‘Arthur’
At the time, the map appeared to have nothing more to say about the borderlands. Instead, I used it as a source of themes for longer bike rides. The point of a theme is that it can take you to places you might never have visited and it makes the memory of the ride more vivid. In this case, there was the added incentive of using a map of second-century Britain to plan a cycling route.
We explored the kingdoms of the Selgovae, the Damnonii and the Votadini, impressed by their vastness and the natural wealth of their lands. Wherever possible, we followed the Roman roads which had connected the places on the map. In Ayrshire, Dumfriesshire and the Galloway peninsula, there were sites whose importance to Roman traders and the native British had only now become apparent, and although these rides were recreational, they began to feel like a necessary experiment. There was no sign that the map could bring back to life that dark age of the Debatable Land, but it was already offering answers to questions which had been raised by the earlier expeditions.
For example, since practically every place on the map stood at a road junction, this confirmed the idea that Broomholm had been served, not only by the Roman road which was ‘plain to be seen’ on Canonbie Moor in 1757, but also by the ‘dry march’ from the west which marked the boundary of the Debatable Land (here). This meant that Colanica/Broomholm had been a major crossroads in Roman Scotland, and it showed that almost the entire northern boundary of the Debatable Land had been traced by a Roman road. (Coincidentally, an archaeological survey of Broomholm in the summer of 2016 showed that the site was ‘more substantial than originally thought’: ‘Most people regard the fort as being off on a limb . . . Now, it’s looking as if it was quite large and important.’47)
The other main theme of these longer rides seemed at first to have only a tenuous connection with the map. It concerned a heroic figure of such questionable reality that he may never have existed. If he did exist, no one knows whether he came from the West Country, Wales, the north of England or Scotland.
Most of the places which bear the name of Arthur are in Wales and the south-west, but there are also thirty-seven ‘Arthur’ places scattered over the Scottish lowlands and the north of England. Several of them are less than a day’s ride from home: the closest are a wooded ridge on the road to Bewcastle called Arthurseat and a farm near Carwinley Burn once named Arthur’s Cross after a stone placed at the intersection of three parishes.48 Arthuret itself, despite its legendary connection with Myrddin or Merlin, may be only accidentally Arthurian.49
Even if a hero of that name had lived in late Roman or Dark Age Britain, it is doubtful that any historical truth would have survived. The comparatively recent figures of Johnnie Armstrong and Kinmont Willie had quickly mutated into figments of legend, their exploits confused with the antics of Robin Hood or associated incongruously with Scottish national sentiment. If a real Arthur had existed, how many other layers of confusion must have built up over the centuries? On Hadrian’s Wall, King Arthur’s Well, the crag of Arthur’s Chair and tales of Arthur’s sleeping knights were no more enlightening than the wordless monoliths of the Debatable Land’s boundaries.
Yet there was one common feature which emerged when I plotted all these places on a map with a view to planning the bike rides. The distribution of ‘Arthur’ place names in Wales and the West Country closely matches the distribution of stones inscribed in the Ogham alphabet, which in turn reflects the Irish settlement of Wales in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. They also tend to be found in relatively inaccessible areas. The ‘Arthurs’ of the North are quite different and form a distinct group. Though fewer in number, they are more widely spread and, for some reason, they tend to occur on or near Roman roads.
I had not seen this peculiarity mentioned and assumed it to be of no real historical significance. Its main interest lay in the fact that the proximity of northern ‘Arthur’ places to long-distance roads made it easy to include them in a cycling route. ‘Arthur’ himself could safely be placed between inverted commas and escorted from the scene of serious history.
* * *
In 2014, serious history was being written all over the borderlands. The words ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ (to Scottish independence) were prominent even in sparsely populated areas. They appeared on telegraph poles and pylons, on sheds and barns, on farm machinery and on the walls of ruined cottages. Riding through Ayrshire, I saw a white cow wearing a waistcoat marked ‘No’ and several sheep tattooed with a ‘Yes’.
In living memory, the national border had never been so important, and it was only now that it became obvious how many British people had no idea where it ran. Sometimes, it seemed as though James VI and my mother had been the only people who knew that the border cut Great Britain approximately in half. A local driver who used to take tourists to Hadrian’s Wall and other local sites told me that he was constantly badgered with questions: ‘Is this the border?’ ‘Are we in Scotland yet?’ Some of our visitors from the south thought that they must have arrived in Scotland when the train had crossed Shap, until they remembered that they had yet to reach Carlisle. But then others thought that Carlisle was in Scotland. Many more visitors, including some who have academic qualifications in history, assumed that Hadrian’s Wall marked the border.
This reminded me of the man who had urged Elizabeth I to build another Roman Wall, believing that the ‘Romaynes’ had built theirs to defend themselves ‘from the dayly and daungereous incurtyons of the valyaunte barberous Scottyshe nation’. The half-Scottish member of parliament for Penrith and the Border exacerbated the confusion with his ‘Hands Across the Border’ campaign, which invited English people to form a human chain along Hadrian’s Wall ‘bearing torches in a bid to convince Scots to vote “No” in September’. A bogus ‘Reverend’ who published a Scottish nationalist blog imagined ‘100,000 English people lined up on a wall’ as ‘target practice’, but observed that, unfortunately, parts of Hadrian’s Wall lie ‘sixty-odd miles from the Scottish border’.
