Test your knowledge of the Picts with this new brain-teaser devised by Dr Neil McGuigan.
* * *Also try this quiz from last year:
Scotland in the Early Middle Ages
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Neil McGuigan is a historian and author, specialising in early medieval Northern Britain. Find him on Twitter at @neilmcguigan
His biography of King Máel Coluim III (‘Malcolm Canmore’) was published last week by Birlinn Books of Edinburgh:
Máel Coluim III, ‘Canmore’: The World of an Eleventh-Century King
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Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans, The King in the North: the Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce. Birlinn: Edinburgh, 2019, xiv +209 pp. £14.99 pbk. ISBN 978 1 78027 551 2
Much progress has been made in the past 30 years to bring the Picts into the mainstream of early medieval European history, yet they are still often regarded as enigmatic and puzzling. This is perhaps understandable, given that – for many people – the most vivid evidence of the Pictish contribution to Scotland’s past is a unique set of mysterious symbols carved on standing stones. Any book that attempts to de-mystify the Picts is therefore timely and welcome. In this case, the reader is presented with a volume of what are essentially separate academic essays, the majority previously published in scholarly journals or monographs but here updated and newly edited. All are linked by a shared focus on northern Pictland, an area generally understood as lying north of the Grampian Mountains and encompassing Aberdeenshire, Moray, Inverness-shire and Easter Ross. The essays are linked by authorship, having been produced by scholars involved in the Northern Picts project at the University of Aberdeen. Like the project itself, the volume is interdisciplinary, covering a range of archaeological and historical topics.
One of the book’s stated objectives is to highlight the importance of northern Pictland and, in so doing, to redress the balance between this area and its southern counterpart. It is certainly true that historians and archaeologists have traditionally placed a focus on southern Pictland, roughly the area between the Grampians and the Forth-Clyde isthmus. In addition to being the core of the later kingdom of Alba, southern Pictland was until recently assumed to include Fortriu, a powerful kingdom whose rulers wielded overkingship over a large swathe of Pictish territory. Northern Pictland, by contrast, was long regarded by scholars as something of a backwater, in spite of its containing some of the most impressive examples of Pictish sculpture. These old perceptions of political geography shifted dramatically in 2006 with the publication of Alex Woolf’s proposal that Fortriu should be seen as a northern realm centred on lands around the Moray Firth. Widespread acceptance of Woolf’s argument encouraged historians and archaeologists to direct more attention to the area north of the Grampians and, in 2012, the Northern Picts project was established. An exciting programme of archaeological surveys and excavations at key sites north of the Grampians has continued in the ensuing years, with analysis and interpretation of the data being presented in this collected volume.
The main contents comprise eight chapters, of which seven are edited versions of previously published studies while the eighth was written specially for this book. A shorter final chapter, giving a summary and overview, is followed by a list of places to visit and an extensive, up-to-date bibliography. Looking at the chapters in sequence, the first sees the archaeologist Gordon Noble introducing a number of key themes: the geographical extent of northern Pictland; the impact of Woolf’s 2006 paper; the subsequent recognition of Fortriu and another kingdom – called Ce – as the main northern Pictish polities; and the work of the Northern Picts project. In Chapter Two, historian Nicholas Evans discusses the surviving primary source material relating to northern Pictland, noting the difficulties presented by the texts and the care that should be exercised when trying to interpret them. Far too much trust has indeed been placed in their testimony, which until quite recently was often accepted at face value. As Evans observes, it is essential that the contexts in which these sources were written are acknowledged, especially those texts produced long after the end of the Pictish period by authors for whom the past was something to be adapted and repackaged. Evans also examines the rise to prominence of the kings of Fortriu, their association with Pictish overkingship and the eventual disappearance not only of the name of their kingdom but of Pictish identity as a whole.
Chapter Three diverts our attention from textual to archaeological evidence with Gordon Noble’s study of fortified settlements in northern Pictland. Noble discusses sites such as the massive coastal promontory fort at Burghead – the largest Pictish fortress so far known – and the multiple enclosure hillfort of Mither Tap, Bennachie, together with less imposing enclosed settlements like the one recently identified at Rhynie. A broader context is the emergence of fortified settlements across early medieval northern Britain as places where elites exercised and displayed their authority, hence the association of hillforts – including a couple of Pictish ones – with contemporary references to kingship and royal warfare. In Chapter Four we are offered a more detailed look at the ‘enclosure complex’ at Rhynie, a fascinating location where excavations by the Northern Picts project have enabled archaeologists to identify a landscape of power and ritual. Evidence of metalworking and jewelsmithing, together with shards of imported Mediterranean pottery, confirm this site’s high status. This new data also provides a context for two unusual and well-known sculptured monoliths – the Craw Stane with its Pictish symbols and ‘Rhynie Man’ with its fierce-looking, axe-wielding human figure.
The archaeological theme continues in Chapter Five, where cemeteries and single graves provide evidence for the burial practices of northern Pictland. Across the region, evidence from aerial survey and excavation suggests a burial tradition involving square or circular barrows, with an apparent absence of the stone-lined ‘long cist’ graves observed south of the Grampians. Interestingly, some barrows were made bigger or more elaborate as time went by, implying that successive generations of the living community deliberately altered the appearance of graves for reasons of their own, perhaps to support claims of authority or ancestry or to retrospectively enhance the status of the dead. Also in this chapter we see how new interpretations of archaeological data are changing older perceptions of Pictish society, namely the important observation that Pictish symbol stones do not – after all – appear to have a strong association with Pictish graves.
Chapter Six describes the hoard discovered in 1838 at Gaulcross – a collection of Late Roman hacksilver buried near two ruined stone circles in an Aberdeenshire field. The hoard is likely to have been deposited in the fifth, sixth or seventh century. Almost all of the original collection of finds subsequently disappeared. However, a new programme of surveying and metal detecting in 2013 unearthed more than 100 additional items, enabling the Gaulcross hoard to be studied alongside two more – one from Traprain Law in East Lothian and another from Norrie’s Law in Fife – these three being the only known hoards of pre-Viking hacksilver from Scotland. Possible contexts for their acquisition and deposition are here usefully considered by analogy with similar hoards from elsewhere in Europe, notably from Denmark. A plausible theory is that the Gaulcross hoard may have been ritually interred by members of a local Pictish elite eager to link themselves to an ancestral or sacred aura represented by the ancient stone circles.
