Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms

by Alistair Moffat

  Two miles further up the Tweed there is another Roman fort near the farm of Easter Happrew. On flat and low-lying ground, with no evidence of defensive structures of any sort, which lies between the farm and the Sheriff Muir, there have been some extraordinary recent finds of Roman material. High-quality brooches, coins, copper alloy weights for use with scales, gaming counters, a mass of potsherds, and dozens of pieces of Romano-Celtic horse gear have all been found in a large area measuring 700 metres by 250/300 metres. Most striking are two small casts of horses’ heads harnessed with Roman bridles. This rich store of new discoveries is compelling evidence of a commercial civil site adjacent to the Roman fort, what is known as a vicus or small town.

  These new finds are reinforced by the plotting by Ptolemy of a place that sounds very much like the Locus Selgovensis. He calls it Corda and puts it approximately at Lyne. The meaning is from a P-Celtic word which simply means ‘a meeting place’ or sometimes ‘a council’.

  The distribution of place-names and their dating shows how people changed the landscape, and sometimes who they were and when they did it. Broadly, the surviving P-Celtic names given by the Selgovae describe a great wood, the natural features within it, and sometimes where they lived. In the upper reaches of the Ettrick and Yarrow valleys, to the west of the Catrail, lie Berrybush, an anglicized P-Celtic name hiding the meaning bar y bwlch, ‘the summit of a pass’, and Altrieve for eltrefe for ‘old settlement’. There are two places where the original P-Celtic meaning was lost: Loch of the Lowes is essentially Loch of the Loch and Cribbs Hill is Hill Hill. Pen for ‘head’ names many hilltops – Ettrick Pen, Pennygant Hill, Penmanshiel – while the P-Celtic word pren for tree is everywhere: Prin near Innerleithen, Pirnie near Maxton. Primrose in Roxburghshire has nothing to do with a little yellow flower: it means pren y ros or ‘the tree on the moor’, while Primside means ‘white tree’. This speaks of a densely forested area where special trees were boundary markers, meeting places or in a pre-Christian era, objects of worship. In Scotland now, ancient trees are still venerated and often given names. Each year the riders taking part in the Jedburgh Common Riding visit the Capon Tree, held to be the last survivor of the old Jedforest, and at Kelso the townspeople walk to the Trysting Tree on St James’ Fairgreen.

  But toponymy tells us that the P-Celts gave their names to the Great Wood. Only when the Anglians and then later the Normans came to the Border country do the names for clearings, fields, glades and open pasture appear in any number. These are a fascinating group with the likes of Hundalee for ‘the clearing of the dogs’ or Sorrowlessfield near Melrose, which was believed to be the only farm in the Borders not to lose men in the disaster at Flodden but was really named for William Sorules in 1208.

  These are not, however, part of this story and must be left for another day. The reason to pause on the nomenclature of the Great Wood is to lay down a background to the next part of this story. The forest is where the Wild Man of the Woods was to be found, among the warlike Selgovae, before the Anglians or the Saxons came, in that time when everything important was remembered, nothing written down: But it is a story that has not been forgotten and is known now all over the world, and began in the Great Wood, the Forest of Caledon, the Ettrick Forest.

  The last of the tribes encountered by the Romans in the south of Scotland were called the Votadini. They claimed territory from West Lothian around the coastline and down to below Berwick-upon-Tweed, while inland Dere Street (now, more or less, the A68) divided them in the west from the Selgovae and to the south they may have extended as far as the north Tyne. Like the other tribes, their centres occupied hilltops: Edinburgh, Traprain Law and probably the Eildon Hills on the banks of the Tweed.

  Votadini had changed to Gododdin by AD 600 and the later rendering allows a meaning. Goddeu is a P-Celtic word meaning ‘the forest’ or more loosely ‘the land of trees’. It has not survived into contemporary usage, except, eccentrically, in Gaelic, twice. The first meaning is only resonant: giuthais is a Scots pine, literally ‘juicy tree’, because of its abundant and useful resin. The second is related to goddeu. Scottish Celts saw the Scots pine as the king of the forest, the wildman of the woods, the tree of heroes, chieftains and warriors; a single species symbol of the Great Wood that once covered most of the land. Now there are only remnants of the pinewood left, along with the oak, ash, willow, juniper and alder, one of the six species truly native to Scotland. The second meaning is crucial to this story. The Firth of Forth is called Linn Giudain, but only by the more learned of the Gaelic speech community. It is a name that has almost, but not quite, fallen out of use. As we will see later in this tale, it is a vital survival.

