FIFTEEN

Beyond the Circle
of Firelight

KELPING IS A NEAR-FORGOTTEN INDUSTRY. Journalists attempting to add some colour and context to the unexpected war for the Falkland Islands in 1982 referred to the islanders as ‘the kelpers’. They worked at an industrial process involving the gathering and treatment of seaweed and the extraction of chemicals from it. It seemed a suitably bleak and windswept business for the place described by the American Secretary of State, General Haig, as a pile of rocks in the South Atlantic.

The passing mention of kelping stirred bitter memories elsewhere. Between 1780 and 1820 Scottish and Irish Gaels were driven off their land and forced to live on the seashore – the more rocky and barren the better – so that landlords could press them into labouring at the lucrative business of kelping. After the defeat in 1746 at Culloden, many Highland landlords began to replace crofting clansmen with na caoraich mora, ‘the big sheep’. These were Cheviots and Blackfaces, and huge herds of them, sometimes accompanied by Border shepherds, were introduced over a short period. The Highlanders hated na caoraich mora because they could easily see how much more money and how much less trouble they would make for the landlords. 1792 was known as Am Bliadhna na Caoraich, the Year of the Sheep, and as shepherds hefted their flocks to the Highland hills, some were attacked by groups of crofters. This made little or no difference: by 1800 there were 50,000 head of sheep in Inverness-shire alone, and by 1850, 600,000.

Landlords began to clear large numbers of their tenants off the land, and while the Cheviots and Blackface were herded up the fertile glens, the people were herded down to the infertile seashore. Kelp was promised as their salvation. While new houses were built on the coast and earth was brought down in baskets to establish beds in the machair and scrubland for growing potatoes and whatever else would survive in the wind, the gathering and processing of seaweed became a primitive but highly profitable business for landlords.

Kelp, or brown seaweed, contains several valuable chemicals such as sodium, potassium and magnesium, which were essential for the manufacture of glass, soap and other products. When European supplies of these chemicals were cut off by the Napoleonic Wars, the price of kelp rocketed to £22 a ton, and the pace of clearance in the Highland glens quickened.

The process of making kelp was simple but harsh. The best seaweed was known as red wrack, sometimes also called yellow, black and prickly tang. Collecting started in mid-November, when it was hoped that winter gales had loosened large quantities and driven it ashore onto the beaches. When the wrack was still attached to the rocks by its holdfasts, collectors had to wade out into the freezing water and cut it, sawing with toothed sickles, sometimes working with their hands under water for long periods. Gathered seaweed was dried on raised wooden steethes, and then it was burned. Kelp kilns were dug in the machair, or in the sandy scrub above the high-water mark and they were usually coffin-shaped ditches measuring 5 by 3 by 2½ feet deep: 24 tons of seaweed was needed to make 1 ton of ash. The fires burned for a long time and then had to be left for weeks before the lumps of chemical-rich ash could safely be lifted out. It was an exhausting and poorly paid business for the displaced crofters but very lucrative for the landlords. In the peak years of production between 15,000 and 20,000 tons of kelp left the Highlands at the end of the collecting season.

When the European wars concluded and normal trading conditions resumed, the price of processed kelp fell dramatically and the final clearance of people from the land entirely began to gather pace. Many families fled south to the cities of central Scotland, and, being nearest to the Highlands, Glasgow was a favoured destination. Urban folklore still remembers the arrival of the impoverished crofters, and the railway bridge over one of the main streets is called ‘the Hielandman’s Umbrella’. For those who wanted to go further, some landlords provided assistance with a passage across the Atlantic, but others were utterly ruthless. Gordon of Cluny wanted to sell Barra to the government as a convict island and he drove 1,500 people off his land, whipping them onto the boats. When crofters from Lewis boarded too slowly on one ship, advice was sent on to the next point of embarkation ‘to push them on without their luggage’. Even when what seemed like a safe passage to North America had been found, the crossing could be appalling. This extract is from the journal of one of a group of crofters cleared off the estates of the Duke of Sutherland:

The old and the children could not stand the hardship of the voyage, every day one of more of our group was buried at sea. After tossing on the Atlantic for eleven weeks we came to the coast of Canada. Each day we had to pay for our food and as some of us had some money left, the Captain cruised up and down for three weeks before landing us penniless on the Canadian shore. We were taken by bullock wagon to Toronto. There we stayed in sheds put up for the emigrants. Smallpox was raging and carried off many who had survived the voyage. Then we were given an Indian guide, a sack of maize-meal, a sack of seed potatoes and a plough. We marched a hundred miles and were left in the middle of a forest to make our homes. We had to burn down the trees before we could plant the potatoes. For six months we had nothing to eat but maize-meal and water.