Moving on to the book’s seventh chapter we encounter the Pictish symbol system, undoubtedly the most familiar and most controversial topic addressed in this volume. A vigorous debate over the question of what message the symbols were intended to convey has been running for more than 100 years and shows no sign of abating. Among a plethora of theories some are more plausible than others, with the idea that the symbols might represent a form of writing being one of the front-runners. This particular theory is here described as the current academic consensus. It certainly draws support from comparisons with the ogham of Ireland and western Britain and the runes of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The runic script and ogham are now thought to have emerged in the second and fourth centuries AD respectively, each being a form of ‘barbarian’ experimentation with writing on the fringes of the Roman Empire. Inspired by the Roman alphabet, although not devised in imitation of it, both ogham and runes may have enabled ambitious elites to publicly communicate their power and status, in the same way that Latin inscriptions conveyed Roman prestige. Here the argument goes on to propose that, if Pictish symbols did indeed originate as early as ogham or Scandinavian runes, they were probably used by high-status families to reinforce social positions. This explanation offers a plausible context for the stone plaques inscribed with simple symbol designs at the sea-stack of Dunnicaer on the Aberdeenshire coast. Fieldwork on this near-inaccessible site was undertaken by the Northern Picts project from 2015 to 2017 and confirmed an older theory that the site had been a Pictish fort. A stone rampart in which the plaques had been set and displayed has yielded a construction date between the late third and mid-fourth centuries AD. If the symbols were inscribed at the same time, the origin of the system is pushed back by several hundred years from its traditional start-date in the sixth or seventh century. As the authors of Chapter Seven point out, it might be no coincidence that such an early date for the origin of the symbols corresponds with the first appearance of the term Picti in contemporary Roman texts. The possibility that the symbols, with their remarkable consistency of form, were devised simultaneously with the forging of a new ‘Pictish’ identity in the far northern regions of Britain is certainly a thought-provoking notion to add to the age-old debate.
Fish symbol and triangle on a stone from Dunnicaer.
Chapter Eight, the last of the main essays, has been newly written for the book. It looks at the transition from paganism to Christianity in northern Pictland, a process barely visible in the surviving sources. A lack of authentic information on what Pictish paganism actually looked like has allowed fanciful modern ideas about ‘Celtic’ religious beliefs to fill the gaps. The few genuine contemporary references of direct relevance to the topic were, to compound the difficulties, written not by pagan Picts but by non-Pictish Christians keen to highlight the superiority of their own religion. For a more objective view of Pictish paganism we turn once again to archaeological evidence and to the inferences that can be drawn from it. Thus, at the Sculptor’s Cave at Covesea in Moray, recent work suggests that the place was a ritual venue where human sacrifice was performed in the third to fourth centuries AD. Similarly, one interpretation of the Rhynie Man carved figure is that his axe-hammer was not a weapon of war but a tool for the ritual slaughter of cattle. Dating the pagan-to-Christian transition in northern Pictland is no easy task but the texts imply that the process began in the sixth century and was virtually complete before the end of the seventh. By 697, a bishop called Curetán appears to have been based at Rosemarkie in Easter Ross, perhaps serving the northern Pictish territories while a more southerly counterpart held a separate bishopric on the other side of the Grampians. Also in Easter Ross lies the monastic site of Portmahomack, the focus of extensive modern excavations that have confirmed its importance during the fifth to eighth centuries AD. A number of smaller ecclesiastical sites identified by the Northern Picts project as potentially significant await investigation in the future. The chapter reminds us that there remain many unanswered questions, such as to what extent northern Pictland was evangelised by missionaries from St Columba’s monastery on Iona – as claimed by Bede – rather than by a more diverse range of personnel.
In the closing chapter, Gordon Noble observes that ‘we have gone from a lack of identified and dated Pictish sites in northern Pictland to one of the best dated sequences from early medieval Scotland’. It is a credit to the work of all those involved in the Northern Picts project that such an observation can now be made. This collection of essays, available in paperback, brings the project’s detailed findings to a wider audience than before, giving the general reader easy access to an important corpus of specialised research. For scholars of Pictish history and archaeology, it provides a useful compendium of data and analysis on a number of current topics. It is an excellent book and I have no hesitation in recommending it.
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Ten years have passed since the publication of my book The Men Of The North: The Britons Of Southern Scotland. It has since been reprinted a number of times, becoming unavailable for only brief intervals between reprints. For an author, this is an encouraging situation to be in, and I am grateful to my publishers (Birlinn of Edinburgh) for keeping the book ticking over throughout the decade. I am also grateful for the many positive comments from readers and reviewers, all of which have encouraged me to believe that the effort of researching and writing this book has not been in vain. Of course, no book is going to please everyone, and The Men Of The North is no exception. On the whole, though, it seems to have been generally well-received.
“Until the publication of The Men of the North there had never been a textbook for the North British kingdoms — its appearance should be welcomed by undergraduates, teachers, and the general public alike.” Dr Philip Dunshea (International Review of Scottish Studies, 2012)
The above quote, from a Scottish historian whose opinions I value highly, captures in a nutshell my main reason for writing The Men Of The North: I saw a gap on my bookshelf and decided to have a go at filling it myself. Ever since my first forays into early medieval history in the 1980s, I had become increasingly aware that the Northern Britons are Scotland’s forgotten people. They are far more obscure and mysterious than any of their neighbours (including the supposedly enigmatic Picts) and their significant role in Scottish history has frequently been overlooked. References to them in medieval chronicles are thin on the ground, leaving huge gaps in their story and forcing modern historians to scrabble around for snippets of information in less reliable sources (such as poems and legends). Nevertheless, I had often wondered if the various fragments could be assembled into a more-or-less coherent narrative, a stable framework around which a chronological history might take shape. It was 2009 before I took the plunge by putting pen to paper and fingertip to keyboard. The task was as challenging as I had expected it to be, but the result was a book that I felt passed the test.
The Men Of The North includes my own interpretations of certain parts of the textual evidence. This is especially true in the first half of the book, which draws data from medieval Welsh poems in which the deeds of various sixth-century North British kings and warriors are praised. Ten years later, and I can report that these interpretations remain largely unchanged. I still firmly believe that the locations of Rheged (a kingdom, or part of one) and Catraeth (apparently the site of a battle) remain unknown. I still reject the conventional notion that four North British kings joined together in a military coalition to launch a combined assault on an English royal dynasty whom they besieged or blockaded on the island of Lindisfarne. In this particular instance, I see each British king waging his own campaign independently of his alleged allies. If my views on these topics have changed at all in the past ten years, they have probably hardened rather than softened.
Some of my views have, however, shifted somewhat. On page 178 of The Men Of The North, while discussing the question of where the great battle of Brunanburh (AD 937) was fought, I mentioned three places as popular candidates for the battlefield. These were Bromborough in Wirral (Cheshire), Burnswark in Dumfriesshire and Brinsworth in South Yorkshire. I now favour a location in Lancashire, either near the estuary of the River Ribble or further east around Burnley. This revision of my thinking is presented in detail in my second book on the Northern Britons, published in 2014 under the title Strathclyde and the Anglo-Saxons in the Viking Age.
Several people have asked if a new edition of The Men Of The North is in the pipeline. My response is that there are, as yet, no definite plans. If a second edition does appear at some point in the future, it will undoubtedly make much use of another book, an edited volume called Beyond The Gododdin, published in 2013 by the Committee for Dark Age Studies at the University of St Andrews. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that no new research on the North British kingdoms of the sixth century should be regarded as complete unless the papers in Beyond The Gododdin have been consulted and cited.
