The Sea Kingdoms E-Book

Alistair Moffat

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 651

Beschreibung

'The most powerful representation yet of the race which has repeatedly changed history as we know it' - The Scotsman Alistair Moffat's journey, from the Scottish islands and Scotland, to the English coast, Wales, Cornwall and Ireland, ignores national boundaries to reveal the rich fabric of culture and history of Celtic Britain which still survives today. This is a vividly told, dramatic and enlightening account of the oral history, legends and battles of a people whose past stretches back many hundred of years.  The Sea Kingdoms is a story of great tragedies, ancient myths and spectacular beauty.

Leseprobe

ALISTAIR MOFFAT was born and bred in the Scottish Border country. A former Director of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Director of Programmes at Scottish Television, he now runs the burgeoning Borders Book Festival. His also runs a production company based near Selkirk and has written twelve books, including Kelsae, The Borders and The Reivers, all of which are published by Birlinn.

This eBook edition published in 2011 byBirlinn LimitedWest Newington HouseNewington RoadEdinburghEH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 2002 by HarperCollins PublishersThis edition first published in 2007 by Birlinn Limited

Copyright © Alistair Moffat 2001, 2008

The moral right of Alistair Moffat to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-116-3

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

MAPS

  1 The Music of the Thing As It Happened

  2 In the Dreamtime

  3 The Islands of the Evening

  4 The Islands of the Mighty

  5 The Ghost Fences

  6 Until the Break of Day

  7 The Sons of Death

  8 The Lords of the Isles

  9 The Long Riders

10 Keys of the Kingdoms

11 Sons of Prophecy

12 Imagineering

13 1798

14 The Revenge of the Disnamed

15 Beyond the Circle of Firelight

Postscript

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Also Available

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Donnie Campbell was a passionate football fan. In his office at Sabhal Mor Ostaig, the Gaelic-medium further education college on the Isle of Skye, a small television was showing Scotland playing in a World Cup qualifier in the late 1980s. With his eyes constantly flicking to the screen, Donnie was trying to concentrate on talking to me in English about something or other, but when Scotland scored a goal, he immediately leaped up and roared. ‘A steach!’ – ‘It’s in!’

In extremis, even exultation, Gaelic sprang first to his lips. It occurred to me that for some people, albeit a rapidly diminishing number, Gaelic was not simply a colourful facet of Scots culture, but still existed as an entirely different way of seeing Scotland, of understanding our national identity – and even of coping with, the continuing tragedy of our football team. In his gentle and straightforward manner Donnie told me a great deal about Gaelic, about the West, and the links with Ireland and the south. His early death in a car accident was a sore loss and I am glad to remember him and his quiet kindness, and acknowledge both. Moran taing a’ charaid.

Christeen Combe taught me Gaelic and had immense patience with my impatience. She not only guided me successfully through public examinations, but in introducing me to her family also offered an unselfconscious means of understanding better the Gaelic speech community of the Western Isles. Christine’s teaching was translated into practical use by Rhoda Macdonald, who insisted that we speak Gaelic at work in Scottish Television and who lent me books, tapes and insights. Through talking to Rhoda I began to see that Gaelic Scotland had much in common with Ireland, Man, Wales and Cornwall, and that some of this sonorous talk about culture hides a great deal of fun and laughter.

Like the good teacher he is, Norman Gillies, the principal of Sabhal Mor Ostaig, has always encouraged my interests. When the college began to create links with Ireland and Irish Gaelic speakers, it began to seem less like an outpost on the edge of Scotland and more like a cultural entrepot in the middle of the Celtic west. Norman will find the arguments in this book very familiar.

When we came to film a ten-part series of The Sea Kingdoms for Scottish Television I had to rethink the book as spoken words and moving pictures. My director, Anne Buckland, demanded clarity and endless rewrites – some of which have found their way into the book. She may even have stamped her foot once or twice. John Agnew, Ken MacNeill, Anita Cox and Adam Moffat helped greatly to make our long journey from Stornoway to Penzance a creative one.

At HarperCollins Michael Fishwick and Arabella Pike created the means for me to write this book and I am grateful for their faith in it. To Kate Morris fell the unenviable task of editing the text and managing it through to publication. Because of her hard work, diligence and tact, The Sea Kingdoms is undoubtedly a better book.

It is simply a pleasure to work with David Godwin, my agent, a lovely man with a sharp eye for a good project and a softly spoken word for an agitated author. Thank you David.

Finally, I want to thank the scores of people who stopped what they were doing, took the time and sat down to talk to me in Scotland, Ireland, Man, Wales and Cornwall. It was grand.

MAPS

Scotland

England

Isle of Man and Cornwall

Wales

ONE

The Music of the Thing As It Happened

THIS IS A HISTORY of whispers and forgetfulness, a story of how the memories and understandings of the Celtic peoples of Britain and Ireland almost faded into inconsequence. It is also a story of the struggle for control of these islands, of those who lost it, and how they continued to interact with the eventual winners, the English and the British. It attempts a lengthy definition of what it means and meant to be Celtic, to think and behave in ways that are different from the British habits of mind – and also often different from the simply Welsh, Irish, Scots, Manx, Cornish and English traditions. With the creation of parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, it is timely to draw up a catalogue of cultural difference, a list of half-forgotten reasons for some of the tensions which have led to the break-up of Britain, the creation of a new and evolving union between England and her old Celtic colonies, and new relationships between those regions.

Two thousand years ago these tensions lay in the future. The farms, fortresses and harbours of these islands echoed to the speech of Celts who recited their history, managed their politics and conducted their business in recognizable versions of old Welsh and early Gaelic. Over the face of England and parts of lowland Scotland where the old Welsh language has long fled, ancient place names evoke those people who first described the rivers, lakes, mountains and marshlands of Britain. Another history of these islands, a Celtic history, often unclear but just catchable, can be heard in the quiet words and phrases of Welsh and Gaelic. For language is the most important yet elusive definition of what ‘Celtic’ meant then and means now: it is a matter of understanding and listening, and is certainly not a question of race or place of birth. First and foremost, the Celts of Britain are a speech community. At the time when an older version of Welsh was spoken over much of the island of Britain, Irish was the common tongue from Belfast Lough to Bantry Bay: Irish Gaelic and Welsh are cousin languages, sharing syntax and vocabulary, although over time they have become mutually unintelligible.