In the nineteenth century Celtic Britain lost enormous numbers of her people. The statistics are worth listing: 8 million left Ireland between 1801 and 1921; 18.5 million left Scotland between 1814 and 1914; many Manxmen and Welshmen left through Liverpool where, between 1815 and 1914,15 million people from Britain and Northern Europe sailed to the USA and Canada. Only in Wales were matters different. The huge human needs of the rapid industrialization of the southern valleys meant that the population there more than doubled between 1801 and 1901, and it was second only to the USA as a destination for immigrants.

It is surprising that, even though there were no assisted passages, no protection from the British Empire and its colonial administration and initially many fewer Scots, Irish, Cornish or Manx communities to welcome them, an overwhelming majority preferred to go to the USA. Of the 18.5 million who left Scotland in the nineteenth century, 13 million went to America and most of the 8 million from Ireland did the same. The USA was the Land of the Free, and a place where the Celts of Britain could at last escape the domination of the English.

However, it is fruitless to believe that Celtic Britain is somehow living in exile in America and part of the cause of that country’s immense flowering. The St Patrick’s Day parades and the Highland Games at Grandfather Mountain are days out of place and time, and an opportunity to remember something whose roots have long since shrivelled. Those who left the Irish and Hebridean shore tended not to take much of their Gaelic culture with them to the New World. They were not inward-looking refugees. These men and women suffered privation, took brave decisions and risked everything not to become expatriates but to become Americans. For many Irish and British Celts the future lay not in hanging on to what little they had, but in helping to invent a new country. For many ‘the dream of things’ became an American dream, and what was left behind became mostly figments of wish-fulfilment and cliché: emerald and tartan lands lost in a mist of tragedy and heroes, quaintness and ‘customs’, big names, genealogical societies and little ruins by the seashore.

Confusingly, the reality of Celtic Britain does in fact contain all of those elements, and rather than straightforwardly segregating myth and history, this journey between Stornoway and Penzance has tried to avoid the summary dismissal of cliché and has attempted to understand what lies behind it. The best antidote to conventional ‘wisdom’ has been the business of travelling to places in Celtic Britain, and being open to what could be found or experienced there.

At Maughold Head, on the easternmost tip of the Isle of Man, there is a beautiful little church much loved by the villagers who live around it. The mountain of North Barrule sweeps up behind it, massive and stately, giving scale and casting a mighty shadow. Inside the church stands a medieval sandstone cross, powdery with age, showing the earliest example of the triskelon, the three-legged emblem of Man, while outside, sheltered by a dusty porch, are dozens of ancient stones. Some are complete Manx cross-slabs, while others are only fragments and the oldest, perhaps 1,500 years old, is an uncut stone with a simple cross scored on it. The churchyard rises up gently behind the church, towards the cliffs of Maughold Head, and in the far corner, hard by the retaining dry-stone wall, are the remains of an old Manx keeil. Only two or three courses of split slate stone mark out a small rectangle in the grass between the rows of modern headstones. The same word as the Irish place-name prefix kil, deriving from the Latin celia for a ‘small room’ or ‘cell’, keeil is the Manx Gaelic word for the earliest Christian churches on the island. Traces of hundreds of them can be seen almost everywhere. Against the corner of the keeil is an old well shaft with an iron grill bolted over it. Peering through the darkness, it is possible to see the glint of a few silver coins in the water at the bottom.

In the late evening the high summer sun makes Maughold churchyard glow in a warm yellow light, and across the broad bay below the headland the sea shimmers. But as soon as the bottom part of the sun dips below the horizon, the effect is startlingly immediate. As the yellow light departs the ground and climbs up the walls of the church, a grey-green gloaming rises behind it. On the bay the shadows begin racing seawards, and the glowering mass of North Barrule looms over the water. Maughold churchyard quickly becomes a place of shadows, and what was vibrant grows cold and lifeless. The outline of the keeil melts into the ground and the carving on the crosses in the porch needs fingers and hands to make it out.

