The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (36 page)

Liege of the worldborn, Lord almighty.

By 759, Aethelwald Moll had made himself king of Northumbria. Not a descendant of Aethelfrith and probably a Deiran aristocrat and not a Bernician, he marched an army north to eliminate a rival claimant. In the heartland of Bernicia ‘a severe battle’, the Battle of Eildon, was fought by the River Tweed.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
added that the armies clashed at a place called Edwinscliff and that Oswin, possibly a Bernician rebel, was killed somewhere in the shadow of the Eildon Hills. Dere Street crosses the Tweed near the old Roman fort at Trimontium and there the ground descends steeply to the river on either bank. The precise location of Edwinscliff is no longer known but it is likely that Aethelwald Moll had fought a battle to deal with a Bernician uprising in the Tweed Valley.

Hardship followed the victory at the Eildon Hills. Chroniclers only occasionally comment on the weather – most are concerned with war, royal succession and events affecting the Church. But the winter of 763–764 was bitter with heavy snowfall and an intense cold which kept the snow on the ground long into the spring. Such forage as there was for animals will have run out and those that could scrape down to the lifeless grass will have found little to sustain themselves. The consequent slaughter of stock will have staved off starvation in the early months of the year but stored up problems for the immediate future. A late spring and the likely effects of a rapid snowmelt as temperatures at last climbed will have delayed sowing and perhaps washed away such seed as was planted. Famine gripped the land for at least a year and disease followed malnourishment.

It may be that the brutal winter also had political consequences. A year later Aethelwald Moll was deposed and tonsured. That meant being forced to become a monk and retire from public life to the seclusion of a monastery. In the same
Book of Life
at Durham which records the brief reign of the Rheged princess, Rieinmelth, Aethelwald Moll is noted not as a king but an abbot.

In the shape of King Alchred, a direct descendant of Ida of Bamburgh, the Bernicians returned to power. There followed a series of short reigns of kings who were deposed and tonsured, exiled or murdered. Mercia and its long-lived rulers dominated southern Britain in the second half of the eighth century. Offa (757–796) was tremendously ambitious, wealthy and famous, with economic and diplomatic contacts in both the Muslim world and eastern Europe. In some of his charters, he appeared to arrogate to himself the title,
Rex Anglorum
, ‘King of the English’.

In 789, a minor event signalled that the world was about to change. Here is the entry in
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
:

In this year King Beorhtric married Offa’s daughter Eadburh and in his days there came for the first time three ships of the Northmen (from Horthaland) and then the reeve rode to them and wished to force them to the king’s residence, for he did not know who they were; and they slew him. Those were the first ships of the Danish men which came to the land of the English.

Four years later the Northmen, seaborne war bands from Scandinavia (Horthaland is in western Norway) who became known as the Vikings, attacked Northumbria.
The History of the Kings of Britain
, a chronicle continued and edited by Symeon of Durham, recorded these shocking events:

In the same year the pagans from the north-eastern regions came with a naval force to Britain like stinging hornets and spread on all sides like dire wolves robbed, tore and slaughtered not only
beasts of burden, sheep and oxen but even priests and deacons and companies of monks and nuns. And they came to the Church of Lindisfarne, laid everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted steps, dug up the altars and seized all the treasures of the holy church. They killed some of the brothers, took some away with them in fetters, many they drove out, naked and loaded with insults, some they drowned in the sea.

So began the era of the Vikings, the raiders described by terrified monks as ‘The Sons of Death’. Their attacks and invasions transformed British history but the story of that process in what was to become Scotland is fragmentary. If the chroniclers are to be trusted, there were very few raids in Galloway, even fewer on the eastern coasts of Scotland north of the Forth and only one major incident in the late ninth century north of the mouth of the Tweed when the nunnery at Coldingham was attacked and burned. Vikings seemed to have sailed to targets to the south.

While it seems that the early assaults on churches such as Lindisfarne were motivated by the availability of portable and valuable loot, there were other attractions. Some raids were timed to take place at Christian festivals when Vikings could be sure that gold, silver and gem-studded treasures would be on display and not hidden away. But the traditional image of horn-helmeted (the headgear is the invention of the nineteenth century, no such items have ever been found) berserkers carrying bags of swag out of burning churches is at best incomplete. What consistently attracted Viking raids, long after the valuables had run out, was something much less dramatic, much less eye-catching for the chroniclers. Slaves were in great demand in the eighth and ninth centuries, especially in Moslem Europe and the east. With their superb longships and sea-craft, the Vikings had the unrivalled ability to abduct people and transport them quickly for sale to distant markets and customers. And many slave raids, savage though they were, will have gone unreported.

Irish sources are clear that feast days were chosen not so much for the gold plate (never unwelcome) but much more because of the ready availability of a large number of people gathered in one place, as potential slaves. Pilgrims came to churches from some distance on saints’ days, always held at the same time each year and therefore easily predictable, and these helpful concentrations of people made obvious targets for the Viking slave masters.

Thrall
was the Norse translation and it survives in the phrase to be ‘in thrall to’ someone. A large slave market was established at Dublin and the longships hove to at the mouth of the Liffey with a steady supply of captives from across the Irish Sea and Ireland itself.

Repeated raids on Lindisfarne forced the monks to move St Cuthbert’s shrine out of reach. There followed years of wandering. The saint first lay at Norham on the Tweed before being carried deeper into Bernicia, even further from the dangerous shore, possibly as far inland as Jedburgh. From the ruins of the medieval abbey, archaeologists have uncovered fragments of an elaborate and beautiful shrine which may have held the holy man’s remains for a time. Cuthbert was moved to Ripon and then to Chester-le-Street before finding his final resting-place at Durham and becoming the inspiration for the raising of the great cathedral church. This long peregrination may have had one important cultural side effect. Having protected him from pagans and many having seen his shrine in all its stopping places, Bernicians began to see themselves as living in a blessed land, St Cuthbert’s Land, and they called themselves the Haliwerfolc, ‘the Holy Man’s People’.

