Chapter 1: Survival on the Periphery

It is a country strong by nature, and difficult and toilsome of access.
John of Fordun, 13801

In 1911 the polymath W.J. Sollas (1849-1936), in a book entitled Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives, made a pioneering attempt to draw parallels between recent primitive societies and the prehistoric world revealed by archaeology. This approach has never lost favour and over the past century anthropologist have looked at primitive tribes in almost every part of the world, in the hope of uncovering the secrets of their own origins. For most of this time they have neglected the most relevant of all primitive cultures and one both closer to hand: the Gaelic culture of the Scottish Highlands. It is extinct - 1750 is a suitable cut-off point but in archaeological terms this is too recent to be of any interest. Archaeology barely acknowledges its existence, being geared to farmers, and particularly to farmers who built elaborate tombs and used pots.

Of people like the vanishing Gaels, Stuart Piggott wrote that ‘the nature of the evidence has forced archaeology, and especially the archaeology of non-literate peoples, into taking a position which … is essentially inter-disciplinary.’2 This study of the non-literate people of Highland Scotland is rather extra-disciplinary, as it makes its own way through a territory largely neglected by conventional historians and practically invisible to archaeologists or to any other academic discipline.

As my surname marks my Highland origins I may be accused of partiality, parochialism or worse when I claim a critical importance for my ancestral culture, and when I take too many examples from my tribal area, but it is perhaps not surprising that a neglected aspect of Highland prehistory should be identified by a writer with a long-standing and wide-ranging interest in the history and prehistory of Highland Scotland. The information about the Gaelic culture of Scotland that she was able to find is admittedly scrappy, lost in the cracks between history, archaeology, ethnography and linguistics. But a coherent story can nevertheless be reconstructed.

In fact the Scottish evidence occupies a key position in any attempt to understand the European Mesolithic. The Mesolithic, in turn, occupies a key position in any attempt to understand European prehistory. Those who settled the recently ice-free areas of northern Europe eight or ten thousand years ago were not homeless stragglers surviving against the odds in a marginal environment but the heirs of a society that had survived in Europe for forty thousand years, including a major glaciation, when circumstances were very trying.

The movement north, and the eventual settlement which took place as the glaciers retreated throws light on an earlier period because the shared inheritance of the Mesolithic tribes of Europe is something they brought with them from the Palaeolithic. As Grahame Clark put it, 'the social capital of the communities occupying the north European plain and its Scandinavian projections during early Post-glacial times derived to a significant degree from Advanced Palaeolithic sources, many of them thousands of years old.’3 This applied to much more than social capital. Britain at this time was still part of the north European plain and foot traffic between Scotland and northern Germany is shown by the typical tanged points thrown away by reindeer herders on the move. We may assume, whether or not there is archaeological evidence for any of these items, that the conical tents, sledges, hurdles and hide cauldrons which are found in various dispersed northern societies were already in use in Europe in the Upper Palaeolithic.

The Mesolithic shaped the pattern of settlement in Europe and created much of the framework that still constrains our lives – its regional identities, settlement patterns, economic preferences and social structures. In turn these initiatives, which can be traced to the Mesolithic, and in some cases to an earlier period, anticipate the more visible changes of the Neolithic. In passing, I might mention that current attempts to use DNA analysis to define the origins of the European population is causing unnecessary confusion. Burial, which provides the bones for these analyses, was an imported rite, and the bones analysed are apparently also those of recent immigrants from somewhere in the Middle East. This discrepancy is particularly evident in Scotland where the natives did not bury their dead but (probably) exposed them and burnt the bones. The Mesolithic hunters of Europe did likewise. Current research has a hidden Indo-European agenda, hidden as well as an elephant might hide in a library.

Since it contradicts this theory, there will no doubt be resistance to the idea that the culture of the Highlanders of Scotland until recently retained many essentially Mesolithic features. In many cases they are probably Palaeolithic features but to describe them as Mesolithic is only to attach the most appropriate label to ascertainable facts. The idea of Mesolithic (or Palaeolithic) survival rests on the probability that in Highland Scotland there was continuity of population from the first settlement until the Clearances, a concept which is increasingly acceptable, if not yet a self-evident assumption. Archaeologists once believed that changes in prehistory were due to a series of major invasions but this dogma has given way to a more informed view which accepts the arrival of a limited number of influential migrants and their subsequent absorption by an established native population.4 The documentary evidence for proto-historic invasion is also under scrutiny and most historians would now accept that early historical sources are, at best, a historical myth. Studies of human genetics are still embroiled in a dating scheme based on historical myth but in their saner moments also show substantial continuity in the population of Europe from the time of settlement until the present.