Any new edition of The Men Of The North will also cite the publications of Dr Fiona Edmonds, author of several ground-breaking papers on the Viking-Age kingdom of Strathclyde/Cumbria, last of the North British realms. As with the contents of Beyond the Gododdin, I regard the work of Dr Edmonds as essential reading. I recommend, in particular, two journal articles and one book chapter. Bibliographic details for these three are given in the list of references at the end of this blogpost.
The past decade has seen other new publications relating to the Northern Britons, too many to list here. I must, however, mention a major archaeological report produced as part of the Galloway Picts Project. Published in 2017, this substantial monograph gives the results of a programme of excavation at Trusty’s Hill, site of a hilltop fortress famous for mysterious carvings that look like Pictish symbols. Interestingly, the report’s main title is The Lost Dark Age Kingdom Of Rheged, reflecting the authors’ belief that Trusty’s Hill is a good candidate for Rheged’s main centre of royal power. Although I remain open-minded on this claim of a Rheged connection, there can be no doubt that the report represents a big contribution to our archaeological understanding of the Northern Britons, giving us an insight into what must have been one of their principal high-status settlements.
On a personal level, the biggest change in my involvement with the Northern Britons since 2010 has been my participation in a number of local heritage projects at Govan on the south side of Glasgow. Most of these projects had a connection with the Govan Stones, a collection of sculptured monuments displayed in the old parish church. The stones were carved in the ninth to eleventh centuries when Govan was a centre of ritual and authority in the kingdom of Strathclyde. The heritage projects helped to raise awareness of the stones not only among the local community but more widely across Scotland as well as internationally. When I first came aboard in 2012, there were some thirty monuments to be seen. Three others, thought to have been lost, were unearthed last year (as I reported at this blog — see link below). Like the archaeological data from Trusty’s Hill, the rediscovered stones at Govan will be studied and analysed, and the information will increase our knowledge of early medieval Scotland.
The Govan Sarcophagus
Banner outside Govan Old Parish Church where the stones are displayed
I expect the next ten years will yield further new information on the Northern Britons, whether in the form of archaeological discoveries or re-interpretations of historical texts. It will be interesting to see if The Men Of The North gets left behind, like something outdated and obsolete, and whether a revision or update then becomes desirable for author and reader alike. If this is what happens, and if I haven’t made a start on a second edition by September 2030 (the book’s twentieth anniversary), I may need someone to give me a not-too-gentle nudge.
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Links :
My blogpost from September 2010, announcing the publication of The Men Of The North.
The first review of The Men Of The North, at Michelle Ziegler’s Heavenfield blog.
My blogpost from 2019 on the carved stones rediscovered at Govan.
My sceptical views on a supposed ‘coalition’ of sixth-century North British kings at Lindisfarne.
My book review of Beyond The Gododdin for the journal Northern History, available online at my Academia page.
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References :
Tim Clarkson, The Men Of The North: the Britons of Southern Scotland (Edinburgh, 2010)
Tim Clarkson, Strathclyde and the Anglo-Saxons in the Viking Age (Edinburgh, 2014)
Fiona Edmonds, ‘The Emergence and Transformation of Medieval Cumbria’ Scottish Historical Review vol.93 (2014), 195-216.
Fiona Edmonds, ‘The Expansion of the Kingdom of Strathclyde’ Early Medieval Europe vol.23 (2015), 43-66.
Fiona Edmonds, ‘Carham: the Western Perspective’, pp.79-94 in Neil McGuigan and Alex Woolf (eds) The Battle of Carham: a Thousand Years On (Edinburgh, 2018).
Alex Woolf (ed.) Beyond the Gododdin: Dark Age Scotland in Medieval Wales (St Andrews, 2013).
Ronan Toolis and Christopher Bowles, The Lost Dark Age Kingdom of Rheged: the Discovery of a Royal Stronghold at Trusty’s Hill, Galloway (Oxford, 2017).
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This new book by renowned philologist Andrew Breeze is a collection of thirteen studies on battles fought in various parts of early medieval Britain. Employing his deep knowledge of place-names and primary sources, Professor Breeze proposes for each battle a geographical context that either supports or challenges previous scholarship. Most of the thirteen chapters are updated or reworked versions of articles previously published in academic journals. Although the author’s conclusions will be familiar to anyone who has followed his research in recent years, it is useful to have them collected in one place, not least because some of the original articles are not easy to find without access to a university library’s journal archives.
A number of famous ‘lost’ battles are discussed in the book, among them Degsastan (AD 603), Maserfelth (642) and Brunanburh (937). These three have yet to be placed on a map with any measure of confidence or consensus, despite much debate and many competing theories. The locations suggested by Breeze are, respectively, Dawyck (Scottish Borders), Forden (Powys) and Lanchester (County Durham). In making a case for Brunanburh (‘Fort of Bruna’?) being the Roman fort of Lanchester (Longovicium) near the River Browney, Breeze offers a challenge to the popular belief that the battle was fought at present-day Bromborough on the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire. In so doing, he shows that the debate is far from settled and that Bromborough is not the only place for which a strong case can be made. Less widely-known than Brunanburh is the battle of Arfderydd (573), an event associated with the earliest strands of the Merlin legend. Breeze supports a long-established consensus that it was fought in the vicinity of Arthuret, an ancient parish eight miles north of Carlisle.
The book’s first two chapters deal with battles traditionally associated with a sixth-century warlord called Arthur, a shadowy figure who appears in early medieval Welsh texts such as the ninth-century Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’). The warlord lies at the root of later legends about a fabled king whose chivalrous knights sat at the Round Table in Camelot. Many people believe – or want to believe – that the legends are rooted in fact, and that the warlord of early Welsh tradition was a real historical figure. This is the position adopted by Breeze, who suggests that the original Arthur was a Briton of the North who undertook a series of military campaigns in the early sixth century. He argues that these campaigns, a dozen of which are listed in Historia Brittonum, were fought in what are now southern Scotland and adjacent parts of northern England. Breeze believes that previous attempts to locate the most obscure battles in the list – such as ‘Bassas’ and ‘Mount Agned’ – have been heading in the wrong direction, hence these places remain unidentified. He believes that their names are corrupt and garbled, requiring correction to forms that make more sense. This leads him to propose entirely new identifications. Bassas, for example, he sees as an error for Tarras, which he associates with Tarras Water in Dumfriesshire or Carstairs in South Lanarkshire (Casteltarras in 1172). He believes ‘Agned’ to be a corruption of Agheu (‘death’ in Old Welsh), a name he associates with the lost place-name Penango (‘Hill of Death’?) in the Scottish Borders. Other names in the Historia Brittonum list are more straightforward and potentially easier to locate, an example being the river ‘Dubglas’ which a number of scholars – including Breeze – identify as the Douglas Water in south-west Scotland. The final battle in the list is a great victory over the Anglo-Saxons at ‘Mount Badon’. Breeze completely uncouples Badon from Arthur’s catalogue of victories, attributing it instead to the fifth-century warlord Ambrosius Aurelianus. He sees the name Badon as an error for Braydon and locates the battlefield at Ringsbury hillfort near Braydon Forest in Wiltshire. Camlan or Camlann, the battle where Arthur is said to have received a mortal wound, is absent from the Historia Brittonum list but appears in the tenth-century Welsh Annals where it is entered at the year 537. Breeze puts Camlan in the vicinity of Hadrian’s Wall, supporting the long-established candidacy of Camboglanna, a Roman fort at Castlesteads near the western end of the frontier.