This was an identity recognised by outsiders and one which cuts across modern distinctions. The hagiographer of St Wilfrid, Eddius Stephanus, wrote of two peoples, the Northumbrians and the Southumbrians, as did Bede, and they are also recorded in
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
. By the ninth century, Asser, biographer of Alfred the Great of Wessex, was encouraging the notion of a north–south divide for obvious political purposes
– ‘a great dispute, fomented by the devil, has arisen amongst the Northumbrians, as always happens to a people which has incurred the wrath of God’. This sense of difference stuck and medieval writers reinforced it. Probably correctly, William of Malmesbury claimed that, by the twelfth century, Northumbrians spoke a different language from their Saxon cousins in the south.

Just as the Humber and the marshland which extended to the west of the estuary (a considerable barrier) was seen as a physical, cultural and political boundary for centuries, so the notional line drawn in the midstream of the Tweed and along the Cheviot watershed between Scotland and England has influenced attitudes to our history very greatly. Because the modern border cuts through the centre of the lost kingdom of Bernicia and the name of Northumbria has come to be attached to an English county to the south of the line, we have failed to see clearly the central importance of either to Scotland’s early history. It is easily forgotten that the descendants of Ida and Aethelfrith had an absolutely determinant influence on the evolution of the Scottish nation, arguably one far greater than the Gaelic and Pictish kingdoms to the north. That is because Bernicia bequeathed the English language to Scotland or at any rate a recognisable and intelligible northern dialect of English. The ancient Celtic language of Old Welsh has been entirely effaced and, at the outset of the twenty-first century, Gaelic stands on the precipice of extinction.

The process of the adoption of English in Lowland Scotland can be glimpsed occasionally in changing place-names and progressively through the medieval period as written records accumulated. But the pace, scale and distribution of adoption must have been halting and patchy. More remote communities in the high valleys and less accessible inland districts will have clung on longer to the mouth-filling fluidity of Old Welsh and, for those forced to speak it, early English must have seemed like stones in their mouths. But the rippling subtleties of
yr iaith hen
, ‘the old language’, were still heard in southern Scotland for many
generations after it had withered in the Bernician east. The kingdom known as Ystrad Clud, Strathclyde, survived the longest of any of the Old Welsh-speaking polities, only retreating into the shadows in 1018 when one of its last kings, Owain, died fighting the Bernicians on the banks of the Tweed.

F
OR MANY
,
THE ROAD
to the Highlands begins when it reaches Loch Lomond and winds picturesquely around its bonny braes and bonny, bonny banks. The motorist quickly realises that he has left the Lowlands, the industrial valley of the Clyde and the bustle and busyness of Glasgow behind. As the steep sides of Ben Lomond plunge into the waters of the largest loch in Britain, travellers on the sometimes narrow and twisting road have the powerful sense of entering another culture, another country. But their instincts are premature. When the north road leaves the lochside and climbs up Glen Falloch to the watershed, a striking geological phenomenon rises up on the left of the A82. Set on a rocky knoll on a ridge, a huge jagged boulder sits, commanding the wild moorland. At more than two metres in height and its eminence much enhanced by its rocky platform, the stone is unmissable – and it was meant to be.

This is the Clach nam Breatann, the ‘Stone of the Britons’, and it marked an ancient frontier between three lost kingdoms. The lands of the Gaelic-speaking Scots of Dalriada lay to the west, the Pictish kingdom to the north and east and the Britons of Strathclyde to the south. Beneath the clichés and the sentimental music brought to mind by the bonnie banks rumbles the hidden history of a violent border between different languages and different politics. Lomond derives from the Old Welsh
llumon
, ‘a beacon’, and Ben Lomond was the beacon mountain where
fires were lit if hostile ships were seen in the loch below. The Lomond Hills in the centre of Fife can also be seen from a great distance and they got their name in the same way.

Through the brilliant and tenacious research conducted over many years by Elizabeth Rennie and her colleagues in the Cowal Archaeological and Historical Society, a complete land border between the realm of the Strathclyde kings and the men of Dalriada has been traced. It runs south-west from the Clach nam Breatann and follows the line of the burn known as Allt na Criche to a low but conspicuous hill called Cnap na Criche. In Gaelic,
cnap
is ‘a hill’ and the word
criche
or
crioch
means ‘a frontier’.
Na criochan
is the Gaelic term for ‘the borders’.

South of the Cnap and at the head of Loch Goil in a very prominent position stands another unambiguous marker. At 8 metres high and 10 metres broad, Clach a Breatunnach is truly massive. Its name is a slight variant on its more famous cousin’s in Glen Falloch and it means ‘the Stone of the British’. Below it lies another beacon site at Blairlomond, ‘the Field of the Beacon’, on the loch shore. It was probably visible from another lochside location now lost which could have conveyed an alarm down to the mouth of Loch Goil where it joins Loch Long. The stone and the beacon site guard the high pass called Hell’s Glen, a difficult but short through-route from Dalriadan territory along Loch Fyne.

Identifiable by a string of
criche
names and other Gaelic boundary names, the ancient frontier extends all the way south to Toward Point where it looks across to the Isle of Bute. To understand why it was placed some way inland, it is necessary to cast aside modern perceptions of geography.