Sadly, and perhaps inevitably, the once-mighty languages of the West are dying: Cornish and Manx are whispered only in the mouths of a few enthusiasts; within a single generation Scots Gaelic will wither into a lexical curiosity; and Irish suffers from the lip service of a familiarity which hides wholesale decline and absence of interest. Only in Wales is there real strength and even resurgence. But the important observation is that these isles were once all Celtic, and even though politics continually pressed the autonomous Welsh and Gaelic speech communities ever farther westwards, they have survived. The languages which described Britain and Ireland more than 2,500 years ago still describe these places now, in a continuity unique in western Europe. As much as the decline of Celtic languages is to be regretted, their resilience ought to be marvelled at too. But it is not the languages themselves that matter, although to my ear their lyrical beauty is unmatched: it is the culture that they embody, the way of thinking about the world that they shape, and the stories they hold inside them that are crucial. These stories are beginning to slip quickly away into silence, and, worse, into a sickly mixture of cliché, quaintness, myth-history and something known as ‘local colour’. Soon, perhaps by the middle of the twenty-first century, the history of Celtic Britain might depend so heavily on translation as to lose much of its texture, and become a thing seen through glass.

To find a way of seeing that history better we first need to forget national boundaries. Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Wales and England all make artificial distinctions across Celtic Britain and Ireland that blur the bigger picture and pull the focus in misleading directions. The cultural reality we need to see is that Stornoway and Penzance once had, and in many important ways still have, more in common with each other than they do with either Edinburgh or London. There is a unity of experience down the western edge of Britain which makes it a distinctive place, another country inside the one we think we know.

The sea is the unbroken link that binds this experience together, and the reason this book is entitled The Sea Kingdoms. For most of the last 3,000 years the sea was a better highway than any on land. This has created a cultural coherence which is is very old and far more widespread than is often realized. From around 500 BC Celtic languages were spoken down the length of the Atlantic littoral of Western Europe, and dialects of a common Celtic language were understood from as far south as the Algarve up to the northern coasts of Scotland. Celtiberian in Portugal and Spain, and Gaulish and Lepontic in France and central Europe all disappeared during Roman rule and subsequent barbarian invasions, but for at least 500 years and probably much longer there existed a common Celtic sea-going culture along the Atlantic coasts which also reached deep inland.

Archaeologists have confirmed that for at least two millennia before the Romans began to expand their empire, there was regular maritime trade on a well-established series of networks within Atlantic Europe, particularly around its subsidiary gulfs and seas such as the Bay of Biscay, the Brittany coast, Portugal, the English Channel, the Severn Estuary and the Irish Sea. Artefacts traded in these areas were transported up major navigable rivers and, passing through several pairs of hands, have sometimes been found more than a thousand miles from their point of manufacture. Pottery, axe-heads, weapons and much that was perishable made journeys on a scale which surprises us now. In the wake of these early ships a great deal followed: not only a commonly understood language, but also ideas about politics, religion and technology.

So that the dynamic of Celtic culture – and its survival in modern versions in the west of Britain and Ireland – can be better understood, this story needs to be seen from a vantage point not on the land, looking out to sea, but from the sea, looking towards the land. And so that it is easier for us to understand how the Sea Kingdoms of the West understood themselves, this tale takes the form of a double journey: through geography from the Isle of Lewis to the Cornish coast, and through history from earliest times to the present day.

Looking back over the immense sweep of all that has happened in these islands, a constant theme insists on its place. For a multitude of reasons, some of them accidental, the story of the Celtic peoples is the story of the war for Britain, and of those who lost it, again and again. The Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans, the English and the British (including many Scots, Welsh and Irish Britons) won that war, and by the eighteenth century had colonized all of these islands. Their version of history was bound to dominate and be believed – even by the defeated. And because the Celtic peoples of Britain and Ireland had comparatively little written culture until recently, an alternative version of events can be difficult to find. This book is not an exhaustive and wearying recital of defeat, or a tear-stained harking back to a black list of injustices, but rather a journey through what remains and a search for another way of seeing the past. The story of the Celts of Britain and Ireland is still whispered, can still just be heard if we push aside our misconceptions, look again at the map of Britain, and see it differently. For too long our history has consisted of London talking to Britain, and the inevitable outcome is that the United Kingdom is too readily seen as a natural point towards which all narratives should flow. Celtic Britain did not die when the Angles, Saxons and other Germanic tribes invaded and settled most of what is now England and lowland Scotland: it was only defeated, marginalized and ignored.

In order to understand better why British history has been skewed in this way, we should never forget that the early Celtic society of Britain was non-literate, not illiterate (for that implies something deficient) and that it relied on memory and recital. For a hundred generations, stories were told in the circle of firelight: the early peoples of Britain listened to their history. Spoken and heard rather than written and read, many of the stories of the men and women who were here before the English have disappeared into the night air. The tales of Celtic Britain, of the west, seem now to be of the twilight, of dying languages and minorities, of emigration and loss, of quaintness and yesterday. And of derision, for to prejudiced eyes the Celts of Britain have also become comic figures: hicks from a rural margin bewildered by the sophistication of the modern world. The term ‘Irish’ for a way of saying or doing something implies eccentricity at best and stupidity at worst, while the Scottish Highlanders are sometimes viewed by urban Scotland as reservation Indians, much given to drink and idleness. There is no word in Gaelic, joke the Lowlanders, which adequately describes the urgency of mañana.