Why should we anticipate the survival of archaic traits in Highland Scotland? One reason is the remoteness of this area, at the northern extremity of Britain, an island isolated from Europe for eight thousand years. Other reasons are its northern climate, mountainous topography, and lack of arable land. There is nowhere to plant cereals and those that are planted very often do not ripen. Few parts of Scotland are low or flat but when one moves north of a line running north-east from Dumbarton to Stonehaven, the land becomes crowded with mountains of a rocky individuality, separated by deep, narrow valleys which often contain long, deep lochs. There is good pasture and practically no other natural resources except peat. Communications within the Highlands are now seen to be difficult, but the natives were able to walk up steep slopes as rapidly as other men could walk on the flat. That this was not exaggeration is shown by marches of sixty miles a day achieved during the civil wars in the seventeenth century. More pragmatically they used water transport wherever possible.

Latitude, topography and climate play major roles in this story. Scottish mountains are seldom more than 1000m high but they are quite far north and so much colder and wilder than their height would suggest. Aberdeen is further north than Moscow. They have no tree cover, thin soil, and a rainfall that reaches 2500 mm a year in parts of the West Coast. The western Highlands have a relatively mild climate but there is little land suitable for growing oats and barley and even less where the climate reliably allows them to ripen. What grows particularly well is grass, which favours herding, and forest, which favours hunting.

All Scots come from the same racial and linguistic stock. Scotland was entirely Gaelic speaking as recently as the fifteenth or sixteenth century, much more recently than most people might imagine. But from the eleventh century a distinction grew between Highland Scots and Lowland Scots. The feudal system, orthodox Christianity, cereal farming and the use of English spread through the more favoured areas of Lowland Scotland. The Highlanders, in their hills, came to be distinguished from the evolved ‘house-holding’ Scots by two linked features: their persistent use of the Gaelic language, and their wild and heathen way of life. As the Gaelic natives remained consistently and stubbornly illiterate, it is to churchmen from Ireland and England that we owe what is regarded as the early history of Scotland.

The silence of the Gaels, not surprisingly, led to a bias in the record and its interpretation. If the ideas presented in the following chapters have any novelty, this is largely because they reject these long-standing preconceptions. One peculiar but persistent feature of Scotland’s traditional history is that, according to early pseudo-history, the Gaelic language and the Gaelic people came to Scotland from Ireland as recently as the sixth century AD. According to the Irish Invasion theory, Irish immigrants either replaced the native Picts of Scotland or, even less probably, persuaded the population of Scotland to speak a different language and to change all their place-names at some time in the Dark Ages (an out-dated term closely applicable to this approach). The champion of this theory was William Watson, who placed his reliance on place-names. Even he had to accept that his prime candidates for Pictish as a non-Gaelic language, the Aber and Pit settlement names, were coined by Gaelic-speakers. But any survey of the relevant shelves in a Scottish reference library will confirm that Celtic studies focus on the literature and language of Ireland, that study of the native culture of Scotland is under-funded and marginalised, and that there is a great gap at the beginning of Scottish history which separates the recent Gaelic-speaking population from the prehistoric ‘Picts’. No-one has ever been able to work out who the Picts were, if not the natives of prehistoric Scotland, and they and their language(s) have been left for the past half-century as an insoluble mystery.5 Consequently, even the most patriotic of the Scottish Gaels have felt that the only relevant field of Gaelic study is in Ireland.

To make any progress, two long-established but unproven theories have to go. I will explain in due course why they must go, what the flaw is. On the large scale is the Indo-European theory and on a lesser but, for our purposes, more significant scale is Watson's Irish Invasion theory. According to Watson, who expounded his thesis in The Celtic Place-Names of Scotland (1926), the Picts spoke a P-Celtic language akin to Welsh. There are many objections to this idea not the least being that its origins lie in the unproven abstractions and prejudices of nineteenth-century historical and linguistic studies and not in an objective assessment of Gaelic traditions, settlement patterns, way of life, or language. Its standards of proof are those of the nineteenth century, when a theory was adopted and evidence was found which supportd it. Watson, like Meyer and others, was inspired by Irish pseudo-history, but we have come to see that this is a very unreliable source of historical fact.