Telling the stories of the losers in the War for Britain is like chasing the shadows at Maughold churchyard. What seems graphic and clear cut can quickly become blurred and near-impossible to catch. This is not a history punctuated by turning points, decisive battles and clear signposts, rather it is a series of overlapping processes: rising and falling, shining and fading or forgetting and remembering. Very little of this has left concrete, tangible remains, in the reassuring way of ruins, roads, old towns and the like. The boast of the Romans, ‘Si monumentum requieris, circumspice,’ ‘If you need a monument, look around yourself,’ could never apply to Celtic Britain. There are no grand monuments to see, no Parthenon, no pyramids or Valley of the Kings, and no mighty castles, moated and crenellated, impose themselves. There are a few texts, a little reliable archaeology and a mountain of misconception about the history of Celtic Britain. The stories of Celtic England deserve far more than the small space that they have been allowed here, and even if it had been possible to include more, there are very few historians who accept that such a concept as Celtic England is either possible or appropriate, and there are even those who doubt the usefulness of applying the word Celtic to anything or anyone at all. Nevertheless, English identity is unquestionably part Celtic, just as Celtic identity is certainly part English. Most Britons have a Celtic influence at some stage in their immediate genealogy.

What banishes this overwrought academic anxiety about definition and terminology is a simple thing: a long journey. I have travelled south from Stornoway through all the Hebrides to Ulster, to Galloway, to the Isle of Man, southern and western Ireland, Wales and finally to Cornwall. I can report that there is such a place as Celtic Britain, that it shares a common culture, an intimately related history and strikingly similar geography, and also that its story can be found in these places. What is elusive or confusing in a library or in the labyrinth of the internet springs to life under the scrutiny of the naked eye and the tramping of the feet. It is in places, not always the obvious places, where the stories of Celtic Britain can be heard, whispered in the air and atmosphere of a place where there is sometimes nothing obvious to see at all.

The sea is different. Inscrutable, pitiless, silent and elemental, it leaves no trace, no memory of the people who crossed it, fished it and fought on it. It stands at the centre of the Sea Kingdoms, is ever present but never less than mysterious. No-one I met, at least no-one with any sense, claimed to know the sea intimately or even to have much affinity with it. On the day I drove down to the Isle of Whithorn, I blundered into the funeral of the young seamen of the Solway Harvester, lost off the Isle of Man in 2000. The official enquiries have produced no reason why the fishing boat went down with all hands, but many believe that it was rammed by a huge steel container floating half-submerged in the sea. A modern monster put there by careless men. The funeral dwarfed the village, the grief was silent and palpable, and even the tabloid photographers and journalists were kept back at a respectful distance by it. Beyond the rooftops, beyond the breakwater, stretching farther than can be imagined, was the ceaseless, mighty surge of the sea.

There can be no conclusions to the story of the Sea Kingdoms. It is in not a discrete narrative with easily recognizable limits and a clear, unifying narration. Best to offer an interim report, and a little advice on what to look for and where to find it.

Llanwnda, St David’s, Wales

Although it appears in a Welsh Heritage pamphlet entitled ‘Saints and Stones’, Llanwnda is hard to find. Near Fishguard, where the car ferries load for a four-hour journey across the Irish Sea to Rosslare, the little church lies at the end of a maze of single-track roads on the headland to west of the port. As with many atmospheric places in the west of Britain, it is difficult to know where to start. There is little or no signage, nothing obviously central and a general air of detachment. A farmstead stands to the south of an open space where the road peters out into a grass track, and to the north there is a small grey church sat in an overgrown cemetery.

Llanwnda gets its name from St Gwyndaf, an early Breton holy man. His origins immediately bring to the fore its maritime background, for religious contact between the sea kingdoms was close and frequent. It would not have been unusual for a P-Celtic-speaking Breton to establish a llan, a sacred enclosure, in a place like this. The Welsh Heritage pamphlet notes that the church was heavily restored in 1881, but there are five inscribed stones incorporated into the exterior walls. One of them is very arresting. Simply known as ‘the Llanwnda Stone’, it is a slab carved in relief showing a head surrounded by three heavily incised borders and set on a pointed stone or stake. ‘Saints and Stones’ wants it to be a Christian artefact but it clearly recalls the early Celtic fascination with the head – for them it was the place where the soul resided and an object of great magical power. The eyes of the Llanwnda head are closed, which suggests the decapitated head of a dead man – something the Celts and their Druids collected with enthusiasm. Despite the description of it as an early representation of Christ, ‘a head in the style of a pantocrater’, there is little doubt that the church of Llanwnda has part of a Druid ghost fence built into the wall of the south transept.

St Gwyndaf is said to have had an altercation with St Aidan, which offers a tentative date for Christian settlement at Llanwnda of some time around 630 to 650. It confirms contact between lona, Lindisfarne and the Welsh and Breton saints – even if it was not harmonious. As with many of the nursery-rhyme-style stories associated with Christian saints, there is a faintly daft episode where St Gwyndaf is supposed to have fallen off his horse when it spooked at a fish jumping in a nearby stream. Unlikely though that may sound, the story makes some sense when the stream itself is found.