But in Scotland, Ireland, Man, Wales and Cornwall a new future is dawning. The old imperial monolith of the United Kingdom is rapidly crumbling as England’s first colonies rediscover what they were and realize what they might become once the corrosive habit of blaming the English for everything has withered into disuse. There is a new hunger for a different history, one which is not refracted through a metrocentric prism, and seeks a new telling of the stories of old places. With only the annual passions of international rugby matches, the interminable and inexplicable shedding of Irish and British blood, and occasional surges in the popularity of step-dancing and Gaelic music to go on, the English, by contrast, have every right to their indifference or bafflement. With at least a millennium of resentment to draw on, the Celts of Britain, the losers, have wasted much time in defining themselves primarily as un- or anti-English.

Better surely to seek out and piece together the stories of this largely non-literate, politically marginalized society. Power passed to those who wrote down their history and had an interest in ignoring the stories of the Celts or changing them into a new shape to fit their purposes, or condemning them to a minor posterity. Because it is difficult to read about the history of the west of Britain, we need to listen hard for its whispers, intuit connections and try to remember what has almost been forgotten. In a translation of a Gaelic phrase, we should listen for the music of the thing as it happened.

For at least ten years I have kept notes of what seemed to be phrases of incidental music: not a diary, but more a set of memos to remind me of incidents, places and anecdotes that seemed to be significant, often because they told a familiar story from a different viewpoint, often the viewpoint of the defeated. The battle of Culloden has an iconic place in Scottish and Celtic history. In 1746 the handsome, charismatic and romantic figure of Bonnie Prince Charlie led his army of Highlanders to a disastrous defeat, what a Scottish aristocrat called ‘the end of an old song’. Much of the romance was attached to Prince Charles himself and the failure to restore the Jacobite dynasty, and too little attention was paid to the fate of the men who fought for him on the moor near Culloden House.

In May 1990 I went to visit the Gaelic Further Education College at Sabhal Mor Ostaig in the Sleat Peninsula in Skye and made a note of a long conversation with the late and much-missed Donnie Campbell, who used to work there. What follows is an outline of the story he told me about what happened before the battle at Culloden. It appears in no written version I could find but that does not dim its power or damage its authenticity.

When the Highland army reached Inverness in April 1746, it was pursued by government forces commanded by the Duke of Cumberland and supported by Rear-Admiral Byng’s fleet in the Moray Firth, a well-equipped, properly provisioned modern army which, throughout the Jacobite Rebellion, had never managed to stand its ground and resist the furious charges of the regiments of clansmen raised by Prince Charles Edward Stuart. It seemed that elemental savagery had won at Prestonpans and Falkirk and would continue to win. Even though his generals advised a guerrilla campaign in the mountains, the Prince chose to turn his undefeated army and fight on Drumossie Moor, near Culloden House. It was to be the last pitched battle fought on British soil.

At about eleven o’clock in the morning of 16 April, lookouts from Clan Cameron and Clan Chattan peered through the sleeting rain and saw the columns of the government army advancing to the moor. The waiting ranks of Highlanders stood to and watched the march of the scarlet and white silk standards, listened to the fife and drum and the tramp of soldiers forming up in lines abreast to face them. The government commanders rode up and down the line to encourage their men, some of whom had run for their lives as the Highlanders charged at the battle of Falkirk only three months before. They reminded them of their tactics and implored them to stand fast. Some government soldiers began to shout abuse at the enemy who stood across the moor, 500 yards away.

The clansmen shouted their own taunts and some clashed their broadswords against their targes, but mostly they watched and waited. Standing in family groups, fathers with their sons behind them, uncles with their nephews at their shoulder, cousins side by side, many were silent, knowing what was to come. Leaders of a Gaelic army which relied entirely on the terrifying power of a furious charge always set the most experienced and older men in front, culminating in the chief of the name. The Gaels believed that courage flowed down the generations. As they stood in the heather and watched the redcoats prepare for battle, some men sang the Twentieth Psalm but, as Donnie emphasized, others did something entirely unique for a Highland army. They recited their genealogy: ‘Is mise mac Ruari, mac lain, mac Domhnaill.’ Some men could go back through the generations for hundreds of years. While the government soldiers were shouting abuse and challenges, listening to their officers and checking their equipment, the clansmen were remembering why they had come to fight. For their families, for their history and the land from which neither was divisible, they stood quietly on the moor with only their shields and broadswords and all their courage.

Once the government army had set up their artillery, they began a murderous cannonade. Round shot ploughed through the Highland lines, but Prince Charles would not give the signal to attack. For more than an hour the clansmen shouted over their shoulders begging for ‘Claidheamh Mor!’, the order to charge. Unable to stand still any longer under the incessant cannon fire, Clan Chattan finally broke away. Mackintoshes, MacBeans and McGillivrays roared their war cries ‘Loch Moy!’ and ‘Dunmaglass!’ as they raced towards the redcoats. And when they saw that Clan Chattan was away, Clan Cameron, the Atholl Brigade and then the Appin Stewarts broke into the charge. Donald Cameron of Locheil raised his broadsword and shouted, ‘Is sinne clann Thearlaich!’, ‘We are the children of Charles!’

As Prince Charles peered through the smoke he saw his clan regiments blown to bits by disciplined musket fire and grapeshot. Few Highlanders reached the government lines. Of the handful who broke through, John McGillivray killed twelve men and then ran on to meet the battalions in the rear where he died. Gillies MacBean, an officer of Clan Chattan, was repeatedly stabbed by bayonet thrusts and his leg broken by grape-shot, but he still broke through the front line before the second cut him down. But they were too few and quickly isolated. When the charge failed the Stewarts and Camerons retreated, walking backwards and glaring at the redcoats in defiance.

Gaelic Scotland began to die at Culloden. The repressive aftermath of the battle was the beginning of a long end for the clans, their culture and their language. But what struck me forcibly about Donnie Campbell’s story was that the significant difference between the two armies was not their equipment – modern against medieval – or their tactics – discipline against a furious charge – but their reasons for fighting. One took the field for the maintenance of a Protestant and increasingly constitutional monarchy, for a version of progress and for regular pay and rations. The other fought for its sense of itself. Behind the clansmen who recited their genealogy stood the ghosts of their past, and in their war cries were the names of their places. Within a generation of Culloden the great emigrations to the New World had begun to convert the Highlands from a working landscape into mere scenery, and with them the departure of memory and understanding began to convert the Highlanders’ stories into riddles or pastiche, as a drowsy nostalgia was substituted for a badly understood past.