  According to Tacitus, the Novantae, the Damnonii, the Selgovae and the Votadini occupied all the land between the Antonine Wall and Hadrian’s Wall. From AD 80 until AD 410, when the Emperor Honorius was forced to abandon the province of Britannia to its fate, these people were exposed constantly to Roman culture but only intermittently subjected to military occupation. Precisely because the four tribes were awkward, difficult to subdue, aggressive, the Romans opted for an arms-length policy.

  What should be drawn from this is a straightforward point: the P-Celts retained their political and military organization while learning a great deal from the efficient fighting machine that was Rome. Their first teacher was Agricola and his campaign in the Borders seems to have gone forward without much difficulty. Except for an echo of battle in place names just audible down 2,000 years. The Ravenna maps show a place in southern Scotland in the territory of the Selgovae. Called Carbantoritum, its derivation is illuminating. Carbad is a Celtic word for ‘chariot’ and the second element of the name can mean a ford but more likely a slope. ‘Chariot-slope’ sound a likely battle reference and toponymy finds a resonance in a very likely place.

  The Liddel Water runs south-west through Liddesdale into the River Esk which joins the Solway near Carlisle. The valley was the refuge of notorious sixteenth-century cattle thieves or reivers and the site of many clan strongholds, the most famous being Hermitage Castle. Liddesdale was also a back door into the Teviot valley and the rich farmlands of the Borders. The reivers knew this and nearly a thousand years before them so did the P- and Q-Celts. In 603 Aedan MacGabrain, the Gaelic King of Dalriada, brought a coalition army of the north and west to battle against the Angles under Ethelfrid, King of Northumbria. It was a crushing defeat for Aedan and Bede notes that: ‘From that day until the present, no king of the Irish in Britain has dared to do battle with the English.’³⁰

  This pivotal battle was fought at Degsastan or Degsa’s Stone. The name has been truncated into Dawston, a tiny hamlet in Liddesdale. Eight miles further down the valley, near Newcastleton, stands Carby Hill or ‘Chariot Slope’. I find it difficult to believe that the warlike Selgovae would have submitted meekly to Agricola without a fight. Carby Hill was a stone-built fortress placed in a strategic position which the hill tribes would have wanted to maintain. I believe they drove their chariots downhill at the Twentieth Legion on their march northwards, and were defeated at the mouth of one of their hill valleys. Interestingly the neighbouring hill to Carby is Arthur’s Seat.

  Having overwintered on the Tay in 83, the 30,ooo-strong Roman army made its way north carefully. Supported by the fleet, the soldiers dug in each night in temporary turf and palisade camps. Each legionary carried implements in his kit which he could use quickly and expertly to dig and stack turf to form a ditch and bank, on top of which other men set a fence of sharpened wooden stakes. These camps are almost always square in shape, with four entrances set in the middle of each side. Scotland is studded with them and aerial photography has discovered many which are invisible on the ground.

  Agricola knew that the northern tribes had formed into an alliance to oppose his advance, and as he moved through Angus and the Mearns, the native war-bands skirmished with his outliers. Their strategy seems to have consisted in avoiding pitched battle. Knowing that the Roman legions were fo
rmidable, well-equipped and well-resourced fighting machines, they preferred to wear down and weary their enemy, all the time extending supply lines from the base at Inchtuthil on the River Tay.

  These tribes were called the Caledonii by Tacitus, probably because that is what they called themselves or where they came from. It is an interesting name but perhaps best seen working backwards. ‘Scotland’ is the English word for Alba. It obviously means Land of the Scots, the Q-Celtic-speaking people who migrated from Ulster to Argyll to form the early kingdom of Dalriada and whose dynasty ultimately ruled most of modern Scotland. But what does ‘Scot’ mean? There is a Q-Celtic root which offers clues. Sgud is a Hebridean word which means ‘a ketch’ or more generally ‘a small boat’. There is also a meaning revolving around the notion of a spy or a scout but that sounds to me like a borrowing from English. Much more likely is an Argyll word sguich which has an ancient meaning of ‘booty, spoil, or plunder’. Argyll itself as a name is from Earra Ghaidheil or the coast of the Gael, that is to say, the first landfall of the Scots as they sailed, no doubt in small boats, from the Antrim coast. ‘Plunderers’ seems a good deal more likely than simply ‘boatmen’.