While Arthur’s campaigns may be familiar to many readers of this book, other battles have received less widespread attention. Two ninth-century encounters between English and Scandinavian forces at ‘Alluthèlia’ (844) and ‘Buttingtune’ (893) fall into this category, but Breeze’s discussion of their historical and geographical contexts is nonetheless illuminating. He locates the former at Bishop Auckland in County Durham, the latter at Buttington in Powys, and shows why both battles should be regarded as significant events in the story of Viking-Age Britain. From an earlier time comes another obscure battle, fought at a place called ‘Gwen Ystrad’ by the mysterious King Urien of Rheged (c.590). Breeze identifies Gwen Ystrad as the valley of the River Winster in Cumbria, a location suggested by others but here strengthened by the author’s considerable philological expertise. Slightly better known is the seventh-century Northumbrian victory at ‘Uinued’ (or ‘Winwaed’) where King Penda of Mercia met his doom. Breeze puts the battlefield beside the River Went in Yorkshire, adding weight to a long-established case supported by many historians.
One aspect of Breeze’s papers that I have always found particularly useful is his comprehensive summarising of previous scholarship on the subject in question. This gives the reader a good measure of background information, while placing Breeze’s own contribution in a broader context, as well as signposting additional resources and alternative theories. The summaries usually begin with antiquarian musings of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before following a trail of study through to the most recent academic discussions. Breeze often acknowledges the work of independent researchers whose contributions to scholarship might otherwise be overlooked.
On the back cover we are told that the book’s impact on scholarship ‘will mean the rewriting of much early British and Anglo-Saxon history’. It is a bold claim, reflecting the author’s confidence in his conclusions. Not everyone will agree with all of his identifications and reinterpretations, especially if they have strong views of their own on where a particular conflict was fought. But this is a book that anyone with an interest in locating the lost battlefields of early medieval Britain will find enlightening and thought-provoking.
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Andrew Breeze, British Battles 493-937: Mount Badon to Brunanburh (Anthem Press, 2020) [link to publisher’s website]
List of chapters:
1. 493: British Triumph at Mount Badon or Braydon, Wiltshire.
2. 537: Arthur’s Death at Camlan or Castlesteads, Cumbria.
3. 573: Legends of Merlin and Arfderydd or Arthuret, Cumbria.
4. c.590: Picts at Gwen Ystrad or the River Winster, Cumbria.
5. 603: Carnage at Degsastan by Wester Dawyck, Borders.
6. 613: Chester and the Massacre of Welsh Monks.
7. 633: Hatfield Chase and British Victory at Doncaster.
8. 634: Hefenfeld and British Defeat in Northumberland.
9. 642: Maserfelth and King Oswald’s Death at Forden, Powys.
10. 655: Treasure Lost on the Uinued or River Went, Yorkshire.
11. 844: Vikings, ‘Alluthèlia’ and a Bridge at Bishop Auckland.
12. 893: Vikings Liquidated at Buttington, Powys.
13. 937: ‘Brunanburh’ and English Triumph at Lanchester, County Durham.
Professor Breeze’s ideas on some of these battles have been previously discussed here at Senchus. The links below will take you to the relevant blogposts:
Arthur’s victories
Gwen Ystrad
Brunanburh
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The period 400 to 600 AD was a time when Christianity, the religion of the last Roman emperors, was gaining ground in many parts of Britain at the expense of home-grown pagan beliefs. The spread of Christianity brought an ecclesiastical infrastructure of churches, monasteries, priests and bishops. It also initiated a stonecarving tradition in which crosses and Latin inscriptions were incised on memorials to the dead. Some of the finest examples of this type of sculpture come from Southern Scotland, bearing witness to the growth of Christianity among the Northern Britons in the fifth and sixth centuries. In this blogpost I’ll be highlighting one such monument, the Coninie Stone, which is of particular interest because it commemorates a woman. Only rarely do we find women identified by name on early medieval sculpture, their minimal appearance on inscriptions matching their sparse treatment in contemporary literature.
The Coninie Stone formerly lay in the valley of the Manor Water, a tributary of the River Tweed, but is now kept in the Tweeddale Museum at the Chambers Institution in Peebles. It has been known since 1890 when it was associated with a cairn of smaller stones situated on sloping ground beside the Newholm Hope Burn. The cairn was demolished sometime between 1890 and 1934, when the Coninie Stone was transferred to the museum. Measuring just under a metre in length, the stone is an irregular slab of whinstone with a cross and a Latin inscription incised on the flattest side. The two-line inscription begins with the word Coninie, deriving from Coninia, a Celtic female name that may be of Irish provenance. The second word –tirie is incomplete and is missing a letter or two at the beginning. One theory proposes that the absent letters are M and A, thus making martirie (a form of the Latin word for ‘martyr’). An alternative view is that there’s only one missing letter, an E, for Ertirie, with the inscription then commemorating a woman called Coninia Ertiria. The form of lettering and the design of the cross suggest a date in the late sixth century.
Whoever she was, Coninia was clearly remembered with affection and respect by the people who commissioned her memorial. She may have been buried inside or beneath the cairn, or her stone may have marked a separate grave nearby. The cross and the Latin inscription tell us that she was a Christian, but this is as much as we can say about her. If her name is indeed of Irish origin, she might not have been a native of the area. Missionaries from Ireland, both male and female, appear to have been active in northern parts of Britain during the sixth century and this could provide a context for her presence in Tweeddale. Alternatively, she may have been a Briton with an Irish name, or someone with a name that isn’t actually Irish at all.
St Gordian’s Kirk. Image via Wikimedia Commons © Chris Eilbeck / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)
The stone and cairn were found close to a mysterious site traditionally known as St Gordian’s Kirk or St Gorgham’s Chapel. This is marked today by a small enclosure containing a Celtic-style cross (erected in 1873) and an early medieval cross-base. The latter was moved from a location some distance away and is often referred to as St Gordian’s Cross. It has been hollowed out to resemble a baptismal font but the basin was originally the socket for a (now lost) cross-shaft possibly carved in the tenth century. St Gordian’s Kirk has earthwork traces of buildings that, according to local tradition, are the remains of an ancient church. In the absence of a detailed excavation, the date and purpose of these features are unknown, but the prevailing view among archaeologists is that the visible remains look secular rather than ecclesiastical. On the other hand, nearby place-names like Kirkhope and Kirkstead are suggestive of an old church having stood in the locality at some point. The traditional connection with the obscure saint Gordian is also interesting. He was a Christian martyr executed in Italy in 362 but is hardly well-known in Britain. Even if there really was a church at this site in the secluded Manor Valley, we would be left to wonder why it was associated with him. A modern archaeological investigation could perhaps answer some of these questions. At the very least, it might enable us to provide Coninia and her memorial with a little more context.