Culloden was a decisive moment in the war for Britain. The Duke of Cumberland’s victory finally killed off the possibility of a Jacobite monarchy and all it stood for, and it secured the Hanoverian progression towards an ever more compliant kingship. It was not the last battle, by any means, to be fought between Celtic soldiers and British armies, but it was the last time that cultural difference and political and military opposition stood glaring at each other across a battlefield on British soil. In thinking of the clansmen reciting their genealogy, and the government army shouting abuse and listening again to their battle orders, determined to stand their ground, it is not difficult to hear the music of Celtic history as it happened.

Culloden offers a partial definition of what it is to be Celtic, but when a history of the Celtic peoples of Britain is promised, it is only sensible at the outset to offer a basic framework for a broader definition of ‘Celtic’. It can be an elusive and often useless description sliding between items as diverse as brooches, beer, music, dancing, harps and languages, and it needs to be better focused and more carefully assembled if it is to serve any useful purpose. The immediate difficulty is that the question of what Celtic means has often been asked and answered from the outside with a set of observed and sometimes even imposed defining qualities. In an implied and sometimes overt contrast with their own culture, Roman historians listed and repeated Celtic characteristics over a long period. Several consistent themes are obvious, as is a noticeable tendency to convert what might be thought of as virtues into excesses or even vices.

The Romans recognized, with awe, two often related Celtic capacities, for drink and sex. It appeared (and still appears) to commentators that the Celts’ appetite for alcohol was extraordinary, limited only by its supply in some recorded cases. Allied to that was a parallel fondness for love-making, mostly between men and women, and at certain times in the year between men and women who were barely known to each other. Sadly, this last has not survived down the centuries, and Celtic Britain has become markedly more straightlaced as time has gone on. This appears to be a direct consequence of the splutterings, thunderings and fulminations of strict Presbyterians and Nonconformists against such abandonment.

Religious devotion joins the list, but in a less obviously traceable way. The early Celts of Britain were seen as devout and their Druidical faith (its details albeit imperfectly understood) inspired and thoroughly informed their culture. Celtic soldiers were fabled for their bravery on the battlefield, an attribute encouraged by their absolute belief in the afterlife – the Otherworld. That all-pervading devotion was later transferred to Christianity. When the Reformation replaced the Catholic church with a Protestant faith that could be adopted by each Celtic nation as its own, this devotion resurfaced in Presbyterian Scotland and Northern Ireland, Nonconformist Wales and Cornwall. The present-day fundamentalists of the Western Isles and Ulster, and the Baptists and Methodists of Wales and Cornwall are a persistent witness to a long tradition.

The links between the Celts and their land are another central trait of their culture. When the clansmen in the Highland army at Culloden recited their genealogy and roared their war cries, they showed how tightly bound up people and families were with the land they lived on and the seas that lapped its shores. To say that the Celts of Britain have a close affinity with the land and the sea is to underplay a near-umbilical connection. The huge skies of the Atlantic shore, the rose and gold of sunsets dying in the west, the bleakness of the land and the majesty of land and sea together pierce the hearts of those who are born there. Even if they leave, the west never leaves them.

Julius Caesar offered one of the first assessments of the Celts in his influential De Bello Gallico, written to glorify his successful campaign to subdue Gaul between 58 and 54 BC. Like many Roman writers, he commented particularly on the eloquence of the Celts. Often using highly coloured language, flecked with the devices of poetry, Celtic orators could construct long passages in their heads and deliver them without a break, a note, or a reminder of any sort. Much later, during the reign of the Emperor Constantine I (305-337 AD), a Celtic prince from the tribe of the Aedui in Gaul came to ask the Roman Senate for military help against invaders. A contemporary historian offered a sense of how comfortable he was when he addressed the Conscript Fathers: ‘the Aeduan prince, haranguing the Senate, leaning on his long shield’.

Such sustained eloquence was made possible by a prodigious memory, also recognized by the Romans as peculiarly Celtic. Clearly, an organized and instantly accessible store of knowledge is required by the likes of the Aeduan prince, or anyone speaking at length without notes. Nowadays we find it difficult to comprehend the sheer quantity of material remembered by the Celts, since we are surrounded by stored knowledge in every conceivable form, but they could remember vast amounts, much of it in precise detail. Until the modern period and the beginning of publishing in Celtic languages, culture was to be found almost entirely in an oral form which was, in turn, sustained by a memory underpinned by a particular arrangement of ideas and facts. With its devices of metre, rhyme, repetition, alliteration and onomatopoeia, we forget that poetry was originally no more than an aid to memory and better story-telling. Gaelic, Welsh, Manx and Cornish are still full of everyday poetry, and accurate descriptions of what might seem to us non-essential detail. Remnants of these habits still exist in English, and we use mnemonics to remember lists and rhyme to remind us of the most everyday things. For example, who can remember how many days are in each month without beginning inwardly to recite, ‘Thirty days hath September, April, June and November’? And in popular music we continue to use the ancient story-telling device of the chorus. When Sir Walter Scott was collecting previously unrecorded ballads in the 1790s for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, some had as many as seventy-five verses, but between each one the chorus was always repeated by the listeners. Part of the reason for that was to allow time for the reciter or singer of the ballad to remember what came next, and his or her memory was cued by hearing the rhythm and metre of the chorus.

Genuine Celtic eloquence, sadly, is no longer seen as a virtue. During the long period when England grew into Britain, oral culture became gradually discredited and was replaced with the perceived greater certainties of ink and paper. Not only did Anglo-Saxon historians like Bede of Jarrow commit an English version of history to writing, thereby giving it permanence and authority, but the engines of government also came to depend on signed, witnessed and dated texts. The Doomsday Book of 1086 is a thumping affirmation of the view that nothing is true unless it is written down. We have inherited that approach to the world, and in our courts a written and signed statement will always be preferred to reported speech, or hearsay.

