Scotland: The Story of a Nation

When I first read Tales of a Grandfather, what struck me most was that Scott completely passes over the Irish origin of the Scots; he makes it look as if the Scoti were indigenous people alongside the Picts from earliest times. To understand this attitude, we have to look at the period in which Scott is writing – the beginning of the nineteenth century. He grew up in the eighteenth century, when Catholicism was outlawed in the United Kingdom. There was a great anxiety about Catholicism in Britain and Ireland, and the period in which Scott was writing saw a powerful political movement demanding Catholic emancipation, which came in 1829, towards the end of Scott’s career as a writer. There was much anxiety, particularly in Ireland, about this upswelling of political fervour of a people who were ‘not like us’ – people who were not Protestants, people who still spoke Gaelic (which was totally alien to the ruling élites of both Scotland and England and, indeed, of Ireland). I think it was this linkage of Ireland with the threat of Popery which probably led Scott to feel somewhat ashamed of his Irish antecedents himself.

Ted Cowan agrees:

Walter Scott really fudged this whole issue of the Irish origins of the Scots: it did not particularly suit a Protestant Scot to make a big deal of the fact that the Scots came from Ireland, so he tended to play it down. But it is rather surprising because, in other contexts, Scott was very interested in Scottish myth and legend (and did a good deal himself to add to that myth and legend).

It is in line with his silence over the Irish connection that Sir Walter Scott makes no mention at all of Ted Cowan’s candidate for the first real king of the embryo realm of Scotland – Constantin II.

Constantin II

Constantin II was a remarkably long-lived king who was eventually to outlive his effectiveness. In his prime he fought against the vikings encroaching from the north and the west; but he was also determined to extend the boundaries of ‘Lesser Scotland’ southwards beyond the Forth – Clyde line. In 914, and again in 918, he made inconclusive forays as far south as Corbridge; but now the position in Northumbria was changing dramatically.

The old Anglian kingdom of Northumbria had been overwhelmed by the Norsemen, and King Alfred of Wessex (Alfred the Great) had been forced to partition England in 878, yielding to the Norsemen the huge swatch of east and north England which became known as the Danelaw. Alfred’s son (Edward the Elder of Wessex, r.899–924) and grandson (Athelstan, r.924–39) succeeded in turning the tide of Norse domination. By 920, Edward the Elder had won back all the Danelaw south of the Humber. The next target was York, and in 927 the vigorous young Athelstan expelled the Norsemen from their powerbase there and assumed the overlordship of Northumbria. Seven years later, in 934, Athelstan consolidated his position in the north of England with a sweeping invasion of Alba, backed by a fleet which harried the east coast as far north as Caithness.

The growing power of Wessex posed an obvious and alarming threat to the fledgling kingdom of Alba, which was also constantly menaced by the power of the Norse earls of Orkney and Shetland. In 937 Constantin II joined a Great Alliance of the Norsemen in Ireland and the Britons of Strathclyde for a pre-emptive strike against the West Saxons. Together they sailed and marched down to the Humber, a huge host, for a trial of strength with Athelstan. The two sides met at a place called Brunanburh, somewhere on Humberside, perhaps, in a ferocious battle which would be commemorated in contemporary poetry and folk memory as the bloodiest encounter yet fought on English soil:

Athelstan the king,

lord of earls

and ring-giver to men,

his brother beside him,

Edmund the Ætheling,

won undying glory

in furious battle

with the blades of their swords

at Brunanburh:

burst through the shield-wall,

hewed at the bucklers

with well-forged swords,

the sons of Edward …

FROM THE BATTLE OF BRUNANBURH,

IN THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE (937)

It was a decisive victory for Athelstan. Among the dead was one of Constantin’s sons. The defeat of all his hopes for his kingdom, and the death of his son, seem to have drained the spirit out of Constantin, and in 943 he abdicated and withdrew to monastic life in St Andrews. It was his successors who began to stem the seemingly irresistible Wessex advance. One of his sons, Indulph (r.954–62), managed to capture the formidable stronghold of Edinburgh and gain temporary control of Lothian. But it was not until the next century that the Scots, under the leadership of the forceful and ambitious Malcolm II (Mael Coluim mac Cinaeda, r.1005–34), finally succeeded in wresting control of the Lothians from Northumbria.

The decisive showdown occurred in 1018. Malcolm had already annexed the kingdom of Strathclyde and had shown his mettle with some merciless raids deep into Northumbria, including a siege of Durham on one occasion. The Northumbrians were outraged. They raised a huge army commanded by warrior prelates pledged to recover the Church lands (and revenues) of Lothian. Malcolm met them with his forces at Carham, just south of the Tweed. It was another fierce encounter, but this time the Scots won the day. Many of the English fell, including a score of Northumbrian nobles and eighteen leading churchmen.

