Britain’s Last Frontier

by Alistair Moffat

  A headland that may once have been an island, like the caves at nearby Covesea, Burghead was a perfect base for sea kings and their ships. On three sides of a roughly rectangular shape, there were rocky cliffs but immediately to the south-west lay a sandy beach where boats could be dragged up above the high-tide mark and easily refloated when needed. At 80 feet above sea level, the headland is high with long views over the Moray Firth to the Black Isle and the mouth of the Cromarty Firth. The landward approach was defended by three huge ditches and high timber-laced stone walls tied together with long iron pins and arranged in an arrowhead formation. These ditches and walls may have had ancient origins for, on Ptolemy’s map of Scotland, Burghead is plotted as Pinnata Castra, ‘the Winged Fort’. Here is a description of the old Pictish stronghold from Charles Cordiner’s Antiquaries and Scenery of the North of Scotland, written in 1780, on the eve of its destruction: ‘[It was] one of the most celebrated places of rendezvous of the buccaneers from Norway [the Vikings]. The vast ramparts still remaining bear the weightiest testimony to its great strength . . . The triple ditch and rampart are yet neat and entire. The top had been defended by logs of oak piled on one another. Many pieces are still to be seen half-burnt.’

  As the houses and streets of the planned town were laid out and built, more than thirty Pictish relief sculptures of bulls came to light. Only six survive and they are thought to be unique to Burghead. They allow speculation on a name – perhaps this immense fortification, the greatest in Scotland, was known to those who made it as ‘the Bull Fort’.

  The events of the Barbarian Conspiracy of the late 4th century make evident the wealth and reach of the sea kings of Moray. As they sailed out of the Bull Fort with their war bands, the succeeding centuries saw their formidable power expand over much of Scotland north of the Forth. To the west, the shared DNA marker of R1b-Pict suggests at least cultural if not political links with Skye and the Atlantic coast. When St Columba came from Ireland to take possession of Iona so that he could establish a community of monks there in 565, Bede noted that it had belonged to ‘the Picts living in that part of Britain [and they] gave it to the Irish monks long ago because they received the Faith of Christ through their preaching’. Perhaps a high king at Burghead had given his assent.

  Columba’s biographer, Adomnan, wrote of the saint’s missionary journeys up the Great Glen to Moray and the heart of Pictland. He famously met King Bridei, probably at his fortress at Craig Phadraig, two miles west of Inverness. Despite several miracles and his besting of Bridei’s pagan priest, Adomnan did not report much success for Columba. More immediate impact was made by soldiers from Ireland than by saints. Some time around AD 500, Gaelic-speaking warriors began to cross the North Channel in significant numbers. At least three kindreds settled on the Argyll coast, what had been the land of the Epidii on the Ptolemy map, and the new name announced their arrival. Argyll means ‘the Coastlands of the Gael’. At the conclusion of the introduction to Bede’s great history quoted above, he set down a version of this process, ‘a combination of treaty and force’, whereby the new Irish kindreds ‘obtained from the Picts the settlements they still hold’.

  Such were the beginnings of Dalriada, the Gaelic-speaking kingdom that would eventually impose its language and its dynasties over much of Scotland. DNA studies not only track the coming of the Irish Gaels, they also offer a revealing gloss on the early development of power politics.

  In 2008, researchers began to notice an Irish marker that appeared to come up again and again in many Y chromosome tests. Known as M222, it is carried by no fewer than 20 per cent of all Irish men and its frequency in the north rises as high as 40 per cent. What astonished analysts was the incontrovertible fact that all of these men were descended from one lineage, from a single individual. DNA markers can be dated, and it became clear that this man lived in the north of Ireland some time in the 5th century. The overwhelming likelihood is that he was the first High King, Niall Noigiallach. Tremendously powerful, his second name reflected the extent of his reach for Noigiallach means ‘of the Nine Hostages’. Sub-kings were compelled to send hostages, usually their children, to the household of the High King as guarantors of compliance and continuing support. Niall ruled over nine kingdoms and their nine sub-kings.

