The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  74. Centres of Scotland and the Caledonian meridians

  Some capitals of Dark Age kingdoms founded after the departure of the Romans were probably the successors of Iron Age capitals. The only plausible solstice diagonal in Caledonia is the trajectory of the ‘Royal Road’ along which Boudica marched from Wardy Hill to Camulodunum. This is the longest diagonal that can be drawn through Britain. It passes to the west of the tribal capital of the Carvetii tribe, Luguvalium (Carlisle), through Brocavum (Eamont), Blatobulgium and several other Roman forts, and along the route of the A74 via Gretna Green to the site of the Glasgow Necropolis. It is shown as a dotted line in figure 79.

  In the historical silence of the Highlands, it is hard to distinguish human messages from stray sounds carried by the wind. This striking alignment of ‘centres’ does all the same have a compellingly Celtic air. It suggests that Caledonia was connected to the rest of Britain and the Celtic world almost two millennia before Scotland and England were joined by the Acts of Union.

  Did some memory of pagan meridians survive in bardic tales and witches’ lore? When Macbeth of Scotland made his last stand at the village of Lumphanan in 1057, he or his geomancers might have known that the battleground lay directly on the Whitchurch meridian. Successive developments over many centuries of prehistoric sites such as Stonehenge show that when tribal memory was preserved in astronomical alignments and visible features of the landscape, it could have a very long life. In 1746, the Caledonian tribes suffered a defeat even more catastrophic than the battle of Mons Graupius. Despite the marshy terrain, the Jacobite rebels chose a moor to the east of Inverness for their decisive engagement with the government army. But only a Highlander for whom a thousand years were a short spell in the collective memory of his clan would have known that Culloden Moor is bisected by the line that runs through the middle of Scotland.

  From Caledonia, the sun of the winter solstice appeared to return to the Ocean beyond an island that was the last outpost of the inhabited world. The Massalian explorer Pytheas had been told that its name was ‘Ierne’. The origin of the word is unknown, though it survives in the modern name of Ireland: Eire. The Romans, having heard that ‘complete savages lead a miserable existence there because of the cold’, called it ‘Hibernia’ (‘the wintry land’). It was also said that despite the wretched climate, the grass of Hibernia was so lush and plentiful that ‘the livestock eat their fill in a short space of time and, if no one prevents them from grazing, they explode’.

  Because Ireland was never conquered by the Romans, its pastures are prolific in tales dating back to the days of the ancient Celts. They were first recorded in the early Middle Ages, but echoes of the founding myths had reached the outside world long before. In the early fifth century AD, in his History Against the Pagans, Orosius reported that ‘a very tall lighthouse’ had been erected in the city of Brigantia (A Coruña) in north-western Spain ‘for the purpose of looking out towards Britannia’.

  The implicit notion that the British Isles might be visible from Spain probably reflects a tale passed on by a trader, a slave or a refugee like the deposed Irish chieftain who sought asylum with Agricola. The eleventh-century compilation of legends known as The Book of Invasions (Lebor Gabála Érenn) tells the story of Breogán, a Celtic king of Galicia, who built a gigantic tower in Brigantia. (Hearing this, a Roman would have recognized the lighthouse called the Tower of Hercules.) ‘On a clear winter’s evening’, Breogán’s son climbed to the top of the tower and saw a distant green shore. He promptly set sail with ‘thrice thirty warriors’. ‘They landed on the “Fetid Shore” of the Headland of Corcu Duibne’ in the south-west of Ireland.

