The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (9 page)

Once Petilius Cerialis had established secure fortresses at Carlisle and Corbridge and either he or Agricola had begun to advance beyond the Cheviots, logistics demanded at least some good relationships with native kings. Having executed an isolating pincer movement around the hill country of the Selgovae, Roman commanders could lead their long columns further north – but not without first securing sufficient supplies for their troops. The routes of march around Selgovan territory lay far from the sea and the fleet and foraging for such a large force was bound to be chancy. The solution was to find allies and in the kindreds known to Ptolemy as the Votadini and the Venicones, and it appears that Roman diplomacy succeeded. The territory of the Votadini included the lower Tweed Valley and the Lothians and seems to have been governed from a series of centres – Edinburgh’s Castle Rock, the impressive acropolis of Traprain Law in East Lothian, Eildon Hill North near Melrose and Yeavering in north Northumberland. The power bases of the kings of the Venicones are much less well understood but in their kingdom of Fife there is no lack of impressive potential sites. It looks as though they were close allies of the Votadini, no doubt communicating by sea across the Firth of Forth, for Venicones means ‘the Kindred Hounds’.

Both kingdoms have scant Roman remains, probably because
diplomacy had avoided the need for forts and roads. Roman military planners did not waste resources and a peace treaty was seen as almost as glorious as victory in war. At Newstead, at the foot of Eildon Hill North, a large depot fort was built by Agricola’s legions. It acted not only as a centre for ingathering supplies (it lay on an ancient route-network and was next to the Tweed and a reliable ford) but also as a sentinel guarding the mouths of the Selgovan valleys of the Ettrick, the upper Tweed and the Gala Water. Around the walls of Newstead (which was rebuilt many times), archaeologists have found the remains of extensive corrals and ancillary fortifications and these appear to have been used to overnight animals – sheep, cattle and horses.

In Fife, the Roman invaders built no equivalent depot fort but sharp-eyed toponymists have detected the shadow of where one might have been. Near two small and temporary camps in the valley of the River Eden lies the village of Blebo. In an earlier version, it was Bladeboig. An unusual place-name, it is thought to relate to what the Romans called Birrens fort in corn-producing Annandale. Blatobulgium means ‘the Meal-sack Place’ and, in Fife, it seems to have been rubbed smooth by time into a contracted version. Supplying corroboration, Ptolemy places Horrea in approximately the same place and in English it means ‘granary’.

Once the legions had reached the Firth of Forth and re-established contact with the captains of their supply ships, Agricola and his commanders will have pondered their next move. Reconnaissance will have given them two determinant pieces of intelligence. Beyond the Venicones lay trouble. Like the Selgovae, the Highland kings were likely to be hostile and if they made a secure alliance, they could muster a large army. However much the Romans longed to confront a native army in a set-piece battle where their superior discipline and equipment had delivered victory after victory, there was a difficulty – a lack of room to manoeuvre. Geography stood in Agricola’s way – an enormously important feature of Scotland’s geography which has now completely disappeared.

Stretching east from the foothills of the Lomond mountains, south of the Lake of Menteith and almost up to the cliffs of
Stirling Castle rock, Flanders Moss was a huge – and dangerous – barrier. The residue of a prehistoric sea which reached as far inland as the rising ground at Aberfoyle, it followed the meandering course of the River Forth and was almost five miles in breadth in places. The name derives from two Scots words and means ‘a quivering or quaking bog’. Studded with stagnant pools, some of them very broad and deep, the flat landscape was punctuated by stands of birch and willow. Place names remember the old marsh – Birkenwood for the birches, East Poldar for a bog beside a pool and Powblack for a peat-dark creek. In winter, Flanders Moss was a bleak, sodden place, often flooded as rain and snow swelled the Forth, and, in summer, the midgies and mosquitoes will have been murderous.

It was not impassable or impenetrable. Under the thick blanket of peat archaeologists have found the remains of prehistoric wooden trackways made from cut logs and, around the fringes of the Moss, there were settlements. Dangerous though it was, the wetland was a reliable source of food for fowlers with their nets and traps. Nests produced eggs in the spring and early summer, and those with patience and a thick skin fished in the pools near the course of the Forth where the murky water moved a little.

