A History of Ancient Britain (31 page)

Looming over the southern end of the Glen is the rocky outcrop of Dunadd – ‘the Fort of the River Add’. Nearly 180 feet high at its summit, its natural terraces are wrapped and
wreathed with the remains of ancient walls as much as 30 feet thick. Its brooding presence is exaggerated out of all proportion to its true size by the flatness of the valley floor from which it
rises, so that it sits proud like an upturned cup on a saucer. The fields around are often waterlogged, but their lyrical-sounding Gaelic name, Moine Mhor – pronounced Moin-yah Vawr and
meaning ‘the Great Moss’ – adds a romantic burnish to what is little more than a weeping, heather-covered bog.

Fortification of the rock began in the last few centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ but sometime around
AD
500 the place was made the capital of the emergent
Gaelic kingdom of Dal Riata. Legend has it that a great chieftain called Fergus Mór mac Eirc – Big Fergus, son of Eirc – crossed the water from his Irish home in search of new
lands to dominate. In his day the sea level was higher than now and the rock of Dunadd more an island than a hill. From its summit he and his tribe could look out upon the waterway that was their
connection to their homeland, and oversee the comings and goings of their ships.

At the start of the sixth century
AD
the Gaels of Dál Riata were just one of the peoples occupying lands in the northern third of Britain. If the legend has a
basis in truth, and the Gaels did indeed arrive from Ireland, then it may explain why they have gone down in history with a name that translates as something like ‘pirates’ or
‘seaborne raiders’. In any event, it seems likely they did not call themselves ‘Gaels’ but had the name foisted upon them instead. Latin scholars referred to the Gaels as
Scoti
– the root of Scot and therefore of Scotland itself.

Excavations at Dunadd have found that the people centred there were skilled goldsmiths – for delicate moulds have been recovered. The find of a single piece of Mediterranean orpiment
– a yellow ink – suggests they may have been in the habit of making illuminated manuscripts as well.

By the time there were Gaels at Dunadd, there were Picts in the east and
north and Britons in the south. The Picts were the descendants of those native tribes that had
refused to co-operate with the Romans, preferring to fight and make mischief for the invaders instead. They occupied much of the best farming land in the territory that would one day be called
Scotland and the most powerful of their leaders styled themselves as kings. The Picts had contacts far and wide and traded natural resources as well as ideas about art and religious beliefs.

To the south were the Britons, sons and daughters of those tribes that had chosen to accept Roman rule. Their territory was spread between fortresses like Din Eidyn – Edinburgh – in
the east and Alt Clut, mighty Dumbarton Rock, in the west.

Relations between the three were complicated. There were marriage ties to bind them and blood feuds to put them at each other’s throats – all the threads so twisted and interwoven
that the tapestry was likely as confusing to the peoples themselves as it is to historians and archaeologists today.

Like the leaders of the Picts, the foremost of the Gaels had aspirations to kingship. On a terrace below the summit of Dunadd they carved a footprint into the living rock . . . an anvil upon
which to forge their kings. Each heir apparent would be crowned with one naked foot placed within the print so that he was literally joined, wedded to the land he sought to rule.

For the next few centuries there was war and peace and war again between Gaels and Picts – until at last, around
AD
900, the two became one by means still not fully
understood. In time, though, the sons and daughters of the new union adapted the old nickname for one of them to form a new identity for all: from now on they were the Scots.

Orkney was once a central point around which much else revolved. Time moved on, however, leaving the place high and dry, like a rock pool. Rather than the centre, that little archipelago north
of Scotland now feels like somewhere remote and on the very edge of nowhere. The same is true of Kilmartin Glen. Drive into that valley today and the overriding feeling is of travelling far off the
beaten track. But that is an impression to be had only from our time in the world. Kilmartin was once nothing less than a true capital – somewhere that mattered as much or more, in its own
time, as any London or Paris. Perhaps the most helpful view of the glen is the one from high above. Sitting as it does on the neck of the Mull of Kintyre, Kilmartin is suddenly, obviously, in
control of the great strip of dry land between the Irish Sea and the inland lochs of western Scotland, a dry-shod shortcut for people heading north-east and south-west. (In his most
important work,
Vita Columbae
– the Life of Columba – the seventh-century hagiographer and abbot of Iona, Saint Adoman, wrote about his more famous predecessor. In
it he mentioned travelling to ‘the head of the region’ – likely Dunadd – and there meeting with traders from Gaul – France – so Kilmartin Glen was an important
destination then for sailors from as far away as France, and even Spain.)