One of the casualties on the Scottish side was Owain, who ruled Strathclyde as a vassal of the Scots. He was the last of his family line, and Malcolm now added the kingdom of Strathclyde (the Britons) to the Scottish realm.

(#ulink_dcecb5cc-7cc0-58f9-b430-305a97fccd3c)

The significance of the Battle of Carham in 1018 was only to emerge later. It was the last battle for Scottish control of the Lothians. Carham marked the first firm delineation of a settled frontier between Scots and English along the line of the River Tweed; but it would be a very long time before this line was to emerge as an accepted final boundary. With the hindsight of history, we can see Carham as a real watershed in the evolution of the shape of ‘Scotland’ as we know it today.

What happened to the Picts?

The Scots and the Picts, after they had been driven back behind the Roman wall, quarrelled and fought between themselves; and at last, after a great many battles, the Scots got completely the better of the Picts. The common people say that the Scots destroyed them entirely; but I think it is not likely that they could kill such great numbers of people.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER I

The fate of the Picts has become the great enigma, the great puzzle of Scottish history; and as a result they are probably the most written about of all the Dark Age peoples, simply because they apparently disappeared, and disappeared very suddenly. Scholars used to write darkly of a terrible chapter of genocide.

It is now accepted that there was no wholesale massacre or enslavement of the people known as the Picts; they simply ceased to exist in the historical record as a separate political and ethnic entity. The old Pictish language was swamped by the Gaelic of the Scots, all the Pictish written records perished over time, and the use of the characteristic Pictish symbols on monumental sculptured stones fell into disuse. It was a question of assimilation, of integration, not the kind of ‘ethnic cleansing’ which is such a horrid aspect of some conflicts of modern times.

Ted Cowan has a typically robust attitude to the so-called ‘Problem of the Picts’:

By Page Three of almost any one-volume History of Scotland, the Picts disappear. And it always used to amaze me that nobody asked what on earth happened to them. After all, we are talking about three-quarters of the population of north Britain.

In fact, the Picts did not disappear on Page Three. There must have been intermarriage between the Picts and the Scots, there must have been a process of assimilation through the Church and through the common medium of Latin. And this, to my mind, explains the demise of the Picts, their language and their culture better than anything else. What they did leave behind was the magnificent and unique legacy of their sculptured stones.

There is no better introduction to the exquisite and enigmatic art of the Pictish sculptured stones than the little museum at Meigle, just off the arterial A93 trunk-road near Blairgowrie. The museum is a converted schoolhouse which now contains a marvellous collection of twenty-seven locally-carved stones dating from the ninth and tenth centuries: prayer crosses, symbol stones, sculpted cross-slabs with hunting scenes, animal stones, public war-memorials and personal tombstones. Most of them are decorated with the enigmatic shapes and symbols which no one has yet been able to decipher satisfactorily.

One of the last testimonials of the Picts is the majestic sculptured red sandstone monolith known as ‘Sueno’s Stone’, which stands six metres tall at the eastern edge of the town of Forres, on the Moray Firth, in the heartland of the ancient Pictish kingdom.

‘Sueno’s Stone’ was another of the great problems which the Ancient Monuments Board for Scotland had to tackle in the 1980s. It is a magnificent piece of statuary, with a wealth of intricate carving (pictorial as well as stylised) on all four of its faces. The front bears a relief carving of a great ring-headed cross whose shaft is filled with interlace spiral knotwork; the reverse side depicts an immense battle scene in four panels of unequal length. It is an extraordinarily vivid and complex sculptural gallery: the top panel presents the leader and his guard arriving on horseback for the battle. The great central panel shows ranks of warriors fighting on foot, then rows of the decapitated bodies of prisoners (their hands still tied) and the executioner holding a severed head, while the enemy flee in disorder. The third panel shows another pile of ruthlessly beheaded corpses and severed heads, while the fourth, partially obscured by the modern base, shows the dispersal of the vanquished army.

By the 1980s it was becoming increasingly difficult to make out the images on the stone (for instance, the heaps of severed heads were barely discernible to the naked eye without recourse to earlier sketches of the stone). Modern atmospheric pollution was creating galloping erosion, which was eating away at the vulnerable sandstone and blurring the detail of the sculptor’s art. Something Had To Be Done: Sueno’s Stone either had to be moved into safe housing (the Old Tolbooth at Forres?) or given a protective covering in situ. The need for a decision was made urgent by plans to alter the line of the A96 from Inverness to bypass the town of Forres: the new road was going to run just a few metres to the north of Sueno’s Stone.

It was not an easy decision. The stone had been discovered, fallen and buried under peat, in 1726, and re-erected in its present position on a new circular pedestal. It had become a prominent part of the landscape of Moray.

