is broken off, the real character of it is made plain. Thomas visited the Celtic Otherworld, entering it through a portal traditionally revered by their priests. He went on Samhuinn Eve when any barriers between men and the supernatural were lowered. And he came back with the gift of second sight, with the magic of a P-Celtic holy man.
The reality is just as engaging. Thomas’s family name was Learmonth and as the records of his holdings at Earlston attest, he was a landowner of some substance. Someone who sounds like his son (unless the visit to the Otherworld conferred longevity as well as second sight) gifted lands to the hospital which lay on Dere Street at Soutra in 1294.¹⁸ I believe that as a literate man Thomas was probably a collector of stories. He lived in a place that had seen great social change and at a time when political upheaval was about to erupt into bloody warfare.
At Earlston, Thomas found himself close to a linguistic frontier. Place names to the west and north of the town (like Trabrown) had survived long enough to be included in the great collections of monastic charters compiled in the Borders in the twelfth century. But the P-Celtic speech community must have dwindled dramatically by the 1260s when Thomas was active. Their stories were about to die with them when he wrote them down, and cast himself in them.
In 1286 King Alexander III of Scotland made an ill-advised journey across the Forth to Fife to spend an uxorious night with his young and beautiful wife. He never saw her; his horse plunged off a cliff near Kinghorn and Scotland was plunged into centuries of intermittent warfare with England as their kings attempted to conquer and control the north of Britain. The stories have it that True Thomas predicted the death of Alexander III the night before it happened. In the Wars of Independence that followed, many other calamities were foretold by him.
Less black, much more hopeful are the prophecies contained in what scholars know as the ‘Third Fytte’ of Thomas.¹⁹ In summary he predicts the return of Arthur who sleeps with his knights under Eildon Hill. There is, he writes, ‘a good time coming’ when ‘the kind conqueror’ will ride from the west and defeat the Saxons before reuniting Britain. No doubt as Edward I’s armies burned and looted ‘the Saxons’ became synonymous with ‘the English’, but Thomas is clear about the use of the word ‘Britain’ and the sense of Arthur emerging with his horse warriors: ‘a chieftain unchosen that shall choose for himself, and ride through the realm and Roy shall be called’.
‘The Romance of Thomas’ and the prophecies spread quickly around Scotland; place names related to the Rhymer are found as far north as Inverness and as far west as Ayrshire. To the Gaelic speakers of the Highlands he became a heroic figure; his origins grew mythic and he became known as Tomas Reumhair or Thomas the Wanderer.²⁰ His preservation of the P-Celtic legends of Arthur resonated with their ancient Q-Celtic cousins. There is a mysterious couplet in a classical Gaelic poem of circa 1600, which makes a clear connection.
‘The leadership of the Gael in his customary step will fall to a champion of the warband of Britain.’ Attributed to Thomas, this sounds like a repetition of a Merlin prophecy of the emergence of someone very like Arthur. What is clearly traceable is the transmission through the cult of Thomas of this sort of story in the Gaidhealtachd of the highlands of Scotland. Echoes survived in tales of Thomas or his shade at markets searching for good horses, clearly with warfare in mind. At some point the prophet supplanted the prophesied and Thomas became Arthur. Another Gaelic poem translates as:
When Thomas comes wi
th his horses
The day of plunders will be on the Clyde
Nine thousand good men will be drowned
And a young king will attain the crown.
As I hope to show this is a clear reference to the struggles of the P- Celts of southern Scotland.
There is much more Gaelic material in this vein, particularly from the seventeenth century but the phenomenon of Thomas the Rhymer shows how the Celtic magic of the Eildons kept its power long after fires ceased to be lit on the summit. Even when the Angles came to the Borders they remembered it when they used their own name, Aeled-Dun or Fire Hill. And, more, it shows how long in the memory of ordinary people the idea of Arthur as a P- Celtic messiah persisted.
The reactions of classical writers give a more rounded sense of pre-Roman Celtic society. It is important to remember that such authors knew the Celts well. Not only were the Cisalpine Gauls neighbours to the north of the Roman heartland in central Italy, these tribes also had the temerity to sack Rome itself in 390 BC. That sort of history encourages care in reading between the lines of sources in Latin.
Much prejudice and much suspicion salts the observations of writers such as Cato and Caesar. That aside, the Latin records of Celtic society are both extensive and attractive. For the sake of clarity I intend to differentiate between several social or racial differences and social organization. And also to emphasize that the British P-Celts and their European brothers shared these things, even as in the case of Druidism, Britain being the ultimate source of what the Romans found distinctive about the Celts. Therefore Cato writing in Rome in the middle of the second century BC has much to say that may be useful in colouring the human landscape of the Scottish Borders before his descendants and their legions arrived in AD 79.
Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms Page 5