But some remnants of a different way of thinking are still observable in the west. On 5 July 2000 I went to the Isle of Man to attend the annual meeting of Tynwald so that I could listen to the oldest parliament in Europe do as the name originally meant – talk.

About six miles inland from the little town of Peel on the west coast of the Isle of Man, there is a grassy mound. Shaped like a tiered wedding cake with steps cut into one side, it rises in a series of circular terraces up to a small dais at the top. Sitting at a natural north-south, east-west crossroads for the island, it is known in Manx Gaelic as Cronk y Keeillown, the Hill of the Chapel of St John, by very few people, and by very many as Tynwald. A Norse word meaning ‘assembly-field’, the grassy mound is where the Isle of Man parliament meets in ceremonial session on 5 July, the date of Old Midsummer.

Norsemen began to raid the coasts of Britain and Ireland in the late eighth century and, quickly understanding the key strategic position of the island, they removed and almost obliterated the Celtic hegemony and established the Kingdom of Man. The Norse settled all over the Sea Kingdoms and their Tynwalds survive as place names as far apart as Galloway and Dingwall, the old county town of Ross-shire. Even though ultimate political control of the Western Isles and Man remained nominally, and occasionally actually, with the kings of Norway into the thirteenth century, the Norse settlers were absorbed into Celtic society, and began to speak Celtic languages. They added powerful ingredients to British Celtic culture. One of these was the Lochaber axe used at Bannockburn in 1314, and another was the Tynwald.

The occasion of the annual meeting of the Isle of Man legislature is mostly for show now, but before 1919 it had a real purpose. For many centuries previously, the Tynwald had listened very closely to two men talking from memory. They were the Deemsters, or judges, and, until forced to write it down in 1690, they retained all the common law of Man in their memories. Each year they recited it in Manx Gaelic and added any new measures which had been agreed in the interim. Until 1919 no new law in Man could be enacted unless it had been recited at Tynwald by the Deemsters. It was called ‘Breast-Law’ because that it where it was learned and locked for safe-keeping. Although these ancient functions have been mostly forgotten, the phrase ‘to learn by heart’ is a memory of what they did, as is the verb ‘to deem’, or to judge.

The survival of an oral recital of the law as a functioning part of government until 1919 is remarkable, particularly in an area of life where written title and written proof are seen as absolutely integral. The Deemsters still perform a truncated version of their ancient role at Tynwald and Manx is still spoken; its use is now nominal, but ceremonies and symbols can still be powerful. At the Tynwald for 2000 Prince Charles sat on top of the little hill, under a prudent tented canopy, as the titular presiding presence. He had only a few formulaic phrases to utter but, to the great embarrassment of the Manx government sitting below him, his microphone refused to work, and, seen but not heard, the Prince took no part in the proceedings. Some Manxmen expressed great satisfaction that allegedly faulty technology had prevented the participation of someone who should in any case have no part in Tynwald, since it was pressure from the English crown which had long ago forced their oral legal culture to be set down on paper.

This cultural shift also radically changed attitudes over a long period. Julius Caesar and other Roman commentators believed Celtic eloquence to be a great virtue and were regularly impressed by the fluency and power of the Celts who spoke to them (presumably using Latin as a second language). Nowadays, we have almost wholly converted this virtue into a vice. English-speaking society not only mistrusts eloquence but has little time for it. Telling phrases like ‘he talks a good game’ or ‘running off at the mouth’ show how deep these attitudes now go. Blarney Castle near Cork gave its name not to eloquence or witty speech but to a vapid flow of verbiage that amounts to very little of substance, according to the Elizabethans who coined the term. In recent years the press treatment of the former Labour Leader, Neil Kinnock, was instructive. A Welsh politician and public speaker of genuine passion and colour in the tradition of Aneurin Bevan and David Lloyd George, Kinnock was regularly pilloried by the Anglo-Saxon press as a ‘Welsh Windbag’. It struck a chord and stuck.

For many centuries English and English speakers legislated, punished, discouraged or ignored those who preferred the languages of their fathers to that of their eastern or southern neighbours. For those who held fast onto their Gaelic and Welsh and quietly passed them to their children, their sense of their own languages became ever more intimate and inward, specific to places and to people, and the bonds of family and shared memory. They turned towards the Atlantic and away from the east. More than English, written down everywhere, Celtic languages were, for many speakers, written down nowhere. Even now, older Welsh and Gaelic native speakers with wide vocabularies have great difficulty in spelling and writing all but the most everyday words, because Celtic languages live most vividly in the minds and the mouths of their speech communities and far less in cold print on white paper. Consequently they have a sensual love of the words and phrases for themselves: the mouth-filling syllables of simple vocabulary, the everyday dramas of cadence, onomatopoeia and rhythm. The Celts of Britain truly love their ancient languages, call them mighty and beautiful, and have fought hard to keep them alive.

On 27 January 2000 there was a story on the leader pages of the Independent that exemplifies the power of English as a language. Recently released statistics showed that because the Internet and virtually the entire information revolution is being conducted in English, the performance of national economies is likely to improve or worsen in direct relation to how well their populations understand the language. Obviously the USA, the old Commonwealth countries and Britain were best placed, but not far behind were the Scandinavian nations and the Low Countries because they have a long-standing educational policy of teaching English as a second language. In the greatest difficulty, predicted the analysts, would be the Far Eastern economies like Japan and China (with the important exception of Hong Kong), because both their languages and methods of writing are most distant in every way from English.

Driving through the countryside of north Wales I began to marvel at rather than mourn the state of the language that lives nearest to English. Welsh has not only survived its dangerous proximity but its speech community is large, numbering more than 500,000. Bilingual road signs with the Welsh names printed above the English are only the most visible evidence of what amounts to a triumph of stubbornness and love. Of all the Celtic parts of Britain, Wales has the longest border with England and it is very near to large English-speaking population centres, from Liverpool and Manchester down to Birmingham and Bristol. Significantly, Wales became the first thoroughly colonized part of Celtic Britain when the Anglo-Norman Kings of England determined to make it their own.

