The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (8 page)

When both men returned that afternoon to the scree, they moved aside more stones to discover a large hoard of bronze objects. Another axe head came to light, many more metal rings,
various metal bands and some small mountings with designs of concentric circles inscribed on them. Mr Linton and his sharp-eyed shepherd found twenty-nine objects in all and, apart from the axe heads, they were recognised as the components of a miniature wagon or cart, something made as a gift or for display, too small to be practical. A provisional date of 750
BC
was attached.

The Yarrow Stone

High in the hills of the Ettrick Forest is a fascinating place. Near the farm of Whitehope is a surviving string of standing stones and one of them has a Christian inscription on it. It reads:

Whitehope is deep in the ancient territory of the Selgovae but this sixth-century gravestone hints at political annexation. ‘Liberalis’ is almost certainly a reference to the first powerful Strathclyde king, Rhydderch Hael. Hael means ‘generous’ and in Latin that translates as
liberalis.
Perhaps the lands of the Selgovae had come under Rhydderch’s sway. Nudus and Dumnogenus, with their Romanised names, may not have been his sons but his underkings.

The Horsehope Craig finds appear to have been a ritual deposit, an offering made to the old gods by a society which valued well-crafted metalwork and whose elites premiated horses, harness and horse-drawn transport. The early kings of the Selgovae and their men rode to war either on horseback or in chariots pulled by ponies. Other finds dating after 500
BC
and later confirm the intimate link between the war bands of the Cheviots and Southern Uplands and their ponies and, even later, a generation after the Agricolan invasion of their territory, written sources from the Roman fort of Vindolanda agree that ‘there are very many cavalry’ amongst the kindreds to the north of the Stanegate frontier, the line which later became Hadrian’s Wall.

The charioteers and the warriors they drove into battle spoke a Celtic language. It was an ancestor of modern Welsh, what language historians call P-Celtic or Continental Celtic. Tacitus would have heard its cousin dialects in Gallia Narbonensis, in Gaul itself and as far east as Dalmatia, even to the banks of the Danube. Place names, kindred names, like
Selgovae
, and the few personal names recorded by Ptolemy and other ancient geographers and historians support the notion of a wide distribution of Continental Celtic.

The language appears to have spread through trade and technology. In central Europe, north of the Alps, metalworking developed to a highly sophisticated degree and the first hard and very sharp iron spears and swords were hammered out by smiths who spoke Continental Celtic. As their much sought-after output moved along trade routes so did their language. And how they moved those goods was also important. Latin generally borrowed
little from Celtic languages and the cultural traffic seems to have flowed in the opposite direction. But in the first millennium
BC
it seems that a clutch of vocabulary around the technology of wheeled vehicles was transferred. The words
carrus
for ‘a handcart’,
raeda
for ‘a coach’,
carpentum
for ‘a carriage’ and many other related Latin terms are derived from Continental Celtic. In this at least, it seems that the Romans had something to learn from the Celts.

Faded, almost unrecognisable and certainly forgotten, the relics of Continental Celtic can still be seen on modern maps. Just as they do to the west of Catrail, its ancient place-names tend to survive in groups, suggesting that Celtic speech communities in remote districts clung on for longer as the sea of English lapped around them. A good example is to be found in a high valley of the upper Tweed, not far from Manor and Horsehope Craig. Around an impressive, tottering ruin called Tinnis Castle (Tinnis is from
dinas
, ‘a fort’), other Celtic names echo a lost history. Dreva Craig is from
tref
for ‘settlement’ and it lies below Trahenna Hill and Penvalla, both Celtic names. And around the flanks of this beautiful valley swirls the shade of a legend, a name forever linked to the retreat and defeat of an older Britain. Merlin or Myrddin is remembered at modern places like Merlindale and in much older names like Drumelzier (originally in the form of Dunmedler, ‘The Fort of Merlin’) and commemorated in an extraordinary stained glass window in the old church at nearby Stobo.