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Notes
I visited the Tweeddale Musuem on 19th February 2020. At that time, the Coninie Stone was not on public display, having been moved to a storage area. I am grateful to Wendy at the museum and to Trevor Cowie of the Peeblesshire Archaeological Society for enabling me to see the stone and to take the photograph below. The stone lay on the floor under a tall shelf-unit and was partly obscured by other artefacts that were too heavy to move aside. I managed to crouch down and take this ‘snap’ using the camera on my phone. I will try and get a better-quality image on a future visit!
For an excellent study of the Early Christian stones of Southern Scotland I recommend the following paper by Dr Katherine Forsyth, Reader in Celtic and Gaelic at the University of Glasgow:
K. Forsyth, ‘Hic Memoria Perpetua: the Inscribed Stones of Sub-Roman Southern Scotland’, pp. 113-34 in S.M. Foster and M. Cross (eds.) Able Minds and Practised Hands: Scotland’s Early Medieval Sculpture in the Twenty-First Century. (Leeds: Society for Medieval Archaeology, 2005)
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Described by one reviewer as “a major landmark in Pictish studies” and by another as “a stunning achievement”, this detailed report on the archaeological excavations at Portmahomack is a must-read for anyone who wants to know more about the Picts. It is particularly useful for what it reveals of Pictish Christianity, giving insights into the daily lives of monks who inhabited this site in Easter Ross more than a thousand years ago. Published in 2016 by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the report has been made available as a free full-text download. It is one of two scholarly monographs on the Society’s Open Access Digital Books platform, the other being The Scottish Antiquarian Tradition , a collection of essays edited by A.S. Bell.
Portmahomack, situated on the Tarbat Peninsula overlooking the Dornoch Firth, was the location of a major Pictish monastery that reached its high point during the eighth century AD. The monastery was burned in the ninth century, possibly by Viking raiders, and ceased to function around the same time, although the site was re-developed as a trading settlement. This, too, eventually fell out of use. In the early 1100s, long after the end of the Pictish period, the site’s former religious character was revived with the founding of St Colman’s parish church.
A programme of archaeological excavation began in the mid-1990s and continued for more than ten years, unearthing clear evidence of the monastery’s importance as a centre of writing, stone-carving and metalworking. Some of the finds, including fragments of Pictish sculpture, are now displayed at the Tarbat Discovery Centre housed in St Colman’s Church. The Centre is well worth visiting and can also be followed on social media (see links below).
Fragments of a Pictish cross-slab from Portmahomack (from The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland, 1903).
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Links
Martin Carver, Justin Garner-Lahire & Cecily Spall (2016) Portmahomack on Tarbat Ness: changing ideologies in North-East Scotland, sixth to sixteenth century AD (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland) [e-book free download]
Tarbat Discovery Centre is open from April to October. It can be followed on Facebook and Twitter
Joining the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland is an excellent way to keep up-to-date with all the exciting news from Scottish archaeology. Members of the Society are known as Fellows and are entitled to use the post-nominal letters FSA Scot. Fellowship is open to anyone who has a keen interest in Scotland’s past. More information on how to apply can be found at the Society’s website.
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Sculptured portrait of a Roman lady, believed to be Julia Domna.
Anyone who seeks to discover Scotland’s early history through textual sources written more than a thousand years ago soon realises that ‘fake news’ isn’t a modern phenomenon. It has always served a useful purpose for its creators, as much in the first millennium AD as in our own era of digital communication and social media. Recognising false information for what it is, rather than taking it at face value, is likewise as much of a challenge when we’re reading an ancient chronicle as when we encounter an attention-grabbing headline on the internet. In some instances, even after having dismissed something written in the remote past as fake information – such as a legend masquerading as real history – we find it so fascinating that we want it to be true. This is what happened to me many years ago when I came across what seemed, at first glance, to be a curious fact – namely that the oldest known words attributed to a woman from Scotland were spoken to a woman from Syria.
The conversation in question supposedly took place sometime in the early third century AD, around the years 209/210. Our source is the Historia Romana (‘Roman History’), a multi-volume work penned by the contemporary historian Cassius Dio. At that time, the Roman emperor Septimius Severus was on active service in northern Britain, leading a military campaign beyond the Antonine Wall – the great turf barrier stretching between the firths of Forth and Clyde. His foes were unconquered native peoples in what are now Stirlingshire and Perthshire, specifically two large groupings or ‘tribal confederations’ – the Maeatae who lived adjacent to the Wall and the Caledonians to the north of them. These two had been causing a great deal of trouble, raiding southward into lands under Roman rule and returning home laden with loot. A recent wave of attacks had been serious enough to persuade the governor of Roman Britain to appeal directly to Septimius Severus for aid. The emperor had duly taken personal charge of a major effort to bring the marauders to heel. Arriving in Britain in 208, accompanied by his wife and their two adult sons, he led his huge army northward. His troops suffered considerable losses from guerilla warfare but eventually both the Caledonians and Maeatae negotiated peace treaties with him. Dio identifies one of the key figures on the Caledonian side as Argentocoxos, presumably a senior chieftain, whose Celtic name means something like ‘Silver Leg’. However, the ensuing truce turned out to be short-lived and a new round of hostilities soon began.
Severus in Scotland, AD 208 to 210, showing three of the many forts involved in his campaign.
According to Cassius Dio, it was during the brief period of peace that a conversation took place between the wives of Argentocoxos and Septimius Severus. The name of the Caledonian lady is unrecorded – perhaps Dio himself had no record of it. He certainly had no doubt about the identity of the other woman. She was Julia Domna, the Syrian wife of Severus and one of the most famous of all Roman empresses. Julia’s image was so well-known around the Mediterranean lands in her own lifetime that it can still be seen today on various coins, paintings and sculptures. Born c. 160 in the city of Emesa (now Homs) in Syria, she sprang from a high-status Arab family who seem to have had royal ancestry. Her father was a senior priest at Emesa’s Temple of the Sun, the main cult-centre of the Middle Eastern god Elagabalus. Charismatic and well-educated, Julia was a suitable bride for Severus when, as a childless widower in his early forties, he decided that he should be married again.
Septimius Severus, Roman emperor from AD 193 to 211.