Crossing places were recalled in place-names such as Fordhead and Causewayhead but, while native hunters and travellers knew the safe paths, Flanders Moss was no place for armies. It was the forgotten barrier which made Stirling and its dramatic castle rock the gateway to the north and the Highlands and the strategic hinge of Scotland. When Lord Kames began drainage operations in the 1750s and the peat was removed to make flat and fertile farmland, it was as though a door had opened.

Tacitus was struck by the importance of Flanders Moss and could see clearly, probably at first hand, the effect it would have on Agricola’s campaign.

For the Firths of Clota [Clyde] and Bodotria [Forth], carried far inland by the tides of opposite seas, are separated by a narrow neck of land. This was now being securely held by garrisons and
the whole sweep of the country on the nearer side was secured: the enemy had been pushed back, as if into a different island.

Therefore in
AD
82 Agricola had no choice but to march north under the shadow of Stirling Castle rock. It was just as well that the garrison was probably friendly. Later sources suggest that the kingdom of Manau was, like the Venicones of Fife, allied to the Votadini. In post-Roman records, the territories became twinned as Manau-Gododdin. Once again, place-names hint at its extent. For centuries Clackmannanshire was Scotland’s smallest county (with the longest name) and its continued existence may have owed something to its having been the kernel of an ancient kingdom. As already noted (p.9), the name is from Clach na Manau, ‘the Stone of Manau’, and in the centre of the little town it can still be seen. Nearby Slamannan is ‘the Moor of Manau’. And, around the fringes of the tiny county, more Celtic names, such as Powis Burn, imply the boundaries of a distinct territory.

None of the uncertainties of place-name evidence can cloud Roman actions after the breakthrough past Stirling. Along the high ground known as the Gask Ridge, the legions constructed one of the first fixed frontiers in the empire. It was a series of fortlets and signal towers linked by a road and at either end of the ridge lay a string of larger forts which were strategically sited at the foot of glens leading into the heart of the Highland massif. This was the territory of the Calidones, a kindred whose name came to be applied to all of the early peoples of the Highlands and the north of Scotland, eventually being adopted in modern times as Caledonia.

The whole Gask Ridge system ran from Loch Lomond in the west, skirting the Highland fault-line and reaching the North Sea coast at Montrose. As with other Roman frontiers it was porous, not aiming to stop armed incursion in its tracks – the individual forts and fortlets were not built to house garrisons large enough to achieve that. Instead the system was set up to police movement, gather intelligence and delineate an area outside of the empire, that of the Calidones, from an area inside, that of the Venicones. The Gask Ridge almost certainly ran along an older
frontier between these peoples, between communities of hillmen and plainsmen. If substantial hostile movement was seen by mounted patrols at the mouths of the glens or indeed further into the interior, then messages could be despatched and retaliatory forces mustered. What is clear in
AD
82 is the sense of a pause in Agricola’s campaign. Having moved through the Stirling gap, he appears to be setting a limit to conquest, perhaps awaiting further instructions from Rome, and meanwhile building a defensive screen to cover his Lowland allies.

The impression made by the Gask Ridge frontier on the native peoples must have been startling. No doubt built quickly in the manner of most Roman military work, striking boldly across the landscape and regular in appearance, the line signalled the arrival of a phenomenon, an army and a culture able to tame the very landscape and make a mark still clearly visible 2,000 years later. Great and unprecedented power had marched north – that was the unmistakable message.

The new frontier was also the first recorded recognition of Scotland’s most profound internal boundary, the Highland Line. And almost immediately it divided the land into Highland and Lowland, savage and subdued, what was to become Celtic in the north and English-speaking in the south.

But all of that lay in the future. Once the Gask Ridge frontier was established, Agricola turned his army westwards:

In the 5th year of the campaigns, he crossed in the leading ship and defeated peoples up to that time unknown in a series of successful actions. He lined up his forces in that part of Britain that faces Ireland . . .