However academics have recently begun to challenge the Irish Invasion version of Gaelic origins and have opened the door to the major changes needed to make sense of our view of Scottish origins. Many accepted ideas must still be revised but it has now been established that there is no evidence for an Irish invasion, and that no probability that a new people speaking a new language came into Scotland from Ireland in the Dark Ages.6 We are now at last free to define Gaelic as the native language of Scotland, distinct from the related but not identical Irish as the native language of Ireland.

The invisible invasion

Archaeologists have searched for many years for signs of the proposed Irish conquest of Scotland, but have drawn a complete blank 'There had never been any serious archaeological justification for the supposed Scottish [Irish] migration’7. It is clear that the Dark Age cultures of northern Ireland and south-west Scotland are quite different. Even signs of normal neighbourly contact are limited so far to one Irish dress pin found in Argyll.8 Ewan Campbell now proposes that the 'Scots' were not Irish but natives, that Dalriada was not an Irish settlement but an evolved Scottish kingdom, and, perhaps most importantly, that the Gaelic language spoken in Argyll was not brought in from Ireland by an invisible and improbable invasion but had always been spoken there. This paves the way for a long-overdue revision of the current view of Scottish origins, with wide-ranging consequences.

In a parallel study, the Scottish historian Dauvit Broun has looked afresh at the Irish origins claimed for the Scottish realm, and now proposes, also reasonably, that, like most medieval writings of the type, it is not true history but an influential political myth created at a much later period.9 The probable purpose – and certain achievement – of this historical myth was to disconnect Scottish rulers from their true ancestors, the wild and heathen Picts, by providing them with a respectable Christian ancestry. In fact these invented Irish ancestors are no more historical than those created with similar ingenuity by other learned clerics for other families with political aspirations, such as the Campbells, who at a later time claimed an equally fashionable and equally spurious Norman pedigree.10. The Campbells’ Highland neighbours, including the MacGregors, MacDiarmids, McNaughtons, Robertsons, MacNabs, MacPhees and MacKinnons, who had more modest ambitions, continued to claim throughout that they descended from the original settlers, had always lived in the same place, and had always spoken Gaelic. James Robertson of Lude in Atholl ridiculed these idiotic ideas: that the Pictish Gael should be ‘looked upon as quite an unknown people’ whose mysterious disappearance, with the destruction of their language, was, according to him, ‘the greatest marvel of its kind that ever passed for truth’. Living as he did in Atholl, a stronghold of the Picts and their culture, and a descendant of Pictish Gaels, he was well placed to know.11 When Perthshire Gaels looked west to Argyll, they saw not an Irish kingdom founded by immigrants speaking a foreign language but the Iargael or Western Gaels, such as the MacPhees and MacKinnons, who were their own kindred. Despite their evident relevance to the 'Irish' debate, the natives of the Highlands were not invited to take part.

So why Scotland?

The radical change of population and language implied by the Irish Invasion theory is not only without foundation but contradicts the principle of peripheral conservatism. In other words, remote country areas are 'old-fashioned' in their material culture, social life and language compared with large towns. W.D. Simpson found this effect in Scottish archaeology where, ‘in a peripheral area, and especially in a Highland area, older racial stocks and cultural patterns tend to absorb, rather than to be obliterated by, newer cultural permeations or immigrant movements. Thus the material relics of such ancient cultures come to be preserved more perfectly than in more central areas where such cultures were absorbed or superseded, and in due course altogether obliterated in times much more remote’.12

There are many factors which contribute to the disparity between an innovating centre and its conservative periphery. The centre will have better communications. It is generally sited where climate and soil are conducive to agriculture, which in turn allows a higher density of population which controls more of the national wealth. The centre is where imported novelties including new religions, literacy and schemes of central government first establish themselves and only slowly, if at all, spread into the remoter areas of the hinterland. Highland Scotland is in all these ways peripheral to Lowland Scotland and, for that matter, to England and the Continent.