Dio had a particular fascination with Julia and has left us a fair amount of information about her. As a career politician who served as senator and consul he was well-placed to obtain interesting snippets of information about members of the imperial family. He had rather less interest in barbarians like Argentocoxos, even when he could be bothered to name them. Like most Romans he no doubt regarded the inhabitants of ancient Scotland as a mob of wild, uncouth savages prowling beyond the Empire’s borders. As an author he nevertheless found them useful as caricatures of the stereotypical barbarian – simple, uncorrupted folk whose primitive ways of living could be amusingly contrasted with the immorality and hypocrisy of sophisticated Roman society. Drawing on such stereotypes, he informed his readers that the Caledonians and Maeatae ‘possess their women in common, and in common rear all the offspring’. It hardly needs saying that such a strange custom probably never existed among the contemporary inhabitants of Perthshire and Stirlingshire, nor are they likely to have viewed adultery and marital fidelity much differently from the citizens of Rome. The idea that they practised a kind of ‘free love’ may have originated as a joke or rumour among Roman soldiers stationed near the northern frontier – or perhaps Dio simply made it up. It appears in his narrative shortly before the meeting between Julia Domna and the wife of Argentocoxos and provides the essential moral backdrop to their conversation.
Dio tells us that the empress teased her companion by saying that Caledonian women indulge in a sexual free-for-all, sharing their beds with different men while making no attempt to conceal their adultery. To a respectable aristocratic lady like Julia, such brazen promiscuity would indeed have seemed worthy of comment. We then see the wife of Argentocoxos swiftly responding with what Dio calls ‘a witty remark’ of her own:
“We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.”
As with all ancient and medieval authors, we should be wary of taking Dio at face value. Although Julia Domna was very much a real person – and indeed one of his contemporaries – this did not deter him from portraying her in a way that suited his literary purposes. Modern scholars who analyse his writings believe that the Julia he presented to his readers was, to some extent, moulded to fit his narrative. There is no doubt that she plays a special role in the Historia Romana, particularly in those sections where Dio seeks to pass judgement on the moral and political issues of his time. In this instance, his target was not the allegedly shameless promiscuity of Caledonian women but the clandestine adultery of fine Roman ladies. The consensus view among present-day historians is that he simply invented the speech quoted above. Like a modern peddler of fake news, he took a piece of made-up information about a group of foreigners and ‘spun’ it to make a specific point. His readers – the wealthy, educated elite of the Roman world – would have got the message very clearly. Some of them probably raised a wry smile; others may have felt stung by the barbed jibe attributed to an anonymous northern barbarian.
I think it would be good if we could accept the story as true. Some parts of it possibly _are_ true, even if the conversation reported by Dio never happened – or at least not in the way he describes. It is not unrealistic, for example, to imagine Julia Domna visiting the imperial frontierlands in what is now Scotland. She was certainly no stranger to dangerous war-zones. One of her honorific titles was Mater Castrorum, ‘Mother of the Army Camps’, bestowed in recognition of her willingness to accompany her husband on military campaigns. Whether she met the wives of any barbarian leaders on such occasions is debatable, although not implausible. I’m inclined to think we can consider the possibility that she not only visited Scotland 1,800 years ago but had a face-to-face encounter with the wife of a local chieftain. Musing even further, we can perhaps imagine these two high-status women – one a Syrian, the other a Caledonian – exchanging a few words, not directly but through an interpreter. Whatever they said to one another, it is more likely to have consisted of polite greetings rather than the mockery and ‘witty remarks’ placed into their mouths by Cassius Dio.
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Epilogue
Julia Domna outlived not only her husband but also their sons, Caracalla and Geta. The brothers became joint emperors following the death of their father in 211 but their relationship was mutually hostile. Within months, Geta was murdered by Caracalla’s soldiers, dying in his mother’s arms. Julia detested Caracalla but relished the power and influence she acquired during his reign and chose to maintain a public image of maternal loyalty. The complicated relationship between mother and son even prompted rumours of incest, but Cassius Dio makes no mention of this and modern historians dismiss it as malicious gossip emanating from the imperial court. Caracalla turned out to be an unpopular emperor and his assassination in 217 came as no surprise, but his death deprived his mother of political status. Julia, by then in her fifties, suddenly found herself at risk of being exiled from Rome and ending her days in obscurity. This bleak prospect filled her with dread, especially as she had begun to nurture ambitions of ruling the Empire herself. She died soon afterwards, allegedly starving herself to death but – according to Dio – finally succumbing to the breast cancer that had afflicted her for many years.
The emperor Caracalla with his mother Julia Domna.
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Notes & references
Julia’s second name or ‘cognomen’ Domna derives from an ancient Arabic word meaning Black. It distinguished her from her elder sister Julia Maesa, a woman of ruthless ambition whose own story is no less remarkable.
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The conversation between Julia Domna and the Caledonian lady is reported in Book 77, section 16, of Cassius Dio’s Historia Romana.
For this blogpost I used the Loeb Classical Library edition, available online at Lacus Curtius.
Substantial portions of the original text of the Historia Romana have not survived, the lost material being known from an abridged version written by the Byzantine scholar John Xiphilinus in the eleventh century.
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Some journal articles I have found useful:
Riccardo Bertolazzi, ‘The depictions of Livia and Julia Domna by Cassius Dio: some observations’ Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae vol. 55 (2015), 413-32
Andrew Scott, ‘Cassius Dio’s Julia Domna: character development and narrative function’ Transactions of the American Philological Association vol. 147 (2017), 413-33
Christopher T. Mallan, ‘Cassius Dio on Julia Domna’ Mnemosyne vol. 66 (2013), 734-60
Caillan Davenport, ‘Sexual habits of Caracalla: rumour, gossip and historiography’ Histos vol. 11 (2017), 75-100
Julia Domna and Septimius Severus with their sons Geta and Caracalla (Geta’s face has been deliberately erased).
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My biography of St Columba, first published in 2012, now has a re-designed cover. I received half a dozen free copies of the new version last week and am very pleased with how it looks.
The publishers – Birlinn of Edinburgh – have moved the book from their academic imprint ‘John Donald’ to their main stable. Two of my other books – The Picts: A History and The Makers Of Scotland – made the same migration some years ago. It means a slightly reduced size (the John Donald format tends to be larger) but otherwise the book is unchanged.
Five of my six free copies, posing for a photo after their journey south from Scotland.
The new cover incorporates an image of Columba that I think is one of the most evocative. For me, it captures the saint in a moment of serious reflection, perhaps when his mind was lingering on a matter of sorrow or regret. The image was created in stained glass by Karl Parsons (1884-1934) for a window in St Michael’s Church at Sulhamstead, Berkshire.
Credit for the re-designed cover goes to James Hutcheson of Birlinn whose creative skills are responsible for the covers of all my books.
The back cover ‘blurb’ and design credits.
Here’s a link to the book’s page at the Birlinn website:
Columba: Pilgrim, Priest & Patron Saint
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A major archaeological find at Govan has been causing quite a buzz in the past week or so. No doubt many of you will already be aware of the news from social media and other sources. The find is indeed exciting: three early medieval carved stones, long assumed to have been lost forever, have been rediscovered in the graveyard of the old parish church.