Merlin may in reality have been a druid, a last, lingering figure from the pagan past, but the associations with Tinnis and Drumelzier are tenacious. They survived in early Welsh poetry known as the Triads and in one fascinating notice in a sixth-century chronicle. But that is to anticipate events.

While the ancestor of modern Welsh, Continental Celtic, was establishing itself in mainland Britain, a distinct variant began to be heard in Ireland, the western coastlands and islands. Known to scholars as Q-Celtic or Atlantic Celtic, it grew into the modern languages of Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Manx Gaelic from the
Isle of Man. Notoriously difficult to date, the process of language spread and transfer can probably be approximately tracked by the archaeology of trade goods and the tracing of trade routes. It is probably safe to assert that the Selgovan kings and their contemporaries on the western seaboard were speaking these two different variants of Continental and Atlantic Celtic by the beginning of the first millennium
BC
. And they probably had difficulty in understanding each other.

As always languages change when they move and in Ireland and in the west, Atlantic Celtic developed in revealing and fascinating ways. These are historically very important and can be well illustrated by modern examples and comparisons. Scots Gaelic is not like English, German or any of the Latin-based languages of southern Europe. There is no word for yes or for no. If a Gaelic speaker asks
A bheil an t’acras ort?
(‘Are you hungry?’), the answers use the verb forms
Tha
(‘I am’) or
Chaneil
(‘I am not’). This makes for greater precision and clearer understanding on either side of a question.

Equally fundamental is word order. English and many of the Latin-based languages generally arrange a sentence in a subject-verb–object format while Gaelic usually prefers the verb first, followed by a subject and then an object. Conjugating prepositions are also widely used and they change the spelling and pronunciation of the word to which they are applied. This makes life difficult for learners. Often this mutation affects only the initial syllable of a word – ‘in the paper’, for example, is
anns a phaiper
, pronounced ‘faiper’ instead of ‘paiper’, as it would be if no preposition had been applied.

There are also strange and very intriguing forms to describe conditions or status or both. The earlier example,
A bheil an t’acras ort?
literally means ‘Is there hunger on you?’. Or, in order to describe themselves as coming from the island of Lewis, a male Gaelic speaker would say,
Se Leodhasch a tha annam
– literally, ‘It is a Lewisman that is in me’. This active means of expression appears in all sorts of forms. ‘I am sleeping’ is rendered as
Tha mi na mo chadal
or ‘I am in my sleeping’.

These forms are very rare and do not appear at all in other European languages, and only about 10 per cent of the world’s languages contain anything like them. Intriguing similarities can, however, be heard in the Near East and along the North African coast. Some Semitic, Berber and Egyptian languages and dialects use many of the same forms found in Atlantic Celtic. Vocabulary differs widely but sentence word order, conjugating prepositions and the use of active verb forms to describe status and condition as well as a dozen other similarities are widely found on the southern shores of the Mediterranean.

Until the reach and mechanisms of trade are taken fully into account, these seem unlikely connections. Amongst the most dynamic early traders in the Mediterranean were the Phoenicians. Originating from the coastal cities of Tyre, Sidon and what is now Lebanon and Israel, these intrepid merchants sailed immense distances into unknown waters in pursuit of profit and intelligence. Having found the great city of Carthage, near modern Tunis, they reached along the coast to the Straits of Gibraltar, the Pillars of Hercules, where they turned their steering oars either north or south. From their port of Gades, or Cadiz, explorer-merchants plied down the Atlantic coasts of Africa or up to Biscay and probably on to Britain beyond.

As these remarkable men traded, they needed to make themselves clearly understood. Vagueness has no place in commerce and incomprehension costs money. As trade intensified, language mixing or creolisation grew, much as it did in the great modern mercantile empires in Africa and the east. Forms, if not vocabulary, were shared and as Atlantic Celtic reached northwards, spreading like a coastal lingua franca, it absorbed much of original native language but imposed on it a structure which had developed out of the Mediterranean. In this way Scots Gaelic shares seventeen fundamental structural characteristics with the Berber languages of the Sahel.