For in the centre of the open space at Llanwnda, very easy to miss, there is a small, Celtic holy well and a stream flowing from it. Bubbling out of the ground amongst bramble bushes, it has been built around in earlier times, because there are several overgrown cut stones arranged at the source. There were two old rags tied on to the bramble bushes when I came across it, and through the peaty water some coins could be seen. St Gwyndaf is said to have cursed the stream where the fish allegedly jumped, but he may simply have cursed the stream because it still attracted the pagan veneration of the people who lived near his new Christian lian.

Llanwnda was a sacred place for a long time before St Gwyndaf arrived from Brittany. To the south of the holy well, behind the farm, is Carreg Wastad. The name may mean ‘the Watching Rock’, and it commands panoramic views of the sea and the land on either side. Near the top of the rocky hill there is a dolmen. Prehistoric peoples made these megalithic tombs by raising a large and often very heavy flat stone off the ground and wedging a smaller stone underneath to keep it propped up and stable. The effect is strange. The dolmen at Llanwnda looks as though it is a door to the underworld which stands permanently ajar. And indeed, that may have been what the makers intended. The Celts believed that holy wells were portals to the Otherworld, and if they lifted their heads to look up the hill at Carreg Wastad, they may have seen another way in.

Llanwnda is unquestionably a sacred place and has been so for millennia. Sanctity, and not of a Christian sort – that seems as dormant at Llanwnda as in an empty city-centre church – still hovers in the air. Like other powerfully atmospheric Celtic sites, it feels literally otherworldly -somewhere one might easily slip through a crack in time.

Beyond the church there stands a house, perhaps the old rectory or vicarage, and some outbuildings. These last had been painted with large, brightly coloured flowers in the style of Sixties hippies, and a car has been parked next to them, which is covered with hundreds of small Dinky Toy cars that have somehow been attached to the bodywork. Between a telegraph pole and its wire guy rope, someone had constructed an elaborate string and twig sculpture of what might have been a human form, which looked as though it could have been made 2,000 years ago.

At the foot of Carreg Wastad is a cottage constructed partly from green corrugated iron sheets. Since it stood at the edge of the rocky hill, it seemed polite to ask permission to walk up to the dolmen. The afternoon sun shone brightly through a large window on several large women watching daytime television. A notice on the garden gate warned callers about large dogs, but when I knocked on the door the lady who answered could scarcely have been more polite. And yet the atmosphere around the little cottage felt decidedly otherworldly.

Llanwnda is not merely an interesting place, or a nice place to be, or a place where anything much is clear. In fact there is menace in the air, a sense of the smallness and insignificance of life, and most of all, a strong notion that the corporeal, temporal, tangible, observable life that we all basically agree on could be turned inside out in an instant. The old gods are close at Llanwnda.

Glendalough, Wicklow Mountains, Ireland

The porter at the Glendalough Hotel told me that the bar did not open for another half hour, ‘Sure now, it won’t take you long to wait half an hour.’ I must have looked nonplussed. ‘Why not go over the road and have a walk around the old churches?’ he prompted. I asked if the precinct was open, unlike the bar. ‘Now, when would God ever be deaf to the prayers of a poor sinner like yourself?’ The old man smiled at me and went about his business.

Glendalough is deep in the Wicklow Mountains in the south-east of Ireland, far from what the Gaels call Abhainn Mor an t’Sluaigh, the Great River of People. More than a thousand years ago the simple monastic foundation of St Kevin had grown into what the Irish called a monastic city. There were three others as big at Kildare, Armagh and Clonmacnoise, and all four were centres for pilgrimage. The cemetery at Glendalough was, like lona, thought to have a purifying soil and many wished to be buried there. In Gaelic the Irish called it ruam, a Celtic rendition of Rome, another holy city. When pilgrims arrived they must have thought Glendalough a beautiful place, with two lakes and a broad strath in a steep-sided glen, now patterned with mercifully irregular plantations of pine trees. There are some interesting monastic ruins and a complete pencil-shaped tenth-century tower reaching high into the mountain sky, but it is what happened out of doors at Glendalough, in the midst of God’s creation, which catches the attention. The monastic city was a centre of manuscript copying, and for many of the monks the best light for their intricate work belonged to God: on fine days they worked outside their dark and windowless cells on boards resting across their knees. There is an Irish manuscript in the Swiss monastery of St Gall which was probably produced at Glendalough, and in the margin of one page there is a beautiful lyric poem which offers a tangible sense of what life was like for the monks in the monastic city in the mountains:

Over me green branches hang
A blackbird leads the loud song;
Above my penlined booklet I hear a fluting bird-throng.

The cuckoo pipes a clear call
Its dun cloak hid in deep dell;
Praise to God for this goodness
That in woodland I write well.

