Finding Arthur (36 page)

How far is a “five days’ march”? I gave up trying to find an exact answer to this question, but the “Goldilocks” solution was to suppose that a it lay somewhere between the Roman’s 50 miles and Harold’s 210 miles. This made the Paratroopers’ 90 miles sound about right (given that soldiers in the sixth century would not have been carrying eighty-pound packs).

The question then is, Who marched for five days from Berwick? Only the Angles lived in Berwick at the relevant time, whatever that time was, and so it had to be the Angles.

Now we come to a big question. If the Angles started in Berwick and marched for five days before they came to fight Nennius’s eleventh battle, where did they march to?

They were unlikely to have marched northwest against the Gododdin again, so soon after Arthur had soundly beaten them in the campaign of the Caledonian Wood. To have tried to bypass the Gododdin and move directly against Strathclyde or Manau would have been to leave their right flank open to attack by the Gododdin, which would have been madness. There was nobody to attack in the west, except perhaps Rheged, but it makes no sense to suppose that the Angles would have attacked some new party when they had enough enemies already (and again this would have left them vulnerable to a flank attack). It seems unlikely that at this time they would
have marched south and opened a second front against a new enemy, leaving their homeland open to invasion by their recent adversaries, the peoples of the Gododdin and Strathclyde. This left only the east, but if they had marched east they would have drowned because the North Sea is in the east. With hindsight, I can see how close I came to the answer when I got this far, and how I stepped away from it just before I got there.

How could the eleventh battle have been fought and won by Arthur, that is, by Arthur Mac Aedan, if his enemies were the Angles? They could not have fought each other if they could not get at each other. It makes no sense to suppose that Strathclyde and the Gododdin stood aside and let the Angles have a go at Arthur so soon after the service Arthur had rendered them in the campaign of the Caledonian Wood.

And yet … Berwick was ninety-four miles from Stirling, a distance that fitted the distance “five days’ march” perfectly. It was frustrating. I couldn’t let it go. I felt I was missing something important. There is so little practical evidence in the old sources, far less specific distances, that I was sure this distance had to mean something, but I could not see where “five days’ march” from Berwick took the Angles.

As so often before when I could not find an answer, I found that I had been asking the wrong question. I had become hung-up on the question of where “five days’ march” would have taken the Angles. I should have been asking, Why was this distance important?

The obvious answer was that this distance was important simply because this distance is one of the few distances to have survived when innumerable other distances have been lost. Of course, before it could survive in the record, it first had to exist in the record. When few distances were ever recorded, the real question, the vital question, the question I should have been asking was, Why was this distance recorded in the first place?

The Angles would have known the marching distance from their base to potential battlefields within, well … marching distance. Most of us have at least a rough idea of the distance from our homes to nearby places of interest. I know how long it would take me to drive from my home to Birmingham or to Newcastle. I have made both of these journeys.
I do not know how long it would take me to drive from Birmingham to Newcastle, because I have not made that journey.

It seems likely that the reason the distance was recorded in the first place was because it was vital information, possibly because the Angles needed to know exactly how far they would have to march to battle through, what was for them, unfamiliar territory. This insight provided the solution to the puzzle. The journey to the eleventh battlefield may have started in Berwick and involved a five-day march, but the march itself did not start in Berwick. First they went by sea.

If the Angle expedition was a combined naval and army exercise involving a journey first by sea and then by land, across unfamiliar terrain, everything made sense. There was only one place the Angles could have gone.

The evidence is this: The eleventh battle involved Arthur and enemies from Berwick, who could only be the Angles. The Angles sailed
somewhere
before they marched for five days to fight Nennius’s eleventh battle. Where could they have sailed to? Where else but to join Arthur’s other enemies, the Picts?

Arthur’s father Aedan had devastated the Pictish fleet in the early 580s. Around 584, Arthur had crushed the Pictish army at Bassas-Circenn-Carpow, before going on to defeat the army of the Angles in the campaign of the Caledonian Wood. It follows, therefore, that the Picts and the Angles had reason to make common cause.