The discovery happened during a community archaeological project called Stones and Bones which is run by Northlight Heritage, a charity closely involved with the conservation of the church (known as ‘Govan Old’) and its collection of early medieval sculpture. The significance of the new find becomes clear when we look back at the long history of the Govan Stones.
The story begins a thousand years ago, in the Viking Age, when Govan was a centre of royal power in the kingdom of Strathclyde. In those days, the site of Govan Old was occupied by a church that served the spiritual needs of Strathclyde’s rulers – a powerful dynasty of Britons whose realm extended northward to Loch Lomond and southward across the Solway Firth. The kings with their families and other members of the local elite worshipped at Govan, burying their dead in the churchyard and marking the graves with elaborately carved stones. After the Scottish conquest of Strathclyde in the eleventh century, the line of local kings came to an end but the gravestones remained. In later times, when the old kingdom of the Britons was barely a memory, many of the stones were re-used by prosperous Govan families as memorials for their own deceased. Hence we see the initials of people who died in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inscribed on a number of stones, overlaying the Viking-Age carvings of crosses and interlace patterns. In the early nineteenth century, the churchyard still contained more than 40 ancient monuments. Most were recumbent cross-slabs, designed to lie flat over graves, but there were other types too, the most impressive being 5 hogbacks and (after its discovery in 1855) a magnificently carved sarcophagus.
Hogbacks and cross-slabs in the churchyard of Govan Old, c. 1900 [T.C.F. Brotchie]
In the late nineteenth century, Glasgow landowner and politician Sir John Stirling-Maxwell arranged for cast replicas to be made of the early medieval stones. These were then individually photographed, with the images being published by Sir John in 1899 under the title Sculptured Stones in the Kirkyard of Govan. Some years later, the sarcophagus was placed inside the church for safekeeping, to be followed in 1926 by many of the other stones. The rest remained outside. A plan of the churchyard, drawn in 1936 (see below), shows 19 stones lying in a line along the east wall. On the other side of the wall lay one of Govan’s famous shipyards.
Aerial view of Govan in the 1930s, showing the churchyard (highlighted in green on this copy of the original), the River Clyde at upper right and the Harland & Wolff shipyard in the centre.
And so we come to one of the darkest chapters in the story of the Govan Stones. In the early 1900s, the shipyard erected huge sheds right up against the churchyard wall. These enormous buildings were demolished in 1973. Unfortunately, the demolition work brought debris crashing down on the ancient stones lying beside the wall. At the time, it was believed that nearly all of these precious monuments had been reduced to shattered fragments amongst the rubble. A few survived, though badly damaged, and are now inside the church.
Fast forward through four decades to 2019 and the Stones and Bones ‘community dig’. One of the dig’s local volunteers was Mark McGettigan, age 14, a pupil of Lourdes Secondary School in Cardonald. Mark was using a probe to search for objects buried beneath the surface near the eastern edge of the churchyard when he made a remarkable discovery:
“I was just prodding the ground to see if there was anything there and suddenly it made a noise and I realised I had hit something. Myself and two of the archaeologists worked out the area of the object and started to dig it out and clean it. I wasn’t too sure at the start what it was. But then we checked with the records and we realised it was one of the lost Govan Stones. I am extremely happy, in fact I’m ecstatic at what I helped to uncover.”
The stone turned out to be a cross-slab from the Viking Age, carved in the 10th or 11th century. Nor was it a lone discovery: another two slabs were also found. All three have been matched to their corresponding photographs in the Stirling Maxwell survey, published 120 years ago, and identified as ’30’, ’38’ and ’40’ according to Sir John’s classification of the Govan monuments. The composite image at the top of this blogpost shows the three photographs grouped together (by me) but in the original 1899 publication they appear on separate pages.
Conservation and analysis by specialists are the essential next steps for these important relics of Scotland’s ancient past before they can be put on public display. In the meantime, it is quite possible that other stones – hitherto thought to have been reduced to rubble – survived the disaster of 1973 and still await rediscovery. We shall see what happens in the coming months but these are certainly interesting times for Govan’s ancient heritage.
Below are some photographs of the new finds, reproduced here by kind permission of archaeologist Ingrid Shearer from Northlight Heritage.
Uncovering one of the three cross-slabs (Mark McGettigan kneeling at top right).
Frazer Capie (Riverside Museum) and Ingrid Shearer (Northlight Heritage) using the 1899 survey to identify the three slabs.
An early medieval masterpiece revealed (the stone shown as ‘No. 40’ in the picture at the top of this blogpost).
Photogrammetric recording by Dr Megan Kasten of the University of Glasgow.
Finally, a message for those of you who enjoy getting out and about to see Pictish stones and similar ancient stuff. If you haven’t yet visited the collection at Govan Old, you’re missing out on one of Britain’s premier ‘Dark Age’ attractions. The Govan Stones are an absolute must-see for anyone who has an interest in Viking-Age sculpture, Celtic art or Scotland’s early history. Govan was the capital of the kingdom of Strathclyde, the last realm of the Cumbri or Northern Britons. Hardly anyone seems to know about this kingdom, even though it was a major player on the turbulent political stage of the ninth to eleventh centuries. Its inhabitants are the most obscure, the most enigmatic of Scotland’s early peoples. If you think the Picts and their symbol-stones have an aura of mystery, see what you make of the Northern Britons and their hogbacks. Stepping inside Govan Old feels like entering the heart of a strange, forgotten realm that somehow got left out of the school history books. The exciting new discoveries by Mark McGettigan and his fellow community diggers have brought a little bit more of this long-lost kingdom into focus.
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Notes & Acknowledgments
My thanks to Frazer Capie for telling me about the discovery and to Ingrid Shearer for letting me use the press release images and other media information.
The Govan Stones and the churchyard have Scheduled Monument status and are protected under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979. The Stones and Bones community dig has scheduled monument consent from Historic Environment Scotland.
The Govan Heritage Trust is currently running a crowdfunding campaign to secure the future of the church and its rare collection of early medieval sculpture. Anyone wishing to support the Trust can contribute via this link.
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Links
The Govan Stones Project has a website and can be followed on Facebook and Twitter.
Other useful Twitter accounts for news and updates about the latest discoveries:
Northlight Heritage
Love Archaeology
Dr Megan Kasten
Dr Kasten has produced a superb 3D image of one of the newly unearthed cross-slabs.
And, lastly, a couple of media reports, one from Scotland and one from the USA:
Lost Glasgow
New York Post
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Modern sculpture of King Arthur on the summit of Tintagel Island.
Although this blogpost briefly mentions Scotland it is mainly about the far south-west corner of England. It does however deal with the early medieval period and with another of the ‘Celtic’ regions of Britain. It is one of a number of non-Scottish posts that occasionally appear here at Senchus.
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A holiday on the north coast of Cornwall last year gave me an opportunity to visit a couple of places associated with King Arthur. One was Tintagel Castle, a strikingly impressive site that I was lucky enough to explore on a warm, cloudless day. The other was Slaughterbridge, a Cornish candidate for Camlann – the site of Arthur’s final battle where both he and his treacherous nephew Mordred were said to have perished.