  Alba is more complicated. It is what the Gaelic-speaking Scots called Scotland when they landed and what Gaelic-speakers call it now. The way it is pronounced in Gaelic is the key to its meaning: the B is said more like a P and half an extra A is inserted between the L and B, almost making it Alapa. It is from the same root that named the Alps, the Latin word albus (meaning matt white). A word English remembers when describing people with white hair and pink eyes. But the use of albus has nothing to do with that or, in fact, with Scotland. Here is how it came about.

  In 366 the historian Rufus Festus Avienus translated the works of the Greek geographer and philosopher Eratosthenes. He flourished much earlier, around 276 BC, and in compiling his gazetteer he used the work of Himilco the Carthaginian who lived circa 500 BC. He claimed to have sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and turned north. Two days’ voyage from somewhere Himilco calls the Oestrymnides Islands there lies the Sacred Isle peopled by the race of the Hierni, and that near them stretches the Isle of the Albiones.

  At a distance of 866 years, through at least one pair of hands, it is unlikely that the name Albiones did not become shopsoiled on the way. However there are references to Albion in the work of four classical geographers, including the more-or-less reliable Ptolemy. All these men approached the island theoretically from the south and in all probability they translated the name given to the island by the P-Celts of Gaul. Because the first feature their sailors saw on the shortest crossing of the English Channel was the White Cliffs of Dover, they called the whole island ‘white-land’ which Avienus and others before him translated into Latin as Alba. The Q-Celtic Scots adopted the Latin name for all of Britain and gave it to the bit of it that they colonized. So the meaning of the Gaelic name for Scotland has nothing to do with what they found and everything to do with England.

  Aside from in the mouths of the 65,000 Scots who make up the pitifully small Gaelic speech community, the name of Alba has not survived widely. Adomnan, the biographer of St Columba, writes in the seventh century AD that the Scots of Britain (as opposed to the Scots of Ireland) are separated from the Picts by ‘montes dorsi Britannici.’³¹ The mountains of the back of Britain, or the spine of Britain, are translated into Gaelic or Q-Celtic as Druim Alban, with Alba taking a genitive case. And on some maps the western ridge of peaks stretching from Ben Ime, near Arrochar by Loch Lomond up north to Ben Nevis, Fort William and the Great Glen are marked as Drumalban. There is another use in an old name (and aristocratic title) in Perthshire. Breadalbane comes from the Q-Celtic Braghaid Albain, meaning ‘the uplands of Alba’. But it is much further south that a seeming repetition occurs. Near Lanark and close to where the River Douglas runs into the Clyde there is a small village called Drumalbin. On the edge of the Southern Uplands, in the rolling countryside of the Clyde valley, it is a curious thing to find. It certainly cannot be Adomnan’s ‘montes dorsi Britannici’ which lie far to the north. But druim in Q-Celtic can mean ridge as well as back and the spelling of Drumalbin with the penultimate ‘i’ might mean ‘of the Scots’. ‘The ridge of the Scots’ rather than ‘the back of Scotland’. I will return to this.

  Ptolemy writes of ‘Albion, a Prettanic isle’. Other geographers use the term ‘Britannic Isles’ to include Ireland, and by Julius Caesar’s time the island is regularly called Britannia. But Ptolemy preserves the origins of the word best in his spelling. It comes from Pretani, probably a soldier’s nickname for the inhabitants of the island. It means ‘the people of the designs’. Caesar notes that both skin-painting and tattooing were widespread among the P-Celts of the south-east of England and so, before they knew any better, they got the name Pretani from the Romans. Therefore Britain is a Latin name for a Celtic custom for a country that thinks itself Anglo-Saxon. Celticness endures in more than DNA and, despite the designs, more than skin-deep.