Common-sense suggests that a race of deer-hunters and cattle-herders living in a remote mountainous region with difficult internal communications, isolated at the northern end of a long island which is itself isolated from other countries, whose lands are unsuited to cereal growing, and who have little or no contact with the outside world over a period of eight thousand years except by rowing boat, are likely to have been very old-fashioned indeed. The most active influence was probably topography. The equally remote but more favoured islands of Orkney show significant immigrant input in their ancient monuments and in their early adoption of agriculture. But much of the Highland area and most of the offshore islands might have been designed as a long-term experiment in the survival of archaic social and cultural features. Resistance to change is shown by several episodes which suggest carefully-managed self-sufficiency. A sign of this is the very slight material evidence of interaction between native and Roman in Scotland, compared with other areas which bordered the Roman Empire which, in Highland Scotland, suggess an active resistance to contact. ‘Even the Roman presence in its fullest form in the first century AD did not involve occupation extending to half Scotland’s land mass.’13

The rule of peripheral archaism is general. In terms that could describe parts of Scotland in the eighteenth century Caesar wrote in 55 BC that ‘The interior of Britain is inhabited by people who claim, on the strength of an oral tradition, to be aboriginal … Most of the tribes in the interior do not grow grain but live on milk and meat, and clothe themselves in animal skins’.14 In passing we might notice that these British aborigines also practised polyandry, a system of inheritance in which the eldest daughter inherits the land and marries all the brothers of another family. It is a method of controlling population by passing property undivided through the female line and is also found in the Himalayas. The Picts are said to have been matrilineal, which is up to a point the same thing. This scattered distribution is typical of a once-universal trait surviving on the periphery.

Dio described the Maeatae and Caledonii of Scotland in very similar terms: in contrast to tribes in contact with the Continent, these people lived in rough shelters, and went naked and without shoes, ‘having neither walls nor towns nor tilth, but living by pasturage and the chase, and on certain kinds of nuts’. He adds that they did not eat fish ‘though their waters teemed with them’, a point that we will come back to.15

As suggested above, we can extend the Dalriadan argument to cover the rest of Scotland. Ewan Campbell deduces native Gaelic in Argyll but provides a map which shows a tentative extension of native Gaelic into the rest of the Highlands.16 This is logical. There is no sign of Irish settlement anywhere in the Highlands, so the Gaelic spoken in the rest of the Highlands did not come from Ireland either, despite lingering pseudo-historical ideas which historians will have to deal with in due course. However there is more, for, as we will see, Gaelic did not always stop at the Highland Line but was once spoken throughout the rest of Scotland, from Caithness to Galloway, including all the territories associated with the Picts. We can now resolve the question of the Picts and their language. ‘Pict’ is merely a nick-name applied to a native of Scotland, a name like Caledonian, Highlander, or Scot. Their name for themselves was Albannach and their language was Gaelic, not a form of P-Celtic. As for the small argument about Columba sometimes using interpreters, it would not be surprising if ‘Pictish’ or Lowland Gaelic were markedly different from Irish, for even within Scotland there dialects of Gaelic which were mutually unintelligible. Anthony Dilworth met a married couple, one from Perthshire and the other from Sutherland, who always used English when speaking to each other, since they could not understand each other’s Gaelic.17.

Everything that follows is based on the logical assumption, that the native language of Scotland was always Gaelic, or a range of Gaelic dialect. When Gaelic is put back into its proper place in Scotland it becomes evident that its Gaelic speakers were descended from those who settled Scotland in the Mesolithic. We must reject the P-Celtic ‘Pictish’ theory, referred to above. The P-Celtic proposal and all its corollaries are now redundant since there was no Irish invasion. Insofar as P-Celtic has any validity as a definition, it is again restricted to Welsh, Cornish and Breton.

The problems which have blocked any progress in the study of Scottish prehistory can be traced to The History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland (CPNS) by W.J. Watson, published in 1926. This is still the main source for what happened in the Dark Ages (properly so called in the case of the Gaels). Watson was a considerable scholar but all his arguments or strands of evidence have been refuted, albeit in piecemeal fashion and over a long period. A primary objection is that he relied on Irish pseudo-history as a source of historical fact. It is now recognised that this type of early writing, typified by Nennius’ History of Britain,is unreliable as a source for real-life speculation. It consists of a great deal of allegory and fanciful speculation but does not contain a single reliable historical fact. But Watson’s main reference, a statement of belief, is taken from Nennius: "I would hold with the Irish Nennius that 'the Britons at first filled the whole island with their children, from the sea of Icht to the sea of Orcs.'"18 What this statement might have meant to the monk who composed it is beyond conjecture. Likewise, Watson’s archaeological evidence has crumbled. He believed that the circular forts of northern Perthshire were Irish military installations, but excavation suggests they were domestic cattle pens.19 He also found what he regarded as Irish and Welsh elements in Scottish place-names, but all the Celtic languages of the British Isles have common elements. Moreover place-names, even Gaelic place-names, are a palimspet and capable of many different interpretations. Scotland is notably diverse and one would expect to find regional variation in its place-name language, as Dilworth found in the spoken language.