The Angles must have known that if they remained on the defensive they would soon be attacked by another allied British army, but their offensive options were limited because their army had been severely mauled by Arthur in the campaign of the Caledonian Wood. However, they still had an intact fleet and a potential ally in the Picts.

The Picts knew that if they could defeat Arthur, Manau would lie open to them. Their navy had been smashed by Aedan’s fleet in the early 580s, but they still had an intact army, albeit one that had suffered severe losses at Arthur’s hands at Bassas-Circenn-Carpow, and they had a potential ally in the Angles.

It made sense to suppose that the Angles and the Picts agreed to combine their forces and send an army overland, west into Dalriada,
and a fleet around the top of Scotland to attack Dalriada from the north. If they coordinated properly, Arthur’s Scots of Dalriada would be caught in a pincer movement.

If the Angles were allied with the Picts, the most likely place for them to disembark their land forces would have been where the Romans unloaded their ships, the fort at Bassas-Circenn-Carpow, less than one hundred miles north of Berwick on the North Sea. The Anglo-Pictish navy would then have been free to sail around the north of Scotland to provide support when the allied army of Angles and Picts arrived at the western sea.

If the Anglo-Pictish land army marched west along the Roman road from Bassas-Circenn-Carpow to Lochearnhead, and carried on through Glen Ogle, Glen Dochart, Strath Fillan and Glen Lochy past the Falls of Cruachan at the head of Loch Awe and into the Pass of Brander, it would have come to the sea at Airds Bay. There they would have found that directly ahead of them lay what is now the village of Benderloch. In the sixth century Benderloch was the fortress town of Beregonium.

The marching distance from Bassas-Circenn-Carpow to Beregonium-Benderloch is about ninety-one miles, a reasonable five-day march.

It seems likely that if the Anglo-Pictish army headed west, it headed toward Beregonium-Benderloch. Of course, Beregonium is obviously a possible Latin version of Breguoin and Bregion.

I said earlier that Agned and the Castle of the Maidens had become confused with Edinburgh because Geoffrey said Mount Agned was “the Maidens’ Castle,” and Edinburgh was called Castle of the Maidens. It only follows that Edinburgh was Agned if there was only one Castle of the Maidens. However there were and indeed still are innumerable Maiden connections all over Scotland, including Maiden Island, southwest of Beregonium-Benderloch, across Ardmucknish Bay. It is quite possible, therefore, that there was a Maiden connection with the fort at Beregonium-Benderloch.

The evidence suggests that Nennius’s eleventh battle, named both Agned and Breguoin, was fought at the fort of Beregonium, modern-day Benderloch. If so it was there that Arthur, Arthur Mac Aedan, met and defeated a combined land force of Angles and Picts.

It is likely that Agned and Breguoin were but two names for one battle.

Beregonium-Benderloch and only Beregonium-Benderloch is consistent with all the evidence concerning Nennius’s eleventh battle, “On the mountain
Breguoin
, which we call
Cat Bregion
.” The name Beregonium is in all probability a Latinized version of the Q-Celtic
Bruighean
from which we get
Breguoin
, and the P-Celtic Welsh
Bruyn-gwin
from which we get
Bregion
. It is likely that in the past these Celtic names were adjusted to make them more euphonic to non-Celtic ears and that a Latin ending was added. The
b
and
g
sounds of both Breguoin and Bregion are echoed in Beregonium. Besides, Gildensian-related manuscripts that say, “Mount Agned, that is
Cat Bregomium
,” seem to me to be too close to
Beregonium
to be coincidental.

One name, Bruighean from which we get Breguoin, is Scots Q-Celtic, and the other
Bruyn-gwin
from which we get
Bregion
, is in the P-Celtic of the Picts. In the sixth century Beregonium was on the Scots–Pict border and often changed hands. The very fact that Beregonium was on a border lends weight to the argument that this was where the eleventh battle was fought, because, for obvious reasons, battles were often fought on borders. Being on the border between P- and Q-Celtic speakers also lends weight to the argument that there were two names for the same battle, one in Q- and one in P-Celtic.