  But Britain has a particular meaning in this story. When I come to say something about the lost Welsh kingdoms of southern Scotland, I will sometimes use the traditional term Britons because they were the northern remnant of a pan-British P-Celtic culture. That is why the only use of the word Britain in place-names is in Scotland. Most famously in the ancient capital of the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde at Dumbarton, or Dun Breatann, the fortress of the Britons. Less well known is Clach nam Breatann at the head of Loch Lomond, the Stone of the Britons, either a northern boundary of the P-Celts or a battle-site, or probably both. There is Balbarton in Fife, the Stead of the Britons; in Aberdeenshire Drumbarton, the Briton’s ridge; and in Dumfriesshire another Britons’ ridge at Drumbretton.³²

  The oldest name for Scotland is Caledonia. It is what Tacitus called the country north of the Forth and Clyde line, which his father-in-law invaded in AD 83/84. The Caledonii were the principal tribe under which all of the north had united to resist the Roman invasion. They were probably also the first group Agricola’s legions encountered and as so often happens, the invaders gave that name to all the peoples of the area. The place-name of Dunkeld remembers the Caledonii, as do the mountains of Schiehallion and Rohallion, and this puts them broadly in modern Perthshire, in the front line against the Romans.

  The root of the word is caled, P-Celtic for ‘hard’. It is a reference to the rocky geography of highland Perthshire, the screes, the stony passes and the bare, treeless mountain tops. If Alba means ‘white-land’ then Caledonia stands for ‘rock-land’.

  However, that name began to lose its specificity very quickly as Roman geographers extended its meaning south to cover the lusher, green countryside south of the Forth and Clyde. Even allowing for the vagaries of classical cartography and the unreliability of third- or fourth-hand reporting, the ancients’ drawing of Caledonia equated very approximately with the extent of modern Scotland.

  After months of cautious advance, Agricola finally forced the Caledonii to stand and fight in open battle. Tacitus tells us the name of their leader. He is Calgacus, meaning the swordsman, and he is the first Scotsman whose name has come down to us. In classical style Tacitus gives him a speech to his troops before battle is joined. This is a familiar device used by Roman historians to underscore the scale of the military triumph about to be achieved. Although the words, the syntax and the ideas are the literary invention of the historian, the careful reader can sift some grains of authenticity from what Calgacus is said to have said:

  Shielded by nature, we are the men of the edge of the world, the last of the free. Britons are being sold into Roman slavery every day … When that happens there will be nothing left we can call our own: neither farmland, nor mines, nor ports. Even our bravery will count against us, for the imperialists dislike that sort of spirit in a subject people. Therefore as we cannot hope for mercy, we must take up arms for what we cherish most. We will be fighting for our freedom.³³

  Mons Graupius³⁴ is the unknown s
ite of the battle where Calgacus and his tribesmen took on the might of Agricola’s legions. They were, of course, defeated on that day, but not decisively. No one knows for a certainty where the battle was fought but sensible conjecture and a knowledge of the logic of Roman campaigning places it somewhere near the town of Huntly in the north-eastern corner of Scotland.

  Mons Graupius was the high-water mark of Roman power in Britain. A year later Agricola was recalled to Rome and the imperial frontier in Scotland retreated south.

  The Romans did not invent Scotland but they did establish a tradition of differentness. Caledonia can be characterized, albeit in general and blunt terms, by the way in which the invaders reacted. They found the northern tribes too hostile, their terrain so difficult to control that they built two walls and mounted a series of unsuccessful punitive expeditions. Hadrian’s Wall was a remarkable response to the problems caused by the Caledonian warriors. Probably the largest Roman monument in Europe, it represented expensive exasperation and a determination to keep out the northerners from the valuable province of Britannia or at least control them. The essential truth to be drawn is that the Romans could not conquer Scotland and by AD 211 they had given up trying.

  Although Agricola’s recall had everything to do with court politics in imperial Rome and little to do with his work in Britannia, it did have the effect of diverting the agreed military strategy. If the conquest of the whole island could not be managed quickly then the Romans needed to consolidate what they had won. Agricola’s campaigns had defined the political realities of the north. In the Pennines and the Southern Uplands were hostile tribes of hill men whose territory had been contained by encircling roads and fort building at the mouths of their glens. In the river valleys of the Tweed and probably the Clyde, compliant client peoples had been cultivated in the shape of the Votadini and the Damnonii. Beyond them, north of the Forth and Clyde line, lay the confederacy of the Caledonii, defeated at Mons Graupius but not conquered, and definitely dangerous. Unlike the tribes of continental Europe who could move if attacked and displaced, the Caledonii had nowhere to go, no alternative but to stand and fight – ferociously. That is what Tacitus understood when he put those words into Calgacus’s mouth. The Caledonii truly were the men of the edge of the world.