  These pre-Christian legends embrace so many diverse and specific details that the saga of Irish origins defies summary but not belief. If Breogán’s son sailed due north from Brigantia, he would have come to the hill of Ard Nemid in what is now Cork Harbour. This, according to Ptolemy’s Geography, was the part of Hibernia inhabited by a tribe called the Brigantes.60 Perhaps the Irish Brigantes had heard of the city of Brigantia in Spain and imagined their Iberian forefathers crossing the Ocean with the stiff breeze of destiny in their sails. It is impossible to know how much historical truth the legend conveys. Some promontory forts in south-western Ireland have Iberian-style defences, and the lives of the early Irish saints contain many allusions to Iberia and Lusitania (Portugal). Archaeology suggests that Hibernia’s ties with the rest of Keltika were tenuous, but this may simply reflect the fact that so many Irish Iron Age sites have yet to be excavated. Many have been destroyed – and still are being destroyed – by road building and peat extraction. At the time of writing, the chief material proof of Ireland’s Mediterranean connections is the skull of a Barbary macaque – the species of monkey that still scampers over the Rock of Gibraltar – which crossed the Ocean, dead or alive, some time between 390 and 20 BC.

  The monkey’s skull was discovered under the great burial mound at Navan Fort in Northern Ireland. Navan Fort is the Emain Macha of Irish legend, one of the ‘royal sites’ at which the early medieval kings of Ireland held assemblies and ceremonies of inauguration. The intricate earthworks and timber circles of these royal sites show that they were already the religious centres of Ireland in the Iron Age. They were chosen, like many of the oppida of Gaul, because they were known to be places that had been sacred to the pre-Celtic inhabitants of the island. One of the royal sites – the complex of barrows and enclosures on the Hill of Uisneach – is identified in legend as the omphalos of Ireland. Uisneach was the sacred centre, the burial place of Lugh, where a Druid lit the first fire in Ireland. It stood in a territory called ‘Mide’ (the Middle Land). The rest of the island was divided into four kingdoms, which became the medieval provinces of Ulster, Connacht, Leinster and Munster.

  Celtic society survived for so long in Ireland that these places of legend can be seen emerging into recorded history with their identities intact. In gloating over the demise of the great pagan shrines, the ninth-century Christian author of The Martyrology of Óengus (Félire Óengusso) unintentionally produced a miniature gazetteer of Iron Age Ireland:

  The mighty burgh of Temra [Tara] perished at the death of her princes: with a multitude of venerable champions the Ard mór [great height] of Machae [Armagh] abides.

  Ráth Chrúachan [Rathcroghan, the ring-fort of Cruachan] has vanished . . . fair is the sovranty over princes in the monastery of Clonmacnoise.

  The proud burgh of Aillinne [Dún Ailinne] has perished with its warlike host: great is victorious Brigit; fair is her multitudinous cemetery [Kildare].

  Emain’s burgh [Emain Macha] has vanished, save only its stones: the Rome of the western world is multitudinous Glendalough.

  The old cities of the pagans, wherein ownership was acquired by long use, they are waste without worship, like Lugaid’s House-site.

  These pagan centres can be plotted on a map, and any solar patterns hidden in Iron Age Hibernia should appear. The most obviously Druidic feature is this: the omphalos of Uisneach is connected by a solstice line to the royal sites of Cruachan and Dún Ailinne. The bearings are close but not identical to the British standard (within 1.4° and 1.6° respectively). Two other royal sites – Cnoc Áine and Emain Macha – are also roughly aligned on the Uisneach omphalos, within a range of 2.2°.

  75. ‘Royal sites’ of Ireland

  ‘Royal sites’ of Iron Age Ireland. The Hill of Tara, the seat of the kings of early medieval Ireland, plays no part in this pattern. It may have been used only sporadically, or acquired its eminence only later.

  76. The Irish network

  The range of bearings of the three west-east diagonals is 57.96°–59.94°. Assuming perfect alignments, the system would have been based on a tan ratio of 9:5. The line joining Uisneach to Dún Ailinne is a winter solstice line; the corresponding line to Cruachan points to sunset on 1 August (the feast of Lughnasadh).

  Despite the slight inaccuracies, a pattern materializes like a piece of jewellery in
an archaeologist’s trench. The fortress and ‘royal site’ of the Grianan of Aileach was one of the key coordinates used in an early division of Ireland. It lies north of Uisneach on a bearing of 2.9°. This skewed meridian is mirrored by two similarly tilted north–south lines which link the other four royal sites (fig. 76).