Edward I was an implacable enemy of the Celts, determined to conquer the Welsh, who bitterly resisted him in a series of wars. In 1282 Llywelyn II, Prince of Wales, rose for a second time in rebellion. Edward was anxious to avoid another expensive punitive invasion, and he allowed John Pecham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to intervene and to see if he could secure a negotiated peace. Pecham spent three days at Llywelyn’s headquarters, near Caernarfon, but failed to find any common ground. Finally, he offered to attempt to persuade Edward I to grant Llywelyn a pension and an honourable position at the English court if he would only yield all his territory to Edward. Given the probable outcome of any war, it might have seemed to the English negotiators like a generous offer. It did not seem so to the Welsh. Not only did Llywelyn refuse but, lest there be any doubt, the leading men of North Wales wrote this letter to Pecham:

The Prince should not throw aside his inheritance and that of his ancestors in Wales and accept land in England, a country with whose language, way of life, laws and customs he is unfamiliar … Let this be clearly understood: his council will not permit him to yield … and even if the Prince wishes to transfer [his people] into the hands of the king, they will not do homage to any stranger as they are wholly unacquainted with his language, his way of life and his laws.

Written in 1282, it is a defiant and eloquent letter, but its significance is not so much in its dignity but the fact that even at this early stage the Welsh are in no doubt about the importance of their language. In the passage above it comes emphatically first, before way of life, customs and laws – twice. The Welsh have long understood that without their language their nation will fade from the map of history. In recent times they have gone to extremes of violence, civil disobedience and even the threatened suicide of the Plaid Cymru MP, Gwynfor Evans, to protect it.

It is an extraordinary survival The Celtic languages of Britain have outlasted the Roman occupation, the invasions of the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans and now, it seems, the onslaught of the Internet and a global economy driven by an understanding of English. Because Welsh is such an old language and because it described Britain first, it carries a version of the history of the whole island inside it. The words in Y Geiriadur Mawr, The Big Dictionary, are the quiet transports of memory, and if we listen hard to what the Welsh say, we can hear an echo of Britain talking 2,000 years ago.

From Caernarfon I drove down through Wales, crossed the Severn Bridge into the West Country and made for north Cornwall and the little fishing village of Padstow. It was 1 May, the date of an ancient fertility festival. There, I discovered immediately that Celtic Britain today is sometimes far from quiet, but even aggressive and exuberant, and certainly defensive.

‘Fuck off! Why don’t you people fuck off out of here? We don’t want you. This is our day. This is our thing. Fuck off!’ The young man might have been eighteen, certainly no older. Clutching a bottle of American lager and clearly very drunk, he put his face so close to mine I thought he was going to head-butt me or even pull out a knife. Instead, he began to sway slightly and was easily persuaded by his mates to back off.

It was nine o’clock in the morning and the narrow streets of Padstow were jammed with people. Perhaps more than 5,000 had come to celebrate the festival. Each year on May Day, out of the door of the Golden Lion pub, a creature comes back from the past. This is the ‘Obby ‘Oss, and he has made the long journey from an ancient culture to dance for a day around Padstow. Although he is accompanied by supporters and musicians, the ‘Obby ‘Oss really dances to the music of time, for this is a fertility festival of a sort that used to be celebrated all over Britain but has survived nowhere as completely as in Padstow. There is a wildness, a strangeness and a sense, often fuelled by drink, of abandonment which seems not to fit, to be oddly un-British in such a traditional setting as this, a Cornish fishing village. Yet in truth, the ‘Obby ‘Oss could not be more of this place, could not be more essentially British. It is much older than many of the ceremonies we now think of as traditional, like the coronation or the state opening of parliament. For the Obby Oss comes spinning out of the labyrinth of Celtic memory. More alive, vivid and noisier than any solemn royal or parliamentary ceremony acted out in London, the Oss is a Celtic ritual played in the streets and lanes of today’s Padstow.

Padstow is an old harbour town that tumbles down to the sea on the west side of the Camel estuary in north Cornwall. During the winter it huddles around the quays from where a few fishing boats sail out in search of an inshore catch. It makes its real money from tourists, but the annual dance of the ’Obby ’Oss is not put on for their benefit.

On 1 May the centre of the village is decked out in swags of greenery, mainly the cut boughs of the sycamore tree and cowslip and bluebell flowers. The old country rhyme ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May’ has long baffled naturalists, since there are no nuts to be gathered in May, it being much too early in the year. The phrase is a corruption of what still goes on in Padstow and should read ‘Here we go gathering knots in May’ – knots or bunches of leaves and flowers. The English phrase ‘to go a-maying’ means approximately the same thing.

The ‘Oss dances under the knots of sycamore, lunging and swerving in front of the press of people. The costume is made from a large circular hoop covered in black canvas with skirts reaching down to the ground, and it is worn by a strong and agile man. Fitted on top is a strange pointed head that looks African in origin, like a witch-doctor’s mask, and is decorated with red-and-white ribbons, the colours of spring and resurgent life.

The ‘Oss dances three times around different parts of the village and, as the day goes on, the pubs do better and better. By five o’clock there are hundreds of people, perhaps a thousand, a good deal the worse for drink. Or perhaps better. In the twelfth century a clerical historian called Gerald of Wales listed eloquence, stubbornness, bravery and an immoderate love of intoxicating drink as Welsh characteristics. He could easily have extended his definition to cover all the Celtic regions of Britain, definitely including Cornwall and Padstow on May Day. The resentment of the drunken young man shown to me on the morning was extreme but not untypical. The ‘Obby ‘Oss is their festival, it is something they do for themselves and for their own reasons. It is most emphatically not quaint or something performed by the natives for the charabanc trade. The ‘Oss is not a comfortable, categorized hunk of heritage. It is not nice, and very Celtic in its feel. With all its abandonment and energy, it is probably the one event in all Britain and Ireland most resembling a Celtic festival day: 1 May is the date of the ancient festival of Beltane. When it falls on a weekday there are many fewer visitors: Padstow prefers that because the Oss has always danced for them, and for no-one else.

