A History of Ancient Britain (47 page)

Do not forget either that most of the ‘Romans’ who came to Britain were not Italians, but men press-ganged into the legions from territories just across the Channel. So the majority
of them were likely Gauls or Germans anyway – genetically indistinguishable from the Angles and Saxons who would arrive a few centuries later. The Normans were Northmen, descendants of the
Vikings who had settled in France after their leader, Rollo, and his men muscled their way into the territory in the ninth century
AD
. It is called Normandy because it was
settled by men from the north.

And underlying it all is the certainty that the first hunters, who walked onto the peninsula of Britain 12,000 years ago, were the sons and daughters of tribes living in the same parts of
northern and western Europe that would later be home to Gauls and Danish Vikings. In short Britain has been invaded several times by the same people. The British are a pack of mongrels, that much
is certain, and all pups from the same two or three breeds. They are still the same people they have always been.

With all of that in mind, consider how difficult it might be to find a Celtic gene.

Undaunted by scientific reality, I sat in the arrivals lounge of Heathrow Terminal 5 one afternoon in the summer of 2010 swabbing the inside of my mouth with a lump of cotton wool on the end of
a little stick. I had flown down from my home in Scotland specifically for the purpose. Somewhere within my saliva would be cells, and within those cells my DNA. A young television researcher
waited patiently while I did so, before popping the sample into a specially prepared sealable tube and heading back off into London to find a suitable lab where it would be analysed. For a little
while it might be possible to isolate those relevant fragments of my innermost chemistry and thereby begin to unpick a long, long story.

Our DNA is like a set of family heirlooms. Within some cells are mitochondria, little batteries that provide energy. It is thought mitochondria may have wormed their way into some cells long ago
as independent bacteria looking for someplace warm to live. Having initially tried to evict or destroy them, the cells learned to take advantage of their invaders instead, enslaving their power to
their own ends. Along with the energy to drive certain processes, mitochondria contain DNA (mtDNA) that is unique to the woman’s bloodline and to her offspring. Women receive it from their
mothers and pass it forwards to their sons and daughters. Only their
daughters have the ability to pass it on to the next generation.

Fathers pass private information to their sons too, in the form of a package called the Y chromosome. As well as determining the maleness of men, the Y chromosome also contains DNA that is
unique to the man’s bloodline and his male offspring. While the mother passes what might be regarded as a genetic diamond ring to her daughters, the father hands down a gold pocket watch.

I have a daughter and two sons. My little girl has received my wife’s mtDNA, just as my wife received it from her own mother. Our sons have the Y chromosome that was passed down to me from
my father, and from his father before him, and so on back into the distant past. If a couple have only sons, the mother’s mtDNA runs into a dead end – a little tragedy after surviving
in an unbroken line for hundreds of thousands of years. Likewise if they have only daughters, the man’s Y chromosome disappears from the world.

There was therefore something strangely intimate and uncomfortable about the experience of handing over so much personal chemical data – as though I was confiding family secrets I would
rather have kept to myself. Some weeks later I met with Peter Forster, an expert in statistical genetic dating methods, to find out how much of my past he had been able to distill from those pieces
of damp cotton wool.

The whole experience was bizarre, bordering on the surreal. We met in the beer garden of a pub in Shepherd’s Bush in London and there Forster attempted to explain where his analysis
suggested my bloodline had its deepest roots. The subtleties and complexities were mind-boggling. In the simplest terms, he had been able to identify two strands of my DNA – one that let him
follow my mother into deep prehistory, the other my father. By comparing my sample to those of tens of thousands taken from volunteers all over the world Forster had been able to find the
individuals alive today whose DNA most closely matched mine.

My mother’s mtDNA – which is in my cells for all of my life, but going nowhere else – was most like that found in the blueprints of donors dotted across various parts of
Scotland. In fact nothing remotely like a match was found anywhere outside that country. ‘As you can see it is all over Scotland,’ said Forster. ‘It is not just one particular
island, or location – so that argues for the presence of your mother’s line in Scotland way back into prehistory thousands of years ago.’

