by Farley Mowat
A similar situation obtained in the west. There the Celts controlling the south shore of Solway Firth were warring for the flat and fertile lands at its head and along its northern shore. Armoricans settled there could serve to keep the Celts at bay.
The number of immigrants involved remains unknown. The Commentaries tell us the Armoricans contributed 30,000 men (of whom a quarter were Pictones) to Vercingetorix’s rebellion. This suggests an Armorican population of at least 150,000. Taking into consideration losses suffered at Roman hands, and assuming that not all survivors were able or willing to flee the country, it may be that only a few thousand émigrés reached northern Alba.
Nevertheless, the Armoricans (with the Picts foremost amongst them) would henceforward play a major role in the history of the land that eventually came to be known as Scotland.
CHAPTER SEVEN
WAR IN THE NORTH
BEING ESSENTIALLY PASTORALISTS, AND SPENDING the greater part of their time with their flocks and herds, Albans would have had small tolerance for urbanites. But Armorican society had been essentially urban. And if these one-time town dwellers ran true to form, they would have regarded their hayseed hosts with condescension, if not contempt. Inevitable friction between people of two such disparate ways of life could alone have led to serious conflict.
Nor was it likely to have been long before the Armoricans, whether cast in the role of frontier guards or simply because they felt penned up in inadequate pockets of Alban land, began looking covetously northward, especially towards the spacious plains east of the Grampian mountain massif. For their part, the Albans would have found themselves in a situation comparable to that of the fabled Arab who allowed a camel to put its head inside his tent.1
By as early as 40 B.C., tensions between the two peoples may have already erupted into open hostilities.
Doubtless the Armoricans had the initial advantage, for they had long been used to living at arms and were skilled fighters. Northern Albans seem to have been militarily unpractised prior to the appearance of Celtic invaders on their borders not so many generations before the arrival of the fugitive Armoricans. The Celtic threat had been contained, not so much because of any military prowess possessed by the Albans as because the Celtic thrust ran out of steam. Nevertheless, the Albans proved to be talented innovators in the art of defensive warfare.
Stalemated along Alba’s southern borders, the only significant threat the Celts continued to pose was from sea-borne raids of the hit-and-run variety, chiefly undertaken in pursuit of vengeance, slaves, and loot. A dozen Celts in an open boat, or perhaps two or three boatloads acting in concert, might come skulking along the coast, seeking to surprise an isolated Alban croft; capture or kill the inhabitants; slaughter the livestock; rob the houses of anything worthwhile; then set the thatch aflame and row away before the neighbours could rally.
People living along such threatened coasts responded by building ring- or D-shaped little strongholds (now called duns, Gaelic for forts), of unmortared stone. These structures, raised by the descendants of megalithic master masons, were so well made that the cost of reducing them would generally have been more than their contents were worth.
Few duns have been found along the east coast, where Celtic seaborne raiders seem never to have been much of a problem. However, Albans in the west erected numbers of such small “homestead” forts. As time passed and raiders grew more determined, the defenders became increasingly inventive, producing so-called galleried duns, which are thought by some to have been ancestral to one of the most remarkable and effective defensive structures of antiquity—the broch.2
One June day my wife and I visited the Broch of Carloway on the northwestern coast of the Isle of Lewis. A gale blowing out of the Western Ocean had cleared the skies, leaving them as harshly blue as the eye of a Celtic god. They glared down on burnished seas that raged against the Outer Hebrides, roared out their fury, and fell away in a smother of foam from the feet of a bald ridge topped by a round stone tower.
Although partly ruined, the tower still stood to a height of forty feet, almost as high as it was round. It still looked as steadfast as it must have seemed to the men who reared it on its granite ridge some two thousand years before our time.
We climbed to it up a slippery pathway through a swirling mob of sheep, seemingly the only other living beings about. In the canyoned little cove below us, a cluster of Hebridean blackhouses, their thatched roofs rotted away and low stone walls overgrown with green turf, testified that people, too, had once lived under the protection of this tower.
We had to bend low to enter the sole portal, which was capped with a lintel stone that must have weighed a ton. A tunnel-like entrance passage, layered deep with sheep dung, pierced the ten-foot-thick ring foundation supporting the broch’s double walls, opening into a central chamber about twenty feet in diameter, tapering upward like the barrel of a gigantic cannon.
Claire Mowat beside the ruins of the Broch of Carloway which still stands guard on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides.
An even smaller interior doorway gave access to a dark and narrow intramural space up which a stone stairway had once spiralled to the top of the tower. The surviving stone treads were slimy with moss, but I scrambled up until a jackdaw, disturbed from her nest, flapped black wings in my face, and a stone dislodged by my passage fell with a warning clatter into the darkness under foot.
Before descending, I peered through a crevice in the outer wall and found I could see right across the wide mouth of Loch Roag, and beyond to a maze of islands through which the boats of raiders from the south would have had to thread their way.
When I regained the floor of the central chamber, Claire drew my attention to a rotted timber protruding from a black heap of stones. I knew that any wood which might have been used in the broch’s original construction would long since have turned to dust, so later that day when I encountered a local historian I asked him about this anomaly. He told me we had been looking at the remains of a roof made of pole rafters covered with thatch.