The beauty of Glendalough and the sanctity of its founder brought many pilgrims into the mountains from as early as the ninth century and probably before that. A large part of the motivation for undertaking long and arduous journeys to shrines like St Kevin’s, or St David’s in Wales, was the need to serve a penance for sins committed. Not only was the idea of a list of penances appropriate to each category of sin originally an Irish idea, but the concept of a personal confessor also began its life in places like Glendalough. The early Christian church made the doing of penance a matter of public recognition by physically separating those who had sinned from the body of a religious community and forbidding them access to the holy sacraments until penance was completed. In Ireland the innovative use of a personal confessor changed this. It encouraged a frequent, and perhaps more open, confession of sins to someone called in Gaelic an anmchara, a ‘soul friend’. Lists of penitentials were still consulted by a soul friend but the transactions between him or her and a sinner became private. Irish Christianity was very influential in shaping the habits and practices of the early European church, although, in the apparent remoteness of Glendalough, it is easy to forget that.

Because it was difficult to reach the monastic city, it remained unharmed by outside or malign influences for 800 years. The continuity of sanctity at Glendalough is striking, and it was only broken when the English attacked the monastery in 1398. There are few details of the raid itself but no doubt that the buildings suffered a good deal of damage.

When the English and others attacked Irish churches, they often had to break through a strange charm, something physically attached to the architecture, although more castles than churches had them stuck to their walls. These were little sculptures known as the Sheela na gig, and they were certainly pagan in origin. Very crudely carved, all of them show a naked female form with exaggerated breasts and often openly displayed and pulled apart pudenda. The term Sheela na gig might derive from the combination of a personal female name with the Gaelic na gcioch, meaning ‘of the breasts’. They are a very surprising thing to find attached to the walls of churches and they witness a powerful continuity from the pagan past literally grafted onto Christianity.

The pilgrimages to Glendalough, called ‘patterns’ in Ireland, also took on some of the characteristics of Celtic festivals. They were widely seen as occasions for taking a good deal of strong drink as well as enjoying all sorts of other licence. The Victorian Catholic church became so alarmed at the drunkenness and debauchery of the Glendalough patterns that, in 1863, they were summarily cancelled. Pilgrimage continued nonetheless, and the power and attraction of St Kevin was not diminished. The Glendalough Hotel thrives on the pilgrimage business but keeps the consumption of strong drink indoors and on the premises. That is, when the bar is open.

Niarbyl Beach, Dalby, Isle of Man

The grassy heights above Niarbyl Beach are not particularly elevated, but on a bright day it is possible to see clear across the Irish Sea to the Mountains of Mourne in Northern Ireland, and north to the Galloway Hills. From South Barrule, the mountain dominating the south of the island, the low farmlands of Anglesey can be made out, and sometimes even Snowdon, rising mighty behind them, while from Maughold Head in the north the Cumbrian Fells are often visible. From Man – the Midway Island – the shores of five of the sea kingdoms can be seen, and this fact of geography makes an eloquent point: the Irish Sea was a Celtic lake until the Vikings sailed through the North Channel, and after their time passed the Lordship of the Isles and Man ruled these waves. The views across the sea from the Isle of Man show a clear world picture. The merchant sailors, fishermen, holy men and adventurers who passed Niarbyl Beach understood this picture well – everyone who ventured on the Irish Sea understood where and in what direction the land lay. It was a world far more cosmopolitan than that of rural inland Britain, outside which very few stepped in the course of their entire lives. Even though the Celts of the west of Britain seemed to be pushed out to the margins, crushed up against the mountains and the sea, their horizons were huge and their world no small and incidental place.

The name Niarbyl refers to a spit of rocks reaching out into the sea from a headland sheltering a small beach. The rocks are submerged most of the time and are of concern only to sailors making safe passage by coasting from Peel in the middle of the west coast of Man down to Port Erin or Castletown in the south. The beach itself is not visible from landward and is reached by a steep path down from fields and pasture which give no hint of its existence. From the seaward side the spit of rock and the small headland it leads from give shelter from the wind and a shallow but safe haven. Because Niarbyl Beach is hidden but close to fertile and settled countryside, it was precisely the sort of place where Vikings chose to beach their boats and mount surprise raids.