Medieval Irish and Scots historians understood something of this ancient process. In the eleventh century monastic copyists produced versions of Ireland’s foundation myth in what they
called
An Lebor Gabala Erenn
(
The Book of Invasions
). Shrouded in the mists of ancient time, the fathers of the Irish nation were said to have sailed from a homeland in the Iberian Peninsula, part of a tradition known as the
immrama
, a series of myth-historical voyages made by holy men and heroes.

Kings, or at least men who would be kings, often reached for a foundation myth when politics demanded that a shaky position be shored up. And when Robert de Brus needed legitimacy to sustain his seizure of the Scottish throne, he asked the clever and resourceful cleric, Bernard de Linton, to cobble together a tale of how the Scots came to Scotland. Leaning heavily on
An Lebor Gabala Erenn
, he produced this – much less famous – passage from the Declaration of Arbroath:

The which Scottish nation, journeying from Greater Scythia by the Tyrrhene Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, could not in any place or time or manner be overcome by the barbarians, though long dwelling in Spain amongst the fiercest of them. Coming thence, 1,200 years after the transit of Israel, with many victories and many toils they won that habitation in the west, which though the Britons have been driven out, the Picts effaced, and the Norwegians, Danes and English have often assailed it, they hold now, in freedom from all vassalage; and as the old historians bear witness, have ever so held it. In this kingdoms have reigned 113 kings of their own blood royal, and no man foreign has been among them.

In the early fourteenth century, when Bernard was writing, Scythia was generally understood to be the Bulgarian and Romanian shores of the Black Sea, and while the Tyrrhene Sea may be seen as a slight diversion, the general direction of travel agrees with the findings of language scholars. Although it should be made clear that de Linton was writing not of Pictish history or kings, or of that large part of the north which spoke Continental Celtic, but of the west, of the speakers of Atlantic Celtic and their traditions. Great migrations of peoples have certainly taken place throughout history but both the Irish
Lebor
and the Declaration of Arbroath are much more likely to be describing the journey of a language and those stories and fragments of a culture carried inside it.

If Agricola and his legions were not the first Mediterranean influence to reach the north of Britain, what can be said about the historical importance of language creolisation over such long distances? Only that contact and knowledge exchanged between cultures was likely to have been much more widespread and active than is currently believed. For good reasons historians place much greater reliance on written records and archaeology than on collective memory and tradition – but it is important to be wary of painting the world of 2,000 ago in stark colours. Simply because no written record of the north, its peoples and their kings survives and that, by contrast, Tacitus’ account of his farther-in-law’s campaigns does, we should not make the lazy comparison between illiterate, primitive and savage Selgovan kings and sophisticated Roman invaders. To twenty-first-century sensibilities, both probably shared shockingly brutal views of human life and suffering but it would be wrong to assume that one was more or less cultured than the other.

The Romans and the Greeks would not agree. They certainly saw themselves as superior. Barbarians were not simply the speakers of ‘bar-bar’ crude languages – they were also lesser beings. Just at the moment when the empire encountered the peoples of the north of Britain, Tacitus catches the complexities of this group of attitudes brilliantly:

Thus [among the British] even our style of dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. Gradually too, they went astray into the allurements of evil ways, colonnades and warm baths and elegant banquets. The Britons, who had no experience of this, called it ‘civilisation’, although it was part of their enslavement.

Tacitus’ references were to southern Britain and they suggest how advanced – and subtle – the process of Romanisation had
become. But the provincial government was not its only agent. In the first century
BC
, communities of Belgic Gauls had crossed the Channel to settle in what is now Hampshire, West Sussex and Berkshire. With them they brought a new economics, stimulated by the trade of the empire, and they introduced coinage to Britain and established markets at Silchester, St Albans and Colchester. Native British coins have been found in places below the Severn–Humber line but no further north. It seems that the kings of the Brigantes and those kindreds beyond them would continue to have more in common with those in Wales and Ireland. And throughout the long four centuries of the province of Britannia, the sort of Romanisation seen by Tacitus’ withering eye would be confined to the south.