An aerial view of the Mousa broch in Scotland—perhaps the best preserved broch extant.
“’Twas a hoosie inside the broch, ye see, built by a crofter for his family. Puir folk, they were. Driven off their wee holding in my own grandfather’s time to make room for the laird’s sheep. Their croft was pulled down around their haids by the laird’s men, so they fled to yon auld pile o‘stanes for shelter.”
He paused and looked past me into the darkened western sky.
“They wouldna’ hae been the first, ye ken. Though maybe the last.”
Brochs bear a superficial resemblance to the cooling towers of nuclear power stations, but were entirely constructed of drystone masonry. No mortar at all was used, yet they could sustain themselves to heights of fifty feet. No windows pierced the outer of a broch’s double walls. Entrance could be gained only through one small portal at or near ground level. This could be stopped up with a massive wooden door and was further protected by internal guard cells set into the walls of the entrance passage.
Flaming arrows could not fire a broch, and its walls were too high to be topped by scaling ladders. Until the advent of war engines capable of flinging heavy or explosive projectiles, brochs were virtually impregnable to direct assault.
They could, of course, be laid under siege. But the people crowding the multi-tiered wooden galleries circling the inner walls had either a well or a cistern to provide water, together with quantities of dried or preserved food for man and beast. Starving them out would have required more time than most raiders could have afforded.
Some scholars contend the broch was the end product of a long and gradual evolution; but there seems to be a mysterious gap between the most advanced dun and the earliest broch, giving the impression that the latter sprang onto the northern stage full blown in all its elegant intricacy. A friend tells me he has seen hollow-walled towers of very similar construction in the mountainous interio
r of Corsica—which was itself an Alban stronghold until relatively modern times.
The earliest British brochs may have been reared on the Rinns of Galloway, an almost-island peninsula to the west of Solway Firth. The Rinns parallels the northeast coast of Ireland for nearly thirty miles and is only a little more than twenty miles distant.
It is a green and pleasant land favoured by humankind since the mesolithic era. In Alban times, its fat cattle and sheep must have been much coveted by Irish Celts who, in good weather, could (as Bede has told us) have seen it across the North Channel. I suspect the Scotti and their neighbours made a practice of raiding the Rinns—until brochs sprouted up on the peninsula, effectively spoiling the raiders’ fun.
It does not require much imagination to envisage disgruntled Celts on the Antrim coast of Ireland directing the Pictish refugees of the Venerable Bede’s account to the Rinns across the water—in hopes of killing two birds with one stone, or at least of seeing them kill one another.
Three ruined brochs still stand on the Rinns, sited so as to protect the rich farmlands along the shores of Luce Bay. All three are so similar in design and construction as to almost certainly have been the work of one directing mind. Was this the place the broch was born?
Very few of the five hundred known brochs are south of the mighty rift called the Great More, the Great Glen, or, as some old maps testify, Glen Albyn, that divides northern Scotland into two almost separate regions.
In fact, only five brochs have been found in western Scotland south of Glen Albyn, and eight to the south and east of it. Three of the latter stand in south-facing valleys of the Lammermuir–Moorfoot mountains separating the Tweed valley from the lowlands of the Forth. Two others stand near the foot of the Forth itself, and two more north of and inland from the Firth of Tay. All are of the same early type as the Rinns brochs, and some show evidence of hasty construction.
This eastern group seems to have been sited in an attempt to block invasion from the south, but this is a role the broch was not designed to play. The garrison of a blocking fort should be able to sally out to disrupt the progress of an invading force; yet brochs had no sally ports, just a single narrow door through which only one man at a time could emerge to engage the enemy. Furthermore, these early brochs had no outer defence works, which are an absolute necessity if a blocking fort is to do its job.
Although the Albans may have built this handful of southern brochs to discourage Celtic raids through the hill passes, they might also have been intended to stem a breakout to the north from the Tweed valley by Armorican “guests.” If this was the case, it would have been wasted effort, since the Armoricans seem to have made their move by sea instead of by land.
Here is how I see the conflict unfolding.
In the east the newcomers used their ships to execute a right hook around the Lammermuir–Moorfoot barrier in order to seize bridgeheads northward along the eastern seaboard. Successful landings near North Berwick and on the Fife peninsula gave them control of the Firth of Forth. Bypassing the two brochs which were all that still stood in their way, they pressed westward across Scotland’s narrow waist to link up with compatriots advancing from the Atlantic side.
Those Armoricans who had settled on the north shore of Solway Firth outflanked the Rinns brochs by sea to land along the shores of the Firth of Clyde and seize the lowlands between Ayr and Ardrossan. They then thrust up the Firth Valley to meet their compatriots from the east.
Thereafter the two groups joined forces to make further landings on the east coast, leapfrogging northward until they were in possession of all the eastern lowlands up to Moray Firth. They do not seem to have made much of an attempt to seize land in the west north of the Clyde, probably because this rough country was of little agricultural worth.