Eventually, after much heart-searching, the decision was made to leave the stone where it was, and to give it its own protective canopy of reinforced glass and steel – a bit like Snow White in the Disney film (although no prince was expected to come to the rescue). The glass case was erected in 1992, complete with immaculate landscaping, useful interpretive panels and all the technological gizmos needed to provide an environment which would ensure Snow White’s survival. Not everyone liked it – it looks incongruous at first glance – but it grows on you. The glass case makes photography difficult, but Historic Scotland is happy to accommodate anyone with a special interest.

Sueno’s Stone is clearly a memorial to some momentous encounter, but there is no ‘label’ on the stone, and there has been endless speculation about the conflict it was set up to commemorate. The stone cannot be dated, on stylistic grounds, more precisely than the end of the Pictish period (ninth or tenth century); it has none of the characteristic Pictish symbols on it, which suggests that the Pictish sculptors were then working for new masters. The spurious name ‘Sueno’ was an antiquarian invention of the eighteenth century, referring to some viking leader with the generic name of ‘Svein’, and cannot give any clue to the battle depicted on the stone. But to me it seems not unlikely that Sueno’s Stone does, indeed, celebrate a real battle, probably some momentous victory against the Picts’ and Scots’ most formidable adversaries, the vikings. According to the Annals of Ulster there was just such a battle in the year 909, when the ‘men of Alba’ (Albanaich), fighting under their miracle-working standard, the crozier of St Columba, won the day. That date falls within the early years of the reign of Ted Cowan’s favourite early king of Scotland, Constantin II, and the battle seems to have led to a treaty whereby the Norsemen were confirmed in their control of Caithness in exchange for a promise to leave the rest of Alba alone.

Academic speculation about the provenance of the stone and the battle it was designed to commemorate will doubtless continue. Whatever the truth of it, I like to think that Sueno’s Stone is the last recorded signature of the people who left their mark on history by carving it on stone.

1 (#ulink_e18d72fe-7304-52e0-8733-eda9442b752e) The idea that the Picts painted or tattooed their bodies is older than the reference to Picti in AD 297 by the the poet Eumenius. Herodian of Syria, who wrote (in Greek) a history of the Roman emperors from AD 180 to 238, said of the Picts: ‘They tattoo their bodies not only with likenesses of animals of all kinds, but with all sorts of drawings.’

1 (#ulink_ff351a16-aa57-5c94-9d38-f1c314df6403) I am indebted to Graeme Cruickshank, director of Edinburgh Historical Enterprises, for an enlightening guided tour of the presumed battle-site and its environs; it was due to his dedicated and scholarly researches that the true significance of the Battle of Dunnichen began to be acknowledged.

1 (#ulink_21aa7c80-e063-5feb-bfd4-f7a14b3d492c) For safety’s sake, the Aberlemno stone in Aberlemno churchyard is covered in winter by stout wooden crating to protect it from bad-weather erosion. A faithful fibre-resin cast of the stone is now in the Museum of Scotland; it was formerly on display in the Meffan Museum in Forfar.

1 (#ulink_7fee3a51-e747-559f-a5a1-8c9cab306897) The traditional version of an Irish colonisation of Argyll is no longer accepted as uncritically as before: scholars like Ewen Campbell, lecturer in archaeology at Glasgow University, point to the lack of archaeological corroboration of any migration of ideas or artefacts from Ireland to the western mainland of Scotland. Dr Campbell argues that the evidence all points the other way – that there was no change in the population in Argyll and that there was considerable influence in the opposite direction.

2 (#ulink_8dbd9f95-0bf7-5172-b79a-7974cc8b81b4) Kilmartin House won the 1998 Scottish Museum of the Year Award and the 1998 Gulbenkian Prize for Museums and Galleries. Kilmartin Glen contains one of the richest assemblages of prehistoric ritual and ceremonial monuments in Scotland: more than 150 sites within six miles of the village of Kilmartin; an extraordinary collection of cup-and-ring rock carvings; a unique linear cemetery of Neolithic and Bronze Age burial cairns; a fine stone circle at Temple Wood and dozens of other ancient stone monuments, dating back almost to the start of human habitation in Scotland. Kilmartin House, which was opened in 1997, provides a focal point for pilgrims who want to visit the sites, and also houses a research centre for archaeology and landscape interpretation.

1 (#ulink_db26d0b5-9ced-54b8-b87b-11ab58da72e1) The footprint into which visitors place their feet is not quite the original one. In 1979, when erosion and increasing wear and tear were beginning to cause damage to the carvings, an exact mould was made up of reconstituted crushed stone, which matched the texture and colouring of the original in every detail; this replica ‘cap’, weighing more than fifteen hundredweight, was helicoptered in by the RAF in 1979 and then manhandled into place to fit snugly and unobtrusively over the stone slab.