  This peculiarly Hibernian variation on the solar network is remarkably coherent. The Uisneach meridian bisects the two diagonal lines, forming two parallelograms. Logically, a corresponding site should exist to the south of Uisneach on the line from the Grianan of Aileach. This would be Ardmore, which predates St Patrick and is probably the oldest monastic settlement in Ireland. In the nineteenth century, thousands of pilgrims were still paying their pagan devotions to a miraculous stone and a holy well at Ardmore, enacting an ‘annual scene of disgusting superstition’ involving the not-entirely-ritual consumption of whiskey.

  One other ‘royal site’ remains to be accounted for: Raffin Fort in County Meath is not mentioned in the medieval texts, but it, too, ‘displays all the features typical of a royal site and is considered to belong to this group’. The solstice lines now begin to trace out a lost history of Ireland. On the same bearing as the other two diagonals – within less than one quarter of a degree – the line from Raffin Fort passes through the hill fort that became the monastery of Kells, then through the Uisneach omphalos, to the monastery of Clonmacnoise, which was one of the great centres of learning in early medieval Ireland. The westerly point of intersection lies just outside the village of Tynagh. The missionary who Christianized Tynagh was said to be a son of Lugh, which suggests that the site was once a cult centre of the Celtic god.

  This elegant pattern may be further evidence of the spread of Celtic culture to Ireland by trade, migration or even deliberate inculcation. A possible sequence of events can be pieced together from legend and by analogy with other Celtic lands. The earliest partition of Ireland described in The Book of Invasions used a natural frontier, the Esker Riada. This ‘road’, formed of glacial ridges of sand and gravel, splits the island roughly into north and south. At this point in the history of Hibernia, there was no omphalos or sacred centre: the division was purely terrestrial.

  Then a people called the Fir Bolg arrived after an odyssey of several generations which had taken them through Greece and Spain. It was the Fir Bolg who chose Uisneach as the centre, presumably using celestial rather than geographical measurements. The Book of Invasions describes their partition of Ireland as a ‘tóraind’ (a ‘marking-out’ or ‘delimiting’). As in Gaul, certain prehistoric sites were chosen and then redeveloped – equipped with banks, ditches, towers and palisades. If the architects of these royal sites retained some of the crude solstitial alignments of the Neolithic monuments, this would account for the inaccuracies of the Hibernian system. When the first Christian missionaries landed in Ireland, they followed in the footsteps of the Druid ‘missionaries’, and their monastic houses were the direct descendants of Druid schools.

  The solar map of Ireland is as rich in virtual expeditions as a railway timetable. It no longer seems a merely picturesque coincidence, for example, that the sun of the winter solstice, seen from Uisneach, rises over Croghan Hill (no. 6 in fig. 76), where St Brigit founded the first convent in Ireland. Other places on the lines may turn out to have been centres of pagan worship, and perhaps the idiosyncrasies of the system will prove to be consequential. The strangely tilted meridian which runs three degrees west of south from the Uisneach omphalos could be the result of careful calculation. If the line is projected as it would have been on a medieval portolan chart, it arrives with eerie precision at the exact point from which Breogán’s son and his armada sailed for Ireland. When he climbed the tower in Brigantia later known as the Tower of Hercules and saw the distant green shore, his mind’s eye did not deceive him.

  Like the Britons and the Gauls, the Irish developed a system which reflected their fabled origins. Archaeologists have shown that the chronology of the Irish legends is astonishingly accurate. The same precision may be encoded in the solar network. Recently, scholars have begun to talk of Celtic culture spreading, not from central Europe, but from the far west. It would have travelled along the Atlantic sea lanes from one ‘end of the earth’ to the next – from the Sacred Promontory to Fisterra and Brigantia, and from there to Finistère, Belerion and the other ‘Sacred Promontory’, on the southeastern tip of Ireland.