But the most serious objection to CPNS, which overrides all the rest, is that Watson’s method is logically flawed. He constructed his theory from partial evidence, and then collected other bits and pieces of evidence which appeared to support it. The theory-driven method was not unusual in his day and is still not totally extinct in certain subjects but it has a fatal effect on the validity of the argument which allows us to dismiss such a work without further discussion. Like much else in historical linguistics, Watson's P-Celtic proposal was not founded on fact; it was not derived from a balanced assessment of all the evidence but was created to fit an existing and equally ill-founded belief: that Gaelic was introduced into Scotland from Ireland and spread by the agency of Irish missionaries. This is partly wishful thinking and partly a mistaken emphasis caused by the absence of literacy in Scotland. Having created this imaginary scheme, Watson then searched for facts which appeared to support it. It is typical of this kind of theory-driven approach that conflicting evidence is ignored as irrelevant. A thesis constructed with such partiality can be very persuasive, as it admits no contradictory evidence, but it is unlikely to be correct and is certainly not proven.20 Even if we overlook the disappearing evidence and the methodological flaw, the evidence does not support a massive Irish presence anywhere in Scotland in the early Middle Ages. CPNS must be put to one side, to be used, with caution, as a quarry for early forms.

This has not yet happened. Watson’s stature in his day was so considerable that the existence of P-Celtic ‘Pictish’ and the corollary of the Irish invasion have survived the vanishing evidence and are still regarded as proven facts. It will take some time for it to be generally accepted that the Picts spoke Gaelic but the following chapters provide their own evidence for an archaic and entirely Gaelic culture which was not Irish and which survived in Scotland over an immense period of time.

But when we dismiss the Irish invasion as a historical figment, a great deal immediately falls into place and a great deal more becomes possible. We can now look for the roots of Gaelic society in the most obvious place: Scottish prehistory. We can assume that the structures of the Pictish state did not vanish in the ninth century, to be replaced by exactly cognate structures of unknown origin. We can assume that the Gaelic place-names of Scotland may provide clues to elements of the first settlement in the Mesolithic.

To end our introduction on a different note, let us reflect on the well-known fact that many people in northern Europe like to go for walks. They dress in special clothing, carry food and emergency equipment, drive into the country, park their cars, and walk for miles over the wildest country they can find, often in groups. They do not saunter or stroll but perform this ritual with purpose. They do not walk to see or to do anything in particular but simply because they enjoy walking in the fresh air, often up a hill. Afterwards they may measure the distance achieved on a map and feel proud of it. They never consider that walking without going somewhere for a defined reason is a curious thing to do but in most parts of the world it appears to be unknown. In overcrowded hot cities, families may stroll around the streets in the cool of the evening, and very poor people may walk for many miles because they cannot afford to pay for transport, but these are quite different activities. ‘Going for a walk’ serves no useful purpose. Nor is it the only irrational outdoor activity practised by northern Europeans. They also like to go for picnics. They tend grass which no animal ever eats, gather wild berries, nuts and mushrooms, they fish, they enjoy camping, and may have a cabin or caravan in the woods or in the mountains for weekends or holidays. Many of them keep terriers and retrievers as pets, prefer a house with a view, and light bonfires and set off fireworks on festive occasions. Hill-walking and camping are outdoor leisure pursuits which are catered for by specialist stores and organised by official bodies.

It takes a rare outsider to see that there is something odd in this. The American writer, Bill Bryson, became an enthusiastic hill-walker when he lived in England but was still enough of an outsider to see that this was a very odd activity: ‘As ever, I was quietly astounded to find that so many people had been seized with the notion that struggling up a mountain on a damp Saturday on the winter end of October was fun… I counted thirty-three people ahead of us, huddled among the fog-whitened boulders with sandwiches, flasks and madly fluttering maps, and tried to imagine how I would explain this to a foreign onlooker – the idea of three dozen English people having a picnic on a mountain top in an ice storm. – and realised that there was no way to explain it’.21

Maybe we are getting closer to an answer.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License