On 5 July 2000 I watched a Viking dragon-ship come into Niarbyl. Out in the open sea the dreki was little more than a speck amongst the choppy waves. The swell was sufficient to hide the ship and its black sail completely before it bobbed back up again. Through binoculars I could see that the crew were rowing hard to bring their boat around into the waves bow first and not broadside. They were getting very wet. After what seemed to be only a short time they rounded Niarbyl Rocks and appeared in the calmer waters of the bay. It was an awesome sight: exactly what the terrified monks of Lindisfarne and lona fled from and what lookouts on western headlands hoped never to see. The progress of the dragon-ship was silent, making no sound that was different from or could be heard above the wash of the waves, except when the steersman asked for hard rowing at a quicker clip, and the sound of the wooden oars banging against the rowlocks beat across the water. With the steerboard carefully turning this way and that, and a man leaning out over the bow searching the water for submerged rocks, the dragon-ship glided closer and closer to the beach. Suddenly it looked huge, as its dragon-head prow slid quickly up the shoreline.

The oarsmen from Peel dress up as Vikings and do a great deal for charily, and also for fun. Their ethos is like that of a boisterous rugby team, but each of them has square shoulders and the biceps of a weight lifter. Last year they rowed forty-four miles across the Irish Sea to Ardg-lass in Ulster to raise cash for Manx charities. Sometimes the sea ran with them as the tide washed out, and sometimes against them. It took a whole day and most of a night to get to Ardglass, but when the men from Peel rowed into the harbour there was a huge crowd, a brass band and the local mayor waiting to greet them. Having pulled hard in a last flourish, they slumped breathless over the oars at the quayside to a terrific roar, and when they climbed up onto the jetty, everyone wanted to shake their hands. Apparently it was an agonizing round of congratulation, since each man’s hands were badly calloused and bleeding. ‘All we had to do was lift a glass of beer that night/ said one of the oarsmen, ‘but a thousand years ago these boys rowed for days and then had to jump out of the boat and fight. Hard men, and brave.’

Glencoe, Highland Region, Scotland

Beside the road across Rannoch Moor, where it climbs up to an empty landscape of heather, bracken and moorland lochs and lochans that still looks inhospitable on a sunny summer’s day, there is a sign in Gaelic. It reads ‘Failte do’n Gaidhealtachd’, ‘Welcome to the Highlands’. Beyond the sign the road stretches on towards one of the most disconcerting and ineffably sad landscapes in Britain. At the head of Glencoe stands its massive mountains of Stob Dearg and Buachaille Etive Mor, while down to the right lie the solitary white buildings of the Kingshouse Hotel. For miles there seems to be nothing: it is a trackless wasteland of grey-green mountains and moorland – majestic but empty. Welcome to the Highlands.

As the road winds its way through narrow defiles, between the shoulders of the mountains, it is difficult to imagine how travellers negotiated the corkscrew paths and tracks on foot or ponies, particularly in the bad weather for which Glencoe is notorious. Eventually the mountains retreat, and straths and fields open out. There are some ruined crofts and modern houses, and, as the road comes within sight of the sea loch, a few buildings cluster at Glencoe village.

In February 1692 a massacre took place here. It was a deliberate and planned act of genocide designed to act as a deterrent to rebellion, and it was authorized along a clear chain of command, with the orders countersigned by King William of Orange himself. It is important to be precise about the origins of the Massacre of Glencoe, since centuries of government embarrassment at what occurred and its consequences intentionally obscured the truth. For example, the events of February 1692 have sometimes been presented as an episode in the long-running rivalry between Clan Donald and Clan Campbell. This is nonsense: Glencoe happened because the Edinburgh and London governments wanted it to happen.

After 1688 and the removal of James II, William and Mary’s government was understandably anxious about the political stability of the Highland clans. All chiefs were required to swear and sign an oath of loyalty by 1 January 1692, and after consulting with the exiled King almost all complied. Maclan of Glencoe did not sign on time, but it was not for the want of trying. Through the depths of a bitter winter the old chief made his way to what is now Fort William to discover that he was in the wrong place. The commander of the garrison, Colonel Hill, was not empowered to administer the oath, and in any case Maclan should have gone to Inverary, a long way to the south. When he finally arrived, it turned out that the Sheriff was absent on holiday after the New Year celebrations. After a wait, Maclan did eventually sign the oath of loyalty, but it was not enough to save himself, his wife, his family and his clansmen.

The Master of Stair, John Dalrymple, was Secretary of State for Scotland and he decided that the lateness of the Glencoe MacDonalds’ oath was pretext enough to make an example of them. On 1 February two companies of soldiers were billeted with the families who lived in the glen. They had not paid their taxes and were therefore liable for this sort of imposition. The commander, Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, had orders to secure both ends of the glen and pen in the MacDonalds and ‘fall upon the rebels … and put all to the sword under seventy’. On the morning of 6 February the massacre began. Maclan, his wife and two of their sons had their throats cut, and in a short time thirty-eight men, women and children had been murdered. Many more slipped through the military cordon only to die of exposure in the snow-filled passes above the strath. There is more than a suspicion that some of the soldiers under Glenlyon’s command had little stomach for the massacre and allowed people to get away.