The Albans were unable to prevent the occupation of much of their country. Forced to abandon the lowlands, some fled north by boat or on foot. Some retreated into the hills south of the Clyde–Forth valley or withdrew into the rugged Grampian massif to the north of it, where they maintained a hillman’s way of life of the sort many beleaguered Alban people elsewhere had been forced to adopt in the past.
By the end of the first century B.C., the situation had become more or less stabilized. Armoricans held most of the arable land south of Glen Albyn. Free Alba had shrunk to that part of Scotland north of the Glen, including the several archipelagos.
For some time the Armoricans did not push beyond the Glen, both because the country north of that great rift was extremely rugged, and because they had land enough to meet their current needs. The day would come when they would go north again; but when they did, they would encounter an almost impregnable Alban defence.
Seizing the Alban lowlands had been one thing. Living on them proved to be something else.
Aided by their brethren north of the Glen, Albans who had retreated into the interior of the southern and central regions waged guerrilla war on their former guests, subjecting Armoricans in the lowlands to punishing raids.
Unable to pacify the interior, the Armoricans attempted to contain it by sealing off its exits with a ring of forts, each large enough to shelter nearby settlers while serving as a base from which the garrison could sally out to repel raids.
The Armoricans built scores of such forts, virtually encircling the southern and central mountain massifs and, in the north, forming a defensive line against incursions from beyond Glen Albyn. Most were variants of a type traditional in central and western Europe. Stone-faced walls were back-filled with earth, rocks, and rubble—the whole being stabilized by transverse timber baulks.
Known to archaeologists as “timber-laced forts,” these structures were relatively easy to build, but had a serious weakness. When their massive wooden tie-beams dried, they became extremely flammable. If an assailant was able to start a blaze against an outer wall (or inside, by means of fire arrows), the bracing timbers would be likely to ignite, whereupon the entire structure was able to become a raging pyre. The resultant conflagrations generated such intense heat that stone facings and fill sometimes melted, producing characteristically fused heaps of rubble now known as “vitrified forts.” It is surely significant that a high proportion of Scotland’s timber-laced forts have been “vitrified.”3
Alban highlanders harassing Armoricans in their lowland holdings were doubtless reinforced by men from free Alba filtering across the Glen Albyn frontier into the heart of the Grampians. The frontier zone extended roughly from the Isle of Mull, northeast along the Great Glen to the vicinity of Glen Urquhart, where it swung north to follow the edge of the high ground to reach the sea at Dornoch Firth.
Despite their forts, few Armorican settlements could have felt secure. The threatening presence of highland reivers so shadowed the lowlands as to become an integral part of the traditions of Scotland.
Unable to root the hillmen out of their lairs, the Armoricans retaliated against free Alba. Because the mountainous interior north of Glen Albyn was virtually impenetrable—it is still called Rough Bounds—they attacked the Glen’s seaward ends.
In the west, with the help of their navy, they managed to force a corridor from the Sound of Arisaig up Loch Eil to Glen Albyn. In the east they took Black Isle and a large part of the Tarbat Peninsula. The abundance of vitrified forts throughout these regions testifies to the fierceness of the struggle.
But, try as they might, the Armoricans were unable to make any further gains of consequence, because by now the Albans had learned how to use their best weapon to best effect.
Some unsung genius had hit upon the idea of erecting several brochs close enough together to be mutually supporting. Individual brochs could keep in communication through line-of-sight signals, including smoke by day and fire by night. Now they were also provided with outworks from which sorties could be launched. If one broch was dangerously beleaguered, men from the others could mount a counter-attack against the enemy’s rear or create a diversion by threatening to cut his line of ret
reat, a particularly potent ploy against seaborne raiders since it threatened their boats.
By shortly after the turn of the millennium, a stone forest of brochs had sprung up along free Alba’s endangered coasts and in some strategic inland regions. These proved so effective against enemy incursions that Alba lost no more territory.
The small island of Tiree in the southern reaches of the Hebridean Sea provides a good example of the new defence.4 Largely covered by pasture land, Tiree was, and remains, one of the most agriculturally desirable islands in Scottish waters, a nearly irresistible target for raiders and would-be land takers. Its defenders reared eight broch towers within sight of one another. Under their protection, Tiree seems never to have fallen into the hands of either Armoricans or Celts, although, as we shall see, the Irish made at least one strenuous attempt against it.
All over free Alba, and especially in Caithness, Orkney, Shetland, and the Hebrides, the brochs repelled attempts to seize the lands they guarded. They formed a palisade of dragon’s teeth.
If the Albans’ enemies were unable to establish permanent footholds north of the Great Glen, seaborne raiders could nevertheless still thrust and harry. This they did along the mainland coast from Dornoch Firth to Pentland Firth and occasionally as far north as Shetland. They also struck inland up the major river valleys of Sutherland and Caithness. But although they undoubtedly took a toll of people, livestock, and crops, they were not able to dispossess Albans of their land. Emerging from the safety of their towers after a raid, the crofters rebuilt what had been destroyed and carried on with their lives.