  As well as political, this man’s influence was also genetic. Like most powerful men at that time, Niall had sex with many women and, as a consequence, fathered many sons. And they in turn, as scions of a royal house, repeated what in essence was an evolutionary process. A much later Irish example illustrates. A descendant of Niall, Lord Turlough O’Donnell died in 1423, perhaps from exhaustion. He fathered 14 legitimate sons and likely many more bastards. The 14 produced 59 grandsons and, if the same rate of enthusiasm had been maintained, Turlough would have had 248 great-grandsons and 1,040 great-great-grandsons. Within four generations, the old man could have bred an army.

  This ancient process explains much. Repeated in almost every society, what researchers call social selection allowed kings and aristocrats to father war bands and household retinues. Chroniclers of Dark Ages history usually wrote in Latin and they attached suggestive labels – comitatus had an earlier meaning of ‘a court or retinue’ but came to signify ‘a war band’; cohors was similar and eventually used for ‘a unit in the Roman army’ as well as ‘a war band’; while familia could mean ‘a household (including slaves)’ or even ‘a troop of cavalry warriors’. Bands of blood brothers fought side by side for many centuries and it was a form of military organisation that endured for a simple reason. Cousins, uncles, brothers, nephews, sons and grandsons would fight harder for each other than an army of strangers would because bonds of kinship were strong. When the clansmen mustered at Culloden in 1746, many of their leaders were also their relatives and all fought for their blood brothers who charged across the moor at their shoulders.

  What is striking about the M222 marker is that it clearly moved and in considerable numbers. In the 5th and 6th centuries, bands of men directly descended from Niall Noigiallach sailed the North Channel to carve out the kingdoms of Dalriada. Bede’s version of events turns out to be far from fanciful but backed by modern science. In 21st-century Scotland, 6 per cent of all men carry the M222 marker, around 150,000 are the direct descendants of the Irish High King, and there is a heavy concentration of these individuals in the west of Scotland. If not an invasion, there was certainly an incursion of Irish Gaelic speakers from the 4th to the 6th centuries, probably people of substance, almost certainly warriors.

  As the fortunes of the Dalriadan kings fluctuated with the prowess or otherwise of their war bands, the dynamics of language offer an interesting historical twist. In the 7th and 8th centuries, the name that the Irish gave to their own language was changing. The use of Erainn was giving way to Goidel, the precursor of Gael. This, in turn, was a loan word from Old Welsh, the family of languages spoken on mainland Britain that included Pictish. To them Gwydd meant ‘wild’ or ‘savage’ (the modern Welsh for an Irishman is Gwyddel). The precise processes involved in this exchange can never be clearly tracked but it appears that the Gaels adopted a description of themselves by Old Welsh speakers, the sort of nickname warriors might have liked, even gloried in. It may have been conferred in the 5th century when Irish war bands from Leinster colonised the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales. The names are cognate. The invaders were expelled but the ruins of their settlements were known as cytian yr Gwyddelod, ‘the huts of the Irish’.

  As well as terrifying the British, the wild Gaels fought amongst themselves. Principal rivals in Dalriada were the Cenel Loairn, the Kindred of Lorne, and the Cenel nGabrain, the ancestors of King Kenneth MacAlpin. They contended for the High Kingship of Dalriada but mostly it remained the preserve of the Cenel nGabrain. Paradoxically it was Pictish aggression that ultimately drove the Cenel Loairn out of northern Argyll and forced their kings and their war bands to seek new territory. Meanwhile the Cenel nGabrain, having been spared the worst of the Pictish attacks, flo
urished in southern Argyll and eventually moved east into Perthshire and the heart of Scotland to establish themselves as High Kings of Scotland. By contrast, it seems that the Cenel Loairn faded from history and after 736 no mention of them is made in Argyll. Their kings and their warriors appeared to vanish.

  It was thought for many years that a few place-names were all the old kindred had left behind but recent scholarship has radically altered that view. In fact, the Cenel Loairn has been rediscovered – and found in Moray. A careful analysis of royal genealogies has identified a series of Gaelic names and, by the 11th century, these men were claiming the High Kingship of Scotland, using the ancient rights of the Cenel Loairn in Dalriada as support for their pretension. On their side, the MacAlpin kings used their descent from the Cenel nGabrain to legitimise their position in a similar way. But it seems that the Loairn had left their homelands in northern Argyll, trekked up the Great Glen to Moray and somehow made themselves kings there, constituting a direct threat to the MacAlpin hold on the High Kingship.