The Massacre of Glencoe was not the first slaughter in Highland history, but it was probably the most cold-blooded and callous. It shows how profoundly Scotland had split into two places by the end of the seventeenth century, and how Highlanders were seen as dangerous sub-humans to be disposed of without remorse. It also marks how low the fortunes of Clan Donald had sunk. Maclan was a scion of the same family who had been Lords of the Isles and masters of an Atlantic principality.

High above the village where the massacre took place there are the three rocky buttresses of Bidean nam Bian, known as the Three Sisters. An opening in one of them is now called Ossian’s Cave, after the alleged composer of James MacPherson’s epic poem of ancient Celtic Highland heroes. It is accessible by a rock climb called Ossian’s Ladder, and the whole area is very popular with rock-climbing enthusiasts.

St Keverne’s, Cornwall

In 1999 John Angarrack wrote an angry book. Called Breaking the Chains – Propaganda, Censorship, Deception and the Manipulation of Public Opinion in Cornwall, it fulminates in a fine rage about the ignorance of Cornish language and history in Cornwall. Naturally, Angarrack has a good deal to say about the Cornish rebellions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and in particular about the leader in 1497, Michael Joseph, known as An Gof:

On the 500th anniversary of the slaughter of our ancestors the people of Cornwall attempted to have placed in St Keverne village square (An Gof’s home village) a statue to the memory of the fallen. Although many who had recently moved to the area were enthusiastic, a selection of brainwashed Cornish quislings, diehard Royal British Legion members and old-school Church of England types objected.

The memorial was ultimately erected, but, as John Angarrack bitterly complains, it sits halfway out of town near a bus stop. With only the faintest of memories of 500-year-old martyrs to call on, the cause of the Cornish can seem literally bloodless, and certainly marginal. Yet what Angarrack and those who support him want is simply an understanding that Cornwall is different from the rest of England, and for that difference to be recognized in civic society, education and local government. Lest his efforts, or those of the Cornish separatist group, Mebyon Kernow, the Sons of Cornwall, be thought overblown, eccentric or vainglorious, sceptics should remember that popular Cornish culture, in unguarded moments, celebrates those differences.

When the Cornish rugby team won the county championships at Twickenham in 1991 and again contested the final in 1992,40,000 Cornish men, women and children, more than 10 per cent of the whole population, went to London to support their team. In the pre-match caperings ordinary people came up with a popular iconography: Cornwall fans wore the black and gold Cornish kilt while carrying a giant pasty around the ground. There was a huge inflatable Cornish chough bouncing over the heads of the crowd and replicas of the Padstow Obby Oss danced on the pitch. The black and white flags bearing the cross of Cornwall’s patron saint, St Piran, seemed to flutter everywhere, along with banners proclaiming ‘Kernow Bys Vyken’, ‘Cornwall For Ever’.

Thoroughly intoxicated by the determination and desire of the Cornish team, a radio commentator, describing a try scored by a Cornish player who carried several Yorkshiremen on his back as he charged for the line, shouted into his microphone that ‘he dived for the line, festooned with Saxons’. After Cornwall reached the final again the following year, the Western Morning News of the following Monday morning basked in the warm afterglow of achievement, if not triumph (the Cornish lost in 1992), transcending not only rugby but the unionist realities of 1992 of John Major’s Britain. The leader writer gathered all of his Cornishness about him when he boomed that the fans ‘carried the Cornish cause into the capital of foreign England’ and declared that ‘in the reorganization of power in Britain that must surely come, Cornwall must keep its own identity, and should have enhanced power’. While sport is often the blue touchpaper that ignites this sort of popular nationalism, the notable ingredient for the Cornish is a strong memory of their Celtic history. The English are Saxons, and the Cornish are not, at least in the minds of the fans travelling to the match.

Because the numbers of Cornish speakers and Cornish nationalists are small, it is tempting to be dismissive and to believe that their passion is no more than mild eccentricity and is in itself a small thing, but that cannot be fair. John Angarrack is surely more than justified in his insistence on a proper memorial to An Gof. War memorials to the fallen in the War for Britain deserve their place beside those for Flanders and the Second World War.

On the Isle of Man, where the Manx language was all but extinct, with the last native speaker, Ned Maddrell, dying in 1974 without a word of his native language being said or sung at his funeral, there is also passion – of an incendiary sort. In protest at the Anglicization of Man and the withering of Manx, two angry young men began a campaign of arson directed at the half-built houses of wealthy incomers. They were caught and sent to prison for substantial terms. Tynwald was surprised and alarmed, and with some haste appointed a Manx language officer and encouraged the establishment of Gaelic play groups. The next census will show a rise from 160 speakers to more than a thousand.