  The earliest written records in Europe beyond the Aegean are inscriptions made in a language called Tartessian. The oldest inscriptions use the Phoenician alphabet and date from the eighth century bc. Tartessian was spoken in south-western Iberia. If the partial decipherments are correct, this language belongs to the same sub-group as the Celtic languages of Gaul and Britain. Like the Irish legends and the lives of Irish saints, these inscriptions may be the distant echoes of an ancient maritime trading empire based on slaves and luxury goods. The rhumb line that connects the Tower of Hercules to Uisneach would represent one of the oldest trade routes in Europe. If the line is projected further still, it arrives with the same uncanny accuracy at the Sacred Promontory on the extreme south-western tip of Iberia, where the sun of the winter solstice returned to the lower world (fig. 77), and where the road from the ends of the earth began its long journey to the Alps.

  Here, on the shores of the Western Ocean, another book begins. It is tempting to believe that the story of Celtic Middle Earth had a sequel, and that the Druids continued to practise and teach in the early Christian era. The fifth-century saint referred to in the Martyrology of Óengus as the ‘victorious Brigit’ (one of the patron saints of Ireland) was the daughter or foster-daughter of a star-gazing Druid who predicted that she would ‘shine in the world like the sun in the vault of heaven’. According to one account, Brigit’s father had come, like Breogán’s son, from Lusitania. Her feast day is the day of Imbolc (the first of February), one of the four Celtic festivals, and her name – ‘the Shining One’ – is that of a Celtic goddess. The woman herself, who tended a fire surrounded by a circular hedge that no man could cross, might have been raised as a priestess of her divine namesake.

  The word ‘Druid’ was applied to Christian saints and hermits, and even to the Son of God. But a word is not proof of continuity. The ‘draoidhe’ who were defeated by St Patrick lived five hundred years after Julius Caesar described the Druids of Gaul as a scientific intelligentsia. The diplomat and scholar Diviciacus would have had little in common with the fifth-century Irish Druid Lucatmael, who, in a miracle-contest with St Patrick, induced ‘demons’ to cover the land in a waist-high blanket of snow.

  77. From Hispania to Hibernia

  In Continental Europe, the body of knowledge that had once demanded a twenty-year-long education was either lost or subsumed into the classical curriculum. The fourth-century Gaulish poet Ausonius claimed that ‘professores’ teaching in Bordeaux were scions of ancient Druid families, but the implication was that Druidism belonged to the past. Some of the Druids’ religious functions – consecrating temples, measuring boundaries, counselling kings – survived in pagan cults, which were absorbed rather than abolished by the Church. Their temples – according to the instructions of Pope Gregory I in c. 600 – were converted (‘if they be well built’) rather than destroyed, ‘for surely it is impossible to efface all at once everything from their strong minds’.

  While Druidism persisted in popular religion, the art that had been the geometrical form of its wisdom went beautifully to seed. The ‘Ultimate La Tène’ style of illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells (c. 800) is decorative rather than mathematical; ‘Celtic’ Christian crosses may resemble pagan sun-wheels and evoke the pattern of solstice lines radiating from an omphalos, but their geometry is inconsistent and contains no secret messages from a Druid underworld.

  The intellectual decline of Celtic art is especially evident in the enigmatic carved stones of the Picts of Dark Age Scotland. Most of the carvings were made in the eighth and ninth cen
turies, more than a thousand years after Celtic art first appeared in Europe. One of the commonest figures in the Pictish repertoire combines the crescent-shaped ‘pelta’ of Celtic art with two ‘compass lines’, which could be the solstice bearings of a solar grid, or the finger and thumb of a measuring hand. But these, too, are inconsistent. Even after decades of scholarly study, the Pictish symbols are still mysterious, and it now looks as though they were mysterious to the Picts themselves. The intriguing designs they saw on antique pieces of equipment and jewellery were a code they were never able to crack. They copied the curiously truncated shapes, unaware that each one had once been the visible part of an invisible whole.