  By 943 to 949, matters had escalated into war when ‘Malcolm went with his army into Moray and slew Cellach’. In this brief passage, the chroniclers were recounting the deeds of Malcolm I MacAlpin – the beginnings of a repeating pattern and what would amount to a long and bloody dynastic conflict. Cellach was not the only King of Moray to be killed by the armies of the High King – or by rivals from the Cenel Loairn. Around 1020, Findlaech was assassinated by the sons of his brother, Maelbrigte.

  By 1032, Malcolm II of Scotland had subdued Moray, burning Gillacomgain ‘along with 50 of his men’. This unfortunate was one of the sons of Maelbrigte but the chroniclers, normally very precise about titles, did not style him as a king. Instead, Gillacomgain was Mormaer, or Great Steward, of Moray, an office that implies a previous subjection to Malcolm. But Gillacomgain’s death would be avenged as the kings of Moray and the Cenel Loairn began to blaze a bloody path to fame, both historical and literary.

  In a chronicle compiled in Mainz by an exiled Scottish cleric known as Marianus Scotus, the entry for 1040 is blunt: ‘Duncan, the king of Scotland, was killed in the autumn, by his Dux Macbethad, Findlaech’s son, who succeeded to the kingship for seventeen years.’ When Cnut, the king of England, Denmark and Norway, came to Scotland to receive the submission of its kings, King Macbeth was counted amongst them.

  Sources are scant but it seems that Scotland was relatively peaceful after 1040. Macbeth appears to have been secure enough to go on pilgrimage to Rome in 1050 where ‘he scattered money like seed to the poor’. Two years later, the king began an enduring historical process when he invited two Norman knights to come north from England: ‘Osbert and Hugh surrendered their castles . . . went into Scotland and were kindly received by Macbeth, King of Scots.’ Their stay was short. Here is entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 1054: ‘At this time the Earl Siward went with a great army into Scotland with both fleet and land-force; and brought thence much war-spoil, such as no man had gained before; but his son, Osbert and his sister’s son, Siward, and numbers of his housecarls as well as those of the king were slain there on the Day of the Seven Sleepers.’

  This forgotten Christian festival was held on 27 July, a day that lived on in history in unexpected disguises. William Shakespeare unwittingly absorbed its significance for it planted in his imagination the notion that Malcolm III was placed on the throne of Scotland with English help. The battle on the Day of the Seven Sleepers and all the attendant drama of the Scottish play were also emblematic of attitudes with an ancient provenance. It was written between 1603 and 1607, just after James VI of Scotland had become the James I of Great Britain and Ireland. The opening decade of the 17th century saw a renewed onslaught by the king and his advisors on what he saw as the lawless Highlands of Scotland. Culminating in the suppressions of the Statutes of Iona in 1610, the royal campaign attempted to bring the clans and the great magnates of the north firmly under control. For these entirely political reasons, Macbeth is portrayed by Shakespeare as a wild Gael, a blood-soaked regicide and a threat to order, civilisation and progress. But, while the historical realities of 11th-century Scotland may have been very different from Shakespeare’s propagandist fiction, the tensions in the play were not entirely a work of imagination.

  Later Scottish chroniclers wrote that Siward’s fleet sailed into the Firth of Tay and penetrated the southern Pictish heartlands. Andrew Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland was compiled in the early 15th century and some of what he wrote found its way into Shakespeare’s great tragedy. Siward’s fleet ‘passed over Forth, down straight to Tay, up that water the high way, to Birnam to gather whole’. The chronicler went on to locate the Battle of the Seven Sleepers at Dunsinane, clearly Dunsinnan Hill, where the ramparts of an ancient hill fort can still be seen. Whether or not the battle was, in fact, a siege is not known – nor is it clear if Birnam Wood was used as cover – but it was certainly ferocious as between three and four thousand were said to have died at Dunsinane. But, despite the carnage, Macbeth survived and reigned for a further three years.

  The Day of the Seven Sleepers may have slid into obscurity but it maintained a curious linguistic presence in modern Gaelic. The festival originally recalled the 3rd-century martyrdom of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, now in modern Turkey. To escape the persecutions of the reign of the Roman Emperor Decius, seven young men sought refuge in a cave. They fell asleep and did not wake for two hundred years. When they were seen in what had become a Christian city as old men, they were somehow recognised and, on their deaths, celebrated as martyrs. When Gaelic speakers of the 21st century complain of being very tired, some say, ‘Tha mise seachd sean sgith’ – ‘I am as tired as seven old men’.