Now, these achievements are hard won and represent repeated acts of stubborn dedication by devoted people. They are not a band of weird, woolly, quaint or daft impossibilists attempting to roll back the mighty tide of English. They have no illusions that Manx or Cornish will reestablish themselves as first languages used as vernaculars in the streets of Penzance or Douglas, but they do believe that a knowledge of these old languages can only be good, and can only inform an interest in their history and culture.

In Scotland the transition of Gaelic from a vernacular language describing the lives of most people in the Highlands and Islands to a lexical curiosity spoken only by enthusiasts is currently underway. At the beginning of a new millennium it is important to face the fact that Gaelic Scotland has become, like the story of Rob Roy, marginal and romantic, or, like the story of Gregor MacGregor, dazzling but unknown. Although the new Scottish parliament in Edinburgh has decorated its buildings with bilingual signs and has debated once in Gaelic, the bitter truth is that there is now no meaningful sense in which Gaelic Scotland lives. The figures from the census returns are utterly unequivocal. When the population of Scotland was first asked the question ‘Do you have Gaelic?’ in the census of 1881, 231,934 people answered yes. In 1991 only 65,978 did. The prospects are very bleak, and the language is rapidly on the way to extinction as a community vernacular within the next twenty years. One statistic drives the point home. In 1991 only 357 children under the age of five spoke Gaelic.

In Wales and Ireland Celtic languages have government backing and in the case of Welsh its decline was reversed by a massive act of collective effort. The Welsh understood well was the correct answer to an oft-repeated question. What is the practical use of Gaelic or Welsh? Everyone who speaks a Celtic language speaks English, so if you want to go to all the trouble of learning a language then why not learn something useful like French or Spanish? The answer is simple. French will not teach you more about Ireland, but Gaelic will. Spanish will not add to anyone’s knowledge of Wales, but Welsh certainly will. These marginal and threatened languages are necessary for a deeper reading of history and a better understanding of these nations’ identity. If they are lost then a large part of ourselves dies with them.

Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England

At the summer solstice of 2000, on 21 June, English Heritage allowed access to Stonehenge to anyone who wanted to celebrate the turning point of the millennial year. For a long time such gatherings had been forbidden. About 6,000 people braved the driving rain to dance, sing and play music around the ancient stones. Many journalists also turned up to watch, including John Vidal of the Guardian:

But for those who have embraced romanticism, paganism and the many strands of druidism and the counter culture, the stones hold a symbolic and physical power of place. ‘Scum and germs … remember your culture’, cried Helen, self-styled Lancastrian mistress of the night, dressed somewhere between Simon Bolivar and an Italian traffic cop – but with specs and a three foot horn which she blew frequently to the four winds … ‘It’s a return to the spirit of the free festivals of the 1970s,’ said Tim Sebastian, whose title – Archdruid of Wiltshire, Chosen Chief of the Secular Order of Druids, Conservation Officer for the Council of British Druid Orders and Bard of the Gorsedd of Caer Abiri (Avebury) – defied any state-conferred nobility in its arcane absurdity. ‘We are seeing a return to Celticity.’

This sort of harmless fun can easily be seen as the fate that befell Celtic England: a jumble-sale of big names and little understanding. Like John Vidal, the readership of the Guardian will undoubtedly have seen the Stonehenge rituals as something marginal and weird, and of virtually no use in compiling a meaningful definition of Englishness. This last is no longer of interest only to cultural historians and leader writers in the broadsheets who occasionally worry about football hooliganism or the north/south divide. Now that political power has devolved to Wales, Ulster and Scotland, English identity, and what it means and needs, has become central to a general debate about government. London has a sufficiently strong sense of itself to have acquired a measure of autonomy, but what of the English regions? The Midland police force had to go back 1,300 years to Offa to find a suitable name when they retitled themselves the Mercia Police. It is doubtful that meant much to anyone, even those living in Walsall or West Bromwich.

To some extent the revellers at Stonehenge are the descendants of Iolo Morgannwg and the amazing Dr William Price of Llantrisant, but they lack the learning and the language to back their eccentricities. Sadly, they show how meaningless and diffuse the idea of Celtic culture has become. No wonder the Obby Oss men of Padstow say ‘Bollocks!’ when it is suggested that they are taking part in a Celtic festival. And no wonder that historians and other commentators remain deeply suspicious of any narrative that incorporates ‘Celtic’ in the label.