Arthur and Mordred in combat at Camlann, painted by William Hatherell (1855-1928)
The question of whether or not the Arthurian legend preserves the authentic story of a sixth-century warlord called Arthur/Artorius is, of course, a matter of debate. My own thoughts on this controversial topic appeared most recently as a chapter in Scotland’s Merlin, published by Birlinn Books in 2016. For the record, I currently favour south-west Scotland as a possible source of the Arthurian legend’s original core, but this does not necessarily mean that I see Arthur himself as any more ‘real’ than Batman. Maybe Arthur existed, maybe he didn’t. The question is not, in any case, a crucial one for historians of early medieval Britain. Hence, Arthur’s story is frequently absent from modern textbooks on the period, including my own study of the Britons of southern Scotland (The Men Of The North, published in 2010). I nevertheless retain an interest in Arthur’s legend – and Merlin’s too – especially at places with tangible ‘Dark Age’ connections. In Cornwall, both Tintagel and Slaughterbridge fall into this category, each of them being sites where objects from the sixth century – the time when Arthur supposedly existed – can still be seen today.
Old engraving of Tintagel Island and the castle ruins.
Tintagel
The island of rock now crowned by Tintagel’s medieval castle formerly supported a substantial high-status settlement occupied in the ‘Arthurian’ era of the fifth and sixth centuries AD. Archaeological excavations have unearthed artefacts and structures from this period, ranging from pottery and glassware to traces of buildings. The pottery includes large jars (amphorae) that once contained wine imported from Mediterranean lands. These show that Tintagel’s inhabitants were involved in long-distance trading networks with other parts of what had once been the Western Roman Empire. Plenty of information about the archaeological finds is available online and I have included a couple of links at the end of this blogpost.
For many visitors, what attracts them to Tintagel Castle is its claim to be the place where Arthur was conceived. The claim derives from the twelfth century when Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain described how Arthur’s father, King Uther Pendragon, used deception to satisfy his lust for Lady Igraine, the beautiful wife of Duke Gorlois of Cornwall. A potion concocted by Merlin enabled Uther to disguise himself as Igraine’s husband so that he could spend the night with her in the Duke’s stronghold at Tintagel. The offspring of this deceitful liaison was Arthur, who eventually succeeded to Uther’s throne.
Whatever our opinions on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s value as a source of early British history, there is no doubt that he knew how to tell a good tale. His dramatic account of Uther and Igraine ensured that Tintagel would forever have a place in Arthurian lore. Needless to say, the teams of archaeologists who have excavated there (most recently in 2018) have found no trace of Geoffrey’s characters – despite the discovery in 1998 of a stone inscribed with the suggestive name Artognou. Yet the popular belief that this was a place well-known to Arthur and Uther 1500 years ago is still alive in the popular imagination.
The following photographs give an idea of what the modern visitor to Tintagel Castle can expect to see.
Looking back from the castle ruins on the summit of Tintagel Island to the adjacent mainland.
Looking along the coast of North Cornwall from the ruins of Tintagel Castle.
The outlined shape of a rectangular building from the 5th/6th century settlement.
Information board for a group of excavated ‘Dark Age’ buildings.
A pair of early medieval buildings nestling on the slope below the summit.
Looking down from the castle to a small cove and beach.
In the cliffs below the castle lies Merlin’s Cave (the cave on the left).
According to the ancient chronicle known as Annales Cambriae (‘Welsh Annals’), the year 537 witnessed the bloody battle of Camlann in which Arthur and Mordred were slain. The antiquity of this information is uncertain and cannot, on present evidence, be shown to pre-date the tenth century when the Welsh Annals were compiled. Two hundred years later, in the 1130s, Geoffrey of Monmouth placed Camlann in Cornwall, on the River Camel. Cornish tradition has long located the battlefield at Slaughterbridge near Camelford, some 4 miles south-east of Tintagel. Another candidate for Camlann is the Roman fort of Camboglanna (now Castlesteads) on Hadrian’s Wall. Camboglanna is a Celtic name borrowed by the Romans. It means ‘crooked valley’ in the old language of the Britons and could have become Camlann in medieval Welsh. However, there were no doubt many crooked valleys in Roman Britain, so the name Camboglanna might have been a common one. It is also possible that Camlann derives from a different name such as Cambolanda (‘crooked enclosure’).
At Slaughterbridge there is a fascinating visitor attraction called The Arthurian Centre which tells of the local Camlann tradition. The Centre has a tearoom, gift shop and plenty of information on Arthur, as well as a walking trail over part of the presumed battlefield beside the River Camel. The trail meanders through pleasant woodland and ends at a viewing platform above the river. Below the platform, and close to the water’s edge, lies a remarkable Early Christian gravestone from the sixth century. It is carved with a Latin inscription: LATINI IC IACIT FILIUS MA[…]RI (‘Here lies Latinus, the son of M…..’)
Along one edge of the stone runs another inscription, in the ancient Ogham script of Ireland. Although badly weathered, this has been interpreted by at least one expert as possibly containing the same name Latinus. Unfortunately, we have no idea who Latinus was. He may have been a local Briton, or perhaps an Irishman. Whatever his origins, he was clearly a person of sufficient importance to be commemorated in this way. It is interesting to note that the name also appears on another sixth-century memorial, the famous Latinus Stone from Whithorn in south-west Scotland, which marked the grave of a father and daughter.
Unsurprisingly, given the local connection with Arthurian legend, the Cornish Latinus stone has been seen in some quarters as a relic of the battle of Camlann. A separate belief associates it with a battle fought in 825 at a place called Gafulford, where the Britons of Cornwall clashed with the neighbouring West Saxons. Gafulford is thought by some historians to mean ‘Camel-ford’, but others interpret the name differently and place the battle elsewhere. The simple truth is that neither Camlann nor the ninth-century battle can be placed with certainty in the valley of the River Camel, or indeed in Cornwall.
During my visit I was saddened to learn that the inscribed stone is at risk of being harmed by floods. In fact, it has been placed on the At Risk Register, which is a matter of concern. We can only hope that this important monument will soon be protected, perhaps by standing it upright (as it formerly was) and moving it higher up the riverbank (which may have been its original position). Some kind of intervention certainly needs to happen before it is overwhelmed by the river.
The trail from the Arthurian Centre, looking towards the supposed battlefield of Camlann.
The sixth-century inscribed stone lying beside the River Camel.
The Latin inscription.
Information board on the viewing platform.
Notes and Links
The images in this blogpost are copyright © B. Keeling.
Readers may be interested in an article by Professor Andrew Breeze: ‘The Battle of Camlan and Camelford, Cornwall’ Arthuriana 15.3 (Fall 2005): 75-90
The Arthurian Centre has a website and a Facebook page
The Tintagel Dig on Twitter
Information on Tintagel Castle at the English Heritage website
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Senchus 