Kilmartin Glen is therefore a little wonder of the Scottish world, a reminder of heydays long past. That it once absorbed an Irish tribe and cradled them in its rocky fastnesses – making
them, in the end, into the first Scots – underlines how the east of Ireland and the west of Scotland have always been closely tied, almost one country at times. For peoples more accustomed to
travelling by boat than overland, a waterway like the Irish Sea was always going to be a shortcut between sister islands rather than any kind of barrier.

The story of Dunadd and Dal Riata is therefore another chapter in the long chronicle of connections between the islands of Ireland and Britain – and the rest of Europe besides. That the
very name ‘Scot’ is rooted in vagabond sea travel serves as a memory of how the water has always mattered to the people at least as much as the land it surrounds.

Of course that sea has been guilty of treachery – stealing away the land by stealth as well as by ram-raiding tsunamis, and forever conjuring up storms to swamp and sweep away curraghs and
coracles. Just a handful of miles west of Kilmartin and Dunadd, in the narrow strait between the islands of Jura and Scarba, lies the monstrous whirlpool of Corryvreckan. One of the largest such
maelstroms in the world, its name surges through Scottish legend. The Gaelic name is Coire Bhreacain – meaning ‘the cauldron of the plaid’ – and the folk tale has it that
the Hag of Winter, called Cailleach, used it to wash her tartan shawl. Dangerous all year round, the vortex is the result of Atlantic tides forced through the narrow channel and swirling around the
peak of an undersea spike of rock they call An Cailleach. When conditions are worst, during the winter months, the swell is often huge and unforgiving and the roar of it all can be heard miles away
– perhaps as far as the summit of Dunadd itself.

Despite the risks, boatmen and sailors had been braving the waters around Britain since at least the Neolithic; and by the Bronze Age, trade with folk on the European mainland demanded regular
crossings of the Channel at least, as well as the wider North Sea.

Such journeys are commonplace to us. The volume and regularity of
ferries and other vessels plying back and forth between Britain and the Continent have rendered such
journeys about as meaningful as jumping on and off a bus. So it is important to try to imagine how perilous an undertaking such a crossing must have been in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age
– and therefore how laden with significance and meaning. Britain and Ireland are set apart by the sea and the millennia of separation have made the people and the society utterly different
from those found on the Continent. It is just 20-odd miles from Dover to Calais, and yet the differences between south-east England and north-west France are profound and instantly apparent. As is
often said, the British and the Irish are island races and islanders are a breed apart.

If those differences, those made and maintained by the water, are still so discernible today, how great must they have been when the separation was much, much more significant as well? Peoples
in the past may have been accustomed to making crossings; but such journeys may have been imbued with meaning and significance that far exceeded the purely physical. Island races are made special
and separate not by the land but by the sea; and we have to attempt to imagine how that water was perceived in ancient times, and what it meant.

As early as the Mesolithic period it seems people viewed the coast and the sea as a boundary between worlds. Archaeologists and anthropologists use the word ‘liminal’ (from the Latin
limen
, meaning threshold) to describe a place set apart, or situated between two other places. People on rites of passage must cross over liminal zones as they pass from one state of
existence to another – from childhood to adulthood; from single to married; from impure to clean; from life to death, and so on.

With archaeologist Steve Mithen I visited giant mounds – middens – of shells left behind on the shorelines of islands off Scotland’s western coastline. As well as the
accumulated rubbish created by years of harvesting and eating shellfish, the middens were also markers – possibly territorial markers – deliberately located on the shining white
boundary between land and sea. Elsewhere in Scotland such middens were occasionally used by Mesolithic people as places in which to bury a few of their own dead. Food, life, death, land and sea
were all mingling in that special zone where states of being were blurred. If the land represented life, then the sea was something or someplace of the dead, or the ancestors, and the coastal strip
between the two was the porous boundary keeping them apart, the threshold.