In other words the statistical likelihood was that my mother’s
descendants had arrived in Scotland in deep prehistory, perhaps (I like to think) alongside the first
pioneers who recolonised the land after the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago.

The DNA in my Y chromosome had something quite different to say about my father, however. When the map appeared on the screen of Forster’s laptop I looked instinctively at the British
Isles, expecting more red dots like those conjured up by my mother’s mtDNA. But there were no matches in Britain or Ireland at all, not a single one. Furthermore it appeared there was no
connection to any of Forster’s volunteers in the whole of northern Europe, even Scandinavia. Instead it turned out that the only people with DNA matching that of my father are alive and well
and living in eastern Europe, even as far afield as Iran.

There is a lot of smoke and mirrors surrounding the science of DNA analysis. It is virtually impossible for non-scientists to make head or tail of it all. Forster’s statistics are worked
up from a base of just tens of thousands of volunteers, meaning there are literally billions of people missing from the picture. Those caveats aside, it seemed statistically likely my Y chromosome
had made it as far as Britain only relatively recently – in genetic terms at least. While my mother’s ancestry showed all the signs of having been built into these islands at the
foundation level, the material from the male half of my make-up had been out east for most of that time. The individual or individuals who brought it into north-west Europe had done so not very
long ago at all.

On a personal level it all made a kind of sense to me – if only in completely unscientific ways. My mum is and always has been happiest close to home. She is most content in her own house,
surrounded by her family. I like to think now that she is fixed there by a kind of genetic gravity. Scotland keeps tight hold of the atoms of her skin and bones. My dad on the other hand is a born
wanderer, pulled towards distant places. He is a reader of maps and a planner of journeys. Maybe the magnet that attracts his particular DNA is someplace far away, up the hill and over the lea, off
towards the east. You couldn’t prove a word of all that of course, but I think it’s true.

For all sorts of reasons people have been looking for proof of a Celtic bloodline for generations. If I have a Celtic gene, it has yet to be found. If it exists at all it is a minuscule splinter
on the side of Jacob’s Ladder catching in the skin of some hands but not others. All we can say with any certainty at the moment is that ancestry – like mine, for example – is
complicated. Each of us is anyway more than the sum of our genetic parts. An Inuit
raised in Kensington would vote Tory; a Xhosa living in Soho would work in the media.

Rather than a Celtic gene it seems more likely there was once a set of Celtic ideas and ideals. By the time of the Late Iron Age people were more mobile than they had ever been before. On foot
and on horseback they ranged easily across vast distances so that customs, beliefs and artistic sensibilities were soon spread throughout Europe and beyond. So we can safely say there exists a
Celtic heritage. It can be demonstrated and proved archaeologically that there was a shared appreciation of art and design as well as a respect for status and hierarchy.

In the modern world the word ‘Celtic’ refers primarily to a family of languages, all of them originally spoken only in the British Isles and Ireland. All share a common
ancestor-language that likely travelled across Europe with the hunters in the years following the end of the Ice Age. The mother tongue may well have been a predecessor of the Sanskrit language of
the Indian subcontinent.

If the study of DNA is a kind of archaeology, excavating inside ourselves in search of answers, then the study of language might be yet another form of digging. Talk surrounds us every day,
flowing around us like a river. We learn it by rote and understand it without wondering where the words came from – why they mean what they mean. Some of the words are new, coined during our
own brief lifetimes. Others have been there so long they are like the most elderly people among us: we take them for granted, paying them no attention as they brush past us in the street. No one
else alive is old enough to remember when those ancients were young, to care where they came from, to ask who they actually are, or were.

Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish and the Manx tongue of the Isle of Man are all ancient, and all related to one another. The last of the Celtic languages, Breton, is spoken in Brittany
in northern France but was exported there in the Middle Ages, along with emigrants from the British Isles. Language matters to students of the history of ancient Britain because clues about our
past lie curled inside it, like fossils in rock.