It is possible that the reference to a leading ship indicates an expedition across the Solway Firth to Galloway but the difficulty with that interpretation is the mention of unknown peoples. Since Cerialis’ men built the fort at Carlisle ten years before, it is inconceivable that the Romans would have had no knowledge of the kindreds on the opposite shores of the firth.

These were the Novantae and Ptolemy’s map plots some intriguing detail. Their name may have meant ‘the Vigorous People’ and it compares with the Trinovantes, ‘the Thrice Vigorous People’, who lived in the south-east, mainly north of the Thames. The kindred name also seems to be related to Novios, the ancient version of the River Nith which runs through modern Dumfries. According to one medieval chronicler, it was seen as the eastern boundary of ‘the wild realm of Galloway’ and, more recently, it was where the counties of Kirkcudbright and Dumfries met, even though the river runs through the county town of the latter. The Novantae might simply have been the name of the first people that Roman reconnaissance patrols encountered, the kindred of the Nith, and their name was used for all those to the west of them. There are many analogies. The vast sub-continent of Siberia got its name from the Sabir, a tribe who lived immediately east of the Ural Mountains.

Ptolemy locates two settlements in the lands of the Novantae. The first element in Lucopibia means ‘white’ and seems to be another name for Whithorn. Rerigonion is on Loch Ryan, a
boiled-down rendering of the original. In Old Welsh, it was Rhionydd and it first came to notice in the cycles of poems known as the Triads. There it is joined with Gelliwig in Cornwall and Caerleon in Wales as one of the three national thrones of Britain, meaning Old Welsh-speaking western Britain. Rerigonion is ‘Very Royal Place’ and was one of the seats of the kings of the Novantae. That they were seen as a vigorous people there can be little doubt. When Hadrian’s Wall was planned and built forty years later, a line of long sea defences, a sea wall, was laid out down the Solway coast of Cumbria. Attacks from Irish raiders and the Novantae were what the Roman military architects were anticipating and one of the largest forts in the north was built at Maryport. Situated on the Sea Brows, one of the few high points on that coastline, its towers looked for trouble sailing out of Galloway or the Irish shore.

Desnes Cro, Mor and Ioan

On early medieval maps of Galloway, what approximates to Kirkcudbright-shire is described as Desnes Cro and sometimes Desnes Mor and Desnes Ioan. What do these names mean and where did they appear from? The great Welsh dictionary,
Y Geiriadur Mawr,
offers no clues and Edward Dwelly’s classic,
Faclair Gaidhlig Gu Beurla
(
The Illustrated Gaelic – English Dictionary
), notes a root word
des
which means, not very helpfully, ‘land’. A
desreith
seems to have been an old term for ‘a judge’.
Cro
can mean an enclosed area but one that is more like the size of a sheepfold than a large tract of land.
Mor
is simple – it means ‘big’ – but
ioan
and any variants seem impossible to work out. Enquiries made to more learned historians have produced nothing. Perhaps an enlightened Gallovidian reader might make some sense of what seems an impenetrable mystery.

Tacitus related what sounds like one of many conversations with Agricola, probably in Rome after his retirement:

I have often heard him say that Ireland could be conquered and held with a single legion and modest numbers of auxilia. That would, he thought, be advantageous against Britain as well, if Roman arms were everywhere and freedom were, so to speak, removed from sight.

Even though his military judgement may have been overly optimistic, the invasion was considered a serious possibility: ‘Agricola had given refuge to one of the minor kings from these people [the Irish], who had been expelled in a family quarrel. He treated him like a friend, keeping him in case an opportunity arose.’ The phrase used by Tacitus, ‘one of the minor kings’, is instructive in that it shows some understanding of the shape of Irish politics in the first century
AD
. And it accords with later models. Law tracts of the seventh and eighth centuries describe three classes of Irish king. A
ri
was the lowest and most common sort, one who ruled over a kindred descended from the same ancestor, often a name-father. In this, they resembled the much
later Highland clans of Scotland who usually adopted the form of, for example, MacLeod to show descent from Leod, the same name-father. The Irish kindreds may also have held ancestral lands as the clans did.