  After 1054, Macbeth may have lost control of southern territories and been forced to retreat into Moray but the pressure did not subside. In 1057, armies clashed at Lumphanan. It seems that Macbeth had been raiding or campaigning south of the Mounth and that the future Malcolm III had overtaken his war band. Lumphanan lies immediately to the north of the mouth of a pass through the mountains known as the Cairn o’ Mount. Macbeth was mortally wounded but able to ride south to Scone, the ceremonial centre of southern Pictland, where its kings were traditionally anointed. There ‘he spewed blood on the evening of a night after a duel’, according to a bardic prophet known as Berchan, and his stepson Lulach was confirmed as his successor, the new High King of Scotland. The son of Gruoch, Macbeth’s queen, he reigned for only seven months and, during a battle in 1058, ‘Lulach, king of Scotland, was treacherously slain by Malcolm, son of Duncan’, ran the entry in the Irish Annals of Tigernach. This pivotal battle, an event that would shift the centre of Scotland’s historical gravity, was fought at Essie in Strathbogie, south of Huntly.

  The destruction of the dynasty of the Cenel Loairn did not, however, lead to the suppression of the kingdom of Moray. In 1085 a man with the fascinating name of Maelschnetai (it means something like ‘the Follower of the Snows’ so perhaps he campaigned from a mountain base) was calling himself King of Moray. And, by 1130, his successor, Angus, the grandson of Lulach, believed himself sufficiently powerful to challenge David I for the High Kingship of Scotland. Having led his war bands south of the Mounth, he was decisively defeated at Stracathro near Brechin.

  The Emperor of the North Sea

  A great but little recognised king of England was Cnut or Canute, the man ridiculed for trying to send back the waves. In reality, he was one of the most powerful men ever to rule in England. The association with the sea is apposite for Cnut created a sea empire. He controlled almost every shore of the North Sea as king of Denmark, Norway and England and as overlord of Scotland. In 1031, the Emperor of the North Sea visited Scotland and, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, King Malcolm and King Maelbeth submitted to his power – that is, Malcolm II and Macbeth, King of Moray. The latter was probably known to Cnut and the Norse earls of Orkney as Karl Hundason and he was said by the composers of the sagas to hav
e lost a great battle to Earl Thorfinn, the Skull-splitter. Thorfinn’s father, Torf-Einar, was so called because he cut turf at Tarbat Ness on the coast of Easter Ross. The significance of this was that his action marked the southern boundary of his earldom with Macbeth’s kingdom of Moray.

  As he did in the Borders and elsewhere in Scotland, David I sought a simple and effective solution to unrest in the further reaches of his kingdom. He imported outsiders who would owe their position entirely to him to act as royal representatives in Moray and also as a catalyst for change and improvement. And an unintended consequence of this radical policy was to divide the old kingdom more clearly into Highland and Lowland zones.

  When a man called Flemming Freskin arrived in the north, he immediately began to distribute some of the best land (presumably the forfeited royal estates of the dead King Angus and also those of his supporters) to more incomers. Freskin adopted the name of de Moravia, ‘of Moray’, which eventually became the name Murray and, under his rule, much of the best land in the Laigh passed into new ownership. Sheriffdoms at Inverness, Nairn, Forres and Elgin supplied a judicial and administrative framework for royal control and the spiritual focus of a new and grand cathedral at Elgin completed a familiar feudal picture.

  David I’s colonisation of the lowlands of Moray created an audible cultural boundary. As the fertile farms of the Gaelic-speaking descendants of the Cenel Loairn were taken over by newcomers, their language began to fade and die. Gaelic had replaced Pictish around the 9th century and now it was itself being supplanted by Scots English. The towns of Nairn, Elgin, Forres and Huntly and their rich hinterlands were peopled from the south and Gaelic began to retreat into the mountains and more remote glens. From Strathbogie right across to Lochaber and Lochalsh, it became the language of shepherds and stocksmen while the ploughmen of the Laigh of Moray and as far east as the Buchan spoke a dialect of English that came to be known as Doric.