Reckless bravery allied to a fiery disposition is yet another combination of characteristics applied to the Celts, although it is not exclusively applied to them. Spanish footballers, Italian prima donnas and even some southern French film actors are sometimes believed to be governed by a Latin temperament, which amounts to much the same thing. The English do not see themselves like that: they find the solid and unflappable figure of John Bull a far more satisfying self-image. Altogether cooler and less impulsive, they believe that dogged determination, consistency and calculation make them different and, without often stating it bluntly, more successful as a culture. One English rugby commentator recently made a good joke about an Irish player who kept giving away penalties and points through persistent flashes of anger. ‘A temperamental fellow’, he remarked, ‘50% temper and 50% mental’.

From their earliest contacts the Celts were admired by the Romans for their courage in battle, but that was often tempered by criticism for being ‘war-mad’ and needlessly provocative and bellicose. This was a persistent observation made throughout British history: in the medieval period, during the Jacobite rebellions and by the English commanders of the late-eighteenth-century British imperial armies that were overwhelmingly recruited from the Celtic west. P. G. Wodehouse’s crack that it was not difficult to tell the difference between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine still has, with its mixture of lofty condescension and accuracy, the power to produce precisely the reaction that confirms it. The Romans and Greeks agreed with the rugby commentator and, in the face of Celtic excess, were just as phlegmatic as the English. The historian and geographer Strabo, writing about the Celts of Europe at the beginning of the first century AD, stated:

The whole nation that is nowadays called Gallic or Galatic is war-mad, and both high spirited and quick for battle although otherwise simple and not uncouth. Because of this, if the Gauls are provoked they tend to rush into a battle all together, without concealment or forward planning. For anyone who wants to outwit them, they are therefore easy to deal with, since it is enough to provoke them into a rage by any means at all, at any time and in any place. It will then be found that they are willing to risk everything they have with nothing to rely on other than their sheer physical strength and courage.

Approximately 1,800 years later Strabo’s observations were born out almost to the letter. The rebellion of 1798 is little known outside Ireland and yet it was a remarkably savage event. Lasting only five weeks of the early summer and focused mainly in Leinster and Ulster, it saw 30,000 people killed out of a total Irish population of 5 million. This compares to the contemporary French Revolution where, between 1789 and 1804, 25,000 people died out of a total population of thirty million. The guillotine, the Reign of Terror and the Storming of the Bastille are all properly famous and powerful symbols, but the astonishing concentration of carnage in the green summer fields and roadside ditches of Leinster and Ulster has been virtually forgotten beyond the Irish Sea, even though Ireland suffered a comparable reign of terror, during which its people were forced, by extreme provocation, to echo Strabo’s description of reckless bravery.

Partly inspired by the French Revolution and the American Revolution of 1776 before that, the Irish Rebellion of 1798 arose out of deep political dissatisfaction. Since the Elizabethan conquest, the Catholic majority and the Presbyterian minority had been progressively disenfran-chized to the extent that almost all power lay in the hands of a Protestant minority which made up less than 10 per cent of the population. A Presbyterian called Theobald Wolfe Tone and others formed the Society of United Irishmen in the 1790s not only to argue a political case but also to promote the idea of unity across a growing sectarian divide. At about this time the Irish tricolour became popular. It was an imitation of the French Revolutionary tricolour, but the choice of colours reflected the ideals of the United Irishmen: green and orange were for Catholic and Protestant, while the white band between them was for peace.

In the years leading up to the rebellion of 1798, there was little enough of that. It seemed as though the colonial government in Dublin Castle was deliberately attempting to spark a popular rebellion so that it could put it down severely and thereafter establish a tighter grip on Ireland. Through a well-organized network of informants, the government knew a great deal about the plans of the United Irishmen, and either to provoke or discourage thoughts of an uprising, troops embarked on a horrifying reign of terror. When they caught suspected rebels a favourite prelude to interrogation was pitch-capping. First, gunpowder was sprinkled on the suspect’s head. Then a canvas skull-cap was soaked in tar, his hands were tied and the cap was crammed onto his head and set alight. When the cap was ripped off the victim was scalped. An Irish historian told me that he had listened to recorded interviews with old ladies recalling men who had suffered pitch-capping being allowed by the clergy to keep handkerchiefs on their scarred heads while in church.

Events were driven hard by such excesses, and in the early summer of 1798 the long-awaited rebellion finally erupted. The core organization of the United Irishmen had been betrayed in Dublin by informers, and without proper co-ordination, decent equipment or French support, the rising was bound for ultimate failure. However, the rebels had some initial success in Leinster, south of Dublin. Huge but poorly armed rebel forces gathered on hilltops. One of the key battles was fought on Vinegar Hill, above the town of Enniscorthy in Leinster. The rebels were commanded by a priest, Father John Murphy from nearby Boolavogue, who had great leadership qualities but a limited knowledge of strategy or tactics. His camp was quickly surrounded by a very large government army. On 21 June more than 20,000 troops attacked the rebels and, moving their cannon expertly up the slopes, they raked the hill with devastating volleys. Although the Irish rebels had a handful of cannon and some muskets, they relied, like the Highlanders at Culloden fifty years before, on the ancient tactic of an all-out charge. Armed only with 12-foot pikes, they launched desperate downhill charges at the cannon and lines of redcoats. Women and children fought alongside their men on Vinegar Hill but their undoubted physical courage could make little impression on the advance of the disciplined troops below them. After two hours of slaughter, Father Murphy directed a retreat. A gap in the encirclement was found and, fighting a rearguard action, the rebels poured through it, leaving more than 500 dead on the hill.