It may be that Nennius’s source came with two names for the one location because the site of the battle was on a P-Celtic–Q-Celtic border. This makes sense because it explains why Nennius did not provide alternatives for other battle-names on his list: they were not on borders. It is also possible that Nennius had more than one source, one which referred to Breguoin-Bregion and another to Agned. This is simpler and so, perhaps, more likely.

According to Skene in his
Chronicles of the Picts and Scots and Other Early Memorials
, Arthur’s great-great-grandfather, Fergus Mor Mac Erc, brought the Stone of Destiny with him from Ireland to Scotland and installed it in a town he built near Dunstaffnage Castle. Dunstaffnage lies across Ardmucknish Bay, three miles south of Beregonium-Benderloch and three miles is pretty near.

Boece, a Scottish historian who flourished around the year 1,500
CE, says, “Fergus … brought the chair [the Stone of Destiny] from Ireland to Argyll, and was crowned upon it. He built a town in Argyll called Beregonium, in which he placed it.”
²¹

It would be reasonable to suppose that Fergus installed the Stone of Destiny in a suitably impressive building; indeed, if we are to accept Boece at face value, Fergus built a whole new town to house it. It is more likely, however, that Fergus fortified and added to buildings that were already there. It would be surprising if this specially built or at least improved town did not have one grand building constructed in the traditional manner and painted either in Pictish multicolor or druidic white. Such a building would fit the great white house criteria that gave rise to the Breguoin-Bregion names.

Beregonium-Benderloch had been Pictish for centuries, on and off, and so it would also be surprising if most of its buildings were not painted. A hillfort surrounded by painted buildings fits Skene’s
agneaid
, “painted mount,” and points directly to the battle-name Agned. The very fact that there was a fort Agned-Breguoin-Benderloch lends weight to this argument because, for obvious reasons, battles were often fought at forts. The details of this eleventh battle are not known: who did what and when, how the two sides engaged each other, we do not know. We only know that Arthur won. As far as can be gathered from the evidence, what happened was something along the following lines.

The Scots of Dalriada under Fergus Mor, Arthur’s great-great-grandfather, had taken Beregonium-Benderloch in the early sixth century. Some eighty years later the Picts wanted it back, but they were not strong enough to do this on their own, as they had just lost much of their fleet to Aedan’s navy. The Angles too had just been heavily defeated at the hands of an allied army under Arthur’s command in the Great Angle War. They knew that if they were to be successful in any future war in the lowlands of Scotland that they would first have to neutralize Arthur. However they were not strong enough to do this on their own.

The Angles and the Picts formed an alliance and agreed to attack Arthur together. The Angles sailed north from Berwick to Carpow, near modern Perth, and there disembarked before marching west to meet their Pictish allies near Beregonium-Benderloch. This ground was
unfamiliar to the Angles, but they knew their march to battle would take five days, because the Picts had provided them with this information. As the Angles marched west, their fleet sailed north around the top of Scotland to fall on Arthur from the sea.

It was always possible that the Anglo-Pictish army and fleet might have headed south from Carpow to attack Stirling. Arthur would not have known where the attack would fall until his enemies were on the move. When the Scots scouts and glen-watchers told Arthur that the Anglo-Pictish army was heading west he rode north from his base at what is now Ben Arthur at the head of a flying-force of cavalry. He would have had time to get ahead of the advancing Angles and Picts and could have met them in the field at any time, but his men were not all mustered and so he fell back before the Angles and the Picts as they advanced. He needed time to allow the Scots of Dunardry-Dunadd to assemble and march north to join him.

The advancing Angles and Picts were also determined to avoid contact with the Scots until they joined the main Pictish army near the west coast. It was there, about the fort of Beregonium-Benderloch, that the opposing armies met. The eleventh battle on Nennius’s battle-list, the battle called both Agned and Breguoin, was fought on and about the hillfort of Beregonium-Benderloch. We do not have details of this battle, but we do know Arthur won, because Nennius says he won, and that he and his men chased the Angles and the Picts back into the glens and to their ships.