Saint Michael’s Mount, the rocky island off the south-west coast of Cornwall, is called ‘Carreg luz en kuz’ in the old Cornish language. It is a phrase that means ‘the
grey rock in the woods’ and might seem like a strange name for a little island in the sea. From around 1500
BC
Phoenician ships tied up alongside the island to await
consignments of precious tin, so
it is clearly a very long time indeed since it was surrounded by anything other than waves.

Once in while, however, when the tide falls low enough, the remains of ancient tree stumps can still be glimpsed poking through the sand on nearby beaches. The Cornish language is therefore the
custodian of a fascinating fact that might otherwise go unnoticed: that long ago, long before the tin traders came in their ships, the sea level around Britain was much lower and the dry land
extended far beyond the rock that is now Saint Michael’s Mount.

‘Eenie, meenie, miney, mo . . .’ is familiar to everyone as the start of a rhyme learned in childhood, and likely dismissed by most adults as nonsense words coined for fun. In fact
‘eeny, meeny, miny, moe’ is one, two, three, four – parts of a counting system that is almost certainly Celtic in origin. To this day some old shepherds in East Anglia use
‘ina, mina, tehra, methera’ when counting their flocks. In Cornwall they say ‘eena, mea, mona, mite’ and in Cumbria – where some audacious scholars are even attempting
to resurrect yet another ‘lost’ language – the sheep farmers can be heard muttering, ‘yan, tan, tether, mether’ as their beasts scamper past them.

The ancient past is fossilised too in the names of places and features in the landscape. We blithely accept a river name like ‘Avon’ without allowing for the fact that the word once
meant something specific. Long before the Romans came, the people living in Britain had a word ‘abona’ in their own language – referred to by modern linguists as Brittonic –
that meant ‘river’. The same meaning survives in the Welsh ‘afon’. Dover comes from ‘dubris’, meaning ‘waters’; ‘Kent’ was once sounded
as ‘cantus’, meaning ‘border’ or ‘periphery’; and when the nomadic hunters first laid eyes on the River Thames, as they began the recolonisation of the land 12
millennia ago, they referred to that silent black barrier as ‘Tamesis’, the ‘darkness’.

And so it goes on, words are all around us like ancient buildings left stranded here and there in modern cities, cut off from the time when their existence made sense in a bigger picture.
Sometime in the fourth century
BC
a Greek merchant and sailor called Pytheas travelled as far as the ‘Tin Islands’ before heading home to Marseille to write
about what he had seen. Among much else he mentioned asking some Gauls about the people who lived on the other side of the water known to us as the English Channel. They apparently told him the
island over there was ‘Pretannike’ and home
to the ‘Pretannikai’. Say ‘Pretannike’ out loud and you will hear a trace of something
familiar in it.

In the British form of the language the inhabitants of the islands were known among themselves as ‘Pretani’ – a word meaning ‘painted people’ and a reference to
their habit of tattooing their bodies. After the Roman warrior and Emperor-in-waiting Julius Caesar had spent some time fighting with the locals there he wrote down the name of the troublesome new
territory as ‘Britannia’ – so that even that most familiar of names, ‘Britain’, actually means something and is a connection to a story thousands of years in the
telling.

‘Welsh’ is a corruption of an Old English word ‘wealas’, meaning ‘foreigner’ or more likely just ‘not one of us’. The people there called
themselves ‘Cymry’, by which they meant ‘companions’ or ‘ the community’. Their own word for the people living beyond the limits of Welsh territory was the
‘Prydyn’ – another reference to the fact the inhabitants had tattoos on their skin.

In time the Roman invaders would find a people in the far north of Britannia who continued to cover their bodies in designs long after all the other inhabitants of the island had abandoned the
practice. The soldiers would label them ‘Picts’ – a disparaging nickname for a painted people. In fact the Picts and their ancestors were keeping up an ancient tradition, one that
in their eyes had a very practical application. Pictish warriors fought naked – believing their gods would look down upon them, see the tattoos worn in their honour, and confer divine
protection upon the wearers. The tattoos were always blue, made from the juice of elderberries and sloes, and the chemicals contained in the fruit were natural aids to the coagulation of blood. A
warrior’s tattooed skin was therefore likely to heal more quickly in the event of injury.