Soon after the battle at Vinegar Hill, Father Murphy was captured. In the market square in Tullow, County Garlow, he was tied to a triangle, the shirt was ripped off his back, and he was lashed repeatedly as officers interrogated him for his identity. Murphy refused to say anything and was taken from the whipping frame and hanged on a mobile gallows. When his body was taken down, his head was hacked off. Some soldiers set it on a spike in the railings outside the court-house and then stuffed his torso in a tar barrel which they set alight. One of the houses in Tullow market square was occupied by a prosperous Catholic family, the Callaghans. The soldiers set the blazing barrel outside their house and, pushing past their children, went inside. ‘There could be no objection in this house to the incense of a priest/ they shouted as they forced open all the windows to let in ‘the holy smoke’.

The Callaghan family still live in Tullow. The appalling cruelty meted out to Father Murphy happened on their doorstep. The story of these dreadful events is vivid, and part of a personal history, part of a real inherited memory rather than a background text from a distant past. The terror happened not to historical figures in a misty landscape long, long ago but to real people, many of whose descendants still live in the same places and whose family memories are sharp. In short, the practice of pitch-capping is not just a barbarity from a primitive and less civilized age, it affects the present. In Ireland the past is not another country, it happened near at hand, in the fields and hills of Leinster, in the market places of small towns in Carlow.

By contrast, in England a Celtic past is certainly thought to have happened in another country. Despite the unquestioned fact that Old Welsh was spoken all over England (and southern Scotland), many English historians have some difficulty with this and argue that the language should be called Cumbric, British or Romano-British and so on. This academic diffidence obscures the fact that Welsh is the modern language much the closest to the old speech of Britain, and that it offers more than an echo of how our ancestors talked and sang. For that reason, and for clarity, Old Welsh is the most straightforward label. It is also a handy reminder that not everything told in Welsh happened in Wales.

In the middle of England the Peak District is the geological full stop at the southern end of the Pennine Chain. Place names often remember periods of history recorded nowhere else, and Pennine comes from the Welsh word pen for head. Only fifteen miles from the edge of the Manchester conurbation, Buxton sits at the heart of the Peak District and is a spa town well known for the waters of its therapeutic well. Nowadays Buxton water is bottled and marketed all over the world and its production is an example of a long historical continuity. The Romans called the little town Aquae Arnemetiae, which translates as the ‘waters of She who stands out before the Sacred Grove’. The well itself is now named after St Anne, but its derivation is probably from a Christianized version of Anu, a Celtic goddess name. The Celtic peoples of Britain venerated wells, believing that gods and goddesses inhabited them and also that, springing naturally from the bowels of the earth, they were portals to the Otherworld.

In the Peak District, and particularly in the Wye Valley below Buxton, ancient Celtic wells are venerated every summer in the rituals of well-dressing. Sanitized and Christianized, these are ceremonies more than 2,000 years old which still take place in twenty-one towns and villages. It is a clear and unambiguous survival of Celtic culture in the sort of difficult upcountry where Celtic customs and language lasted longest in England. The wells are adorned with garlands of flowers, and in some places women go out at dawn on May Day to tie simple posies and swags of greenery on the trees and shrubs around them. As in Padstow, the white-and-red ribbons of reawakening life are also tied on. Throughout the summer the wells are dressed in different ways: some villages build large 10-foot-high panels which are covered with elaborate patterns of living plants and flowers and erected behind or at the side of the spring. After the flowers have been put in place, there are often small festivals and local events to celebrate the coming summer and welcome the return of the sun.

Buxton and the Peak District are rarely included in any description or definition of Celtic Britain, but the survival of well-dressing and other rituals argue strongly that they should be. Much of England retains some connection, however elusive, with the culture that existed over most of Britain before the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans came. Again, place names show this: London, Dover, Leeds and Lincoln are all Celtic in origin. The part played by England in the stories of the Sea Kingdoms is both overwhelmingly obvious – it would be perverse and also impossible to tell the stories without near-constant reference to the interaction between the Celts and their powerful and populous neighbours – and complex and subtle. There is a Celtic England which is not the England we know, a layer of experience not often seen as part of a traditional sense of Englishness.

Although it would be easy to allow a description of the dynamic of this relationship to slide into a maudlin recital of cultures crushed and lost, it is neither the most informative nor the most accurate approach to take. England’s role is not simply that of the island bully ruthlessly imposing an Anglocentric uniformity on the enfeebled Celts of the west. History is rarely so simple. It is essential to remember that some of England’s native culture has its roots in a half-forgotten past often obscured by a Christian overlay or ignored in an over-emphasis of an identity based on the role of London as its capital city. Beefeaters, Westminster and Buckingham Palace are important components of England’s culture, but so is the fact that Cumbria comes from Cumber, the name used by the Anglo-Saxons for the British Celts, or the fact that early forms of morris dancing owe much to the way in which the four annual Celtic festivals were celebrated. England has a part in the stories of the Sea Kingdoms as a ruthless oppressor, but it also has a Celtic culture of its own.

Added to the paradox of Celtic England is the clear historical development of non-Celtic Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The distinctions between Celtic and non-Celtic inside these so-called Celtic nations are very clearly present, and if each had to be sifted and weighed, the telling of this story would take on a bewildering complexity. Common sense advises that each nation, including England, ought to be judged by the degree of its Celtic identity. Obviously Glasgow is more of a Celtic city than, say, Wolverhampton. Not only does it have a Celtic name, but very many of its inhabitants have either Scots or Irish Gaelic backgrounds at a distance of only one or two generations, and Gaelic is still spoken by a few thousand of its citizens. More important than that, Scottish history – all of it – has been highly coloured by a Celtic past and its culture made distinctive by a Celtic present.

While this positions Scotland, Wales and Ireland (as well as Man and Cornwall) in a Celtic atmosphere, it is important not to ignore or underplay the tensions inside these countries. The Welsh speech community is large but it comprises only a sixth of the total population of Wales, and if language has been the central tenet of Welshness since the age of Llywelyn II, how does the five-sixths majority express its sense of Welshness?

The foregoing examples and arguments are intended only as an opening set of impressions of clear similarities and shared experiences which exist between apparently distant places in Britain. What follows is the diary of a long journey through the Sea Kingdoms of Celtic Britain.