For ancient peoples, therefore, islanders especially, the sea was more than just a body of water, and voyages undertaken across it may have mattered in ways we can only
guess at.

The earliest boats known to archaeologists are the so-called ‘log-boats’ – dugout canoes made by hollowing out large tree trunks, Robinson Crusoe-style. Gary Momber and his
team are excavating what they believe to be the oldest boat-building yard in the world, under 30 feet of water in the Solent, and it was log-boats that were apparently being built there. But at the
time when Momber’s Mesolithic craftsmen were living and working, there was no south coast, no England, no Isle of Wight and no France. Rather they occupied a river valley in the body of land
that then joined Britain to the Continent. The remains of log-boats are always found in rivers and lakes, suggesting they were used for getting around within the interior of territories and seldom
if ever on the open sea. Such vessels, made and used by hunter-gatherers, are found all over the world. But in Britain, during the Bronze Age, a unique class of sea-going boats came into play.
These are the ‘sewn-plank’ boats, built of carefully shaped oak planks (and they are always made of oak) literally sewn together with ‘withies’ of twisted yew saplings. As
far as we know, sewn-plank boats were made and used in Britain and nowhere else in the world.

This is appropriate for an island race, after all. As islanders off the north-west coast of Europe, the proto-British and Irish were subject to a unique set of circumstances. They were well
aware of and heavily influenced by fashions and cultures on the Continent – from farming to changing tastes in pottery and fine jewellery – and if they wanted to be active participants
in it all, then they had to evolve sophisticated approaches to crossing the sea that would otherwise have isolated them. So the land that would in due course witness an armada humbled, before
eventually producing the greatest navy the world had seen, discovered early on that serious thought had to be applied to the business of matters maritime.

Between 1937 and 1963 a total of three sewn-plank boats were discovered on the banks of the River Humber in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Local man Dr Ted Wright found two of them, in 1937 and
1940, and they are impressive vessels even by modern standards. Measuring over 40 feet long by five and a half feet wide and made of oak planks three to four inches
thick,
the first one Wright unearthed, known as Ferriby 1 or F1, is big enough to carry as many as 20 people. The individual planks had first to be split from the tree trunk before the long edges were
shaped and bevelled for a neater fit. Holes bored at intervals along the length of the planks enabled the yew withies to lash them tightly together into one composite hull. The lateral joints
between the planks had been caulked with moss to help keep the water out and then topped with neatly fitting, slender laths of oak. Ferriby 2, or F2, was found by Wright in 1940 just tens of yards
from the first, and was almost identical in terms of its construction. The last of them, F3, was discovered close by F1 and has yielded a radiocarbon date of 2030
BC
, making
it the earliest boat of its kind in Europe.

When Danish Vikings found their way to that part of the East Riding around the start of the ninth century
AD
they called the place ‘Ferja Bi’ – meaning
a ‘place beside a ferry’. Given the prehistoric boats, the tradition of navigating the Humber was already ancient by then. Communities on either side of the estuary – in Yorkshire
in the north and in the Lincolnshire Wolds in the south – clearly found it easiest to stay connected, one to another, by using the water rather than the land.

Another sewn-plank boat was found at nearby Kilnsea in 1996, two or three miles from the neck of Spurn Point, the appendix of sand that dangles into the North Sea and forms the northern bank of
the mouth of the Humber Estuary. The remains of the Kilnsea boat were less to look at, essentially just a single, long oaken plank; but the evidence of integral cleats and other woodworking
features meant it was clearly part of the tradition that had produced Ferriby 1. Of greater interest to archaeologists than the remains themselves, however, was their location. The Kilnsea boat had
finished its last journey at what is a perfect point of departure to – or arrival from – destinations on the other side of the North Sea. Its resting place was a tantalising position at
the beginning and end of sea-going voyages, within a landscape rich in the remains of prehistoric human habitation.