On the English side of the Debatable Land, in the parish churches of Arthuret, Kirkandrews and Nicholforest, the talk was all of the referendum. Nicholforest Church, which hides in the woods near Liddel Water far from anything that might be called a village, is one of the rare churches which still use the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. It is unusual, too, in the unpredictability of its services. Because of the size and remoteness of the border parishes, there are not enough vicars to go around and the officiating priest can change from one Sunday to the next.
The sounds of Jacobean English and hymns rarely heard since Victoria fill the church with an air of olden days. The setting evokes an even more distant age, when small congregations worshipped secretly at forest shrines, praying to save the guttering flame from extinction. ‘Vicars . . . we’re a dying breed!’ were the first words I heard at Nicholforest. They came from the rear of the church, where a door leads out into the graveyard. The vicar, who had been delayed by snow and chronic back pain, sounded almost cheerful.
One Sunday, a minister I had not seen before was officiating. He spoke with a distinct Scottish accent: for a moment I imagined a clerical fifth-columnist sent by the Church of Scotland to infiltrate the Anglican community. The organist explained to me that this was a ‘runner’ – a peripatetic minister who takes the place of an absent vicar. The noun in its ecclesiastical sense is unknown to the Oxford English Dictionary, the closest definition being ‘a wanderer, a rover; specifically, an itinerant seller of supposed medicines and remedies’. I had come across the word in the report of a Puritan bishop who visited Nicholforest and other border parishes in 1599: ‘In divers places of the Borders the churches have walls without covering, and they have none to celebrate divine service save certain beggarly runners which come out of Scotland.’
There was nothing ‘beggarly’ about the Scottish Anglican. He delivered his sermon in a stern but affable and sometimes ironical voice which reminded me of ministers I had heard in Scotland on family holidays. He leant on the edge of the pulpit, scanning the flock, and began in an admonitory tone: ‘Now, we’re all Christians here . . . aren’t we?’ I recognized the allusion to the tale of a traveller lost in Liddesdale who, seeking help in vain, had cried out, ‘Are there nae Christians here?’, only to be answered, ‘Na, na, we’s all Armstrongs and Elliots.’
The sermon ranged widely over the minister’s bookshelves – the books unread (‘the Complete Works of Robert Burns for instance’), and the books long forgotten. Much of the sermon was devoted to John Wesley’s Primitive Physick, or An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases. This led back by a carefully meandering route to the New Testament reading, which had been the Raising of Lazarus. It was an odd sermon for the church of a predominantly agricultural community, where the most popular service is the annual blessing of sheep. At the end of the sermon, as he gathered up his notes, the minister appeared to have an afterthought: ‘There’s one thing I could never understand. Why did Jesus bring Lazarus back from the dead, knowing full well that poor old Lazarus would only have to jump through the hoop a second time?’
There were long silences between the prayers which followed. The minister prayed for the sick and the dead, ‘and also for the souls of those whose names have become illegible on the gravestones outside’. Then came a longer silence while the congregation took communion. I was in the habit of reading the Order for the Burial of the Dead or another liturgical text from the time of the reivers. But that Sunday, thinking of Arthurian excursions, I was pondering a litany even older than the Book of Common Prayer.
The list of the twelve battles of Arthur is the only detailed record of events in Dark Age Britain. It forms part of a Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’), which was cobbled together from various sources in 828 or 829. The scribe was not a historian in the modern sense. He rummaged through chronicles and fragments of folklore, ‘heaping together all [he] could find’ in order to create a heroic narrative. One of those ancient texts was a list of nine battle sites at which twelve battles had been fought by ‘British kings’ under a great commander described as a ‘leader of battles’ (a direct translation of the Celtic ‘Cadwalader’).
The original, lost Brittonic text would have been written several centuries before. It had probably been a poem, with the names of the battles providing the rhymes. The scribe updated the old chronicle and rewrote it for a contemporary, ninth-century audience which was facing the threat of heathen Saxon invaders. In this modernized version, the Saxons were the villains and the hero was a semi-mythical British hero called Arthur, who may or may not have appeared in the original poem. (This was the prototype of the Arthur who, much later, became the central figure of the medieval chivalric fantasies involving Merlin, Guinevere and the Knights of the Round Table.)
Then Arthur fought against them in those days with British kings, though he himself was the leader of battles.
The first battle was at the mouth of the river called Glein.
The second and third and fourth and fifth battles were on another river, which is called Dubglas and is in the Linnuis region.
The sixth battle was on the river which is named Bassas.
The seventh was the battle in the Celidonian forest, which is to say the Battle of Celidon Wood.
The eighth was the battle at Guinnion fort, in which Arthur carried the image of the Holy Perpetual Virgin Mary on his shoulders and the pagans were put to flight that day and great slaughter was upon them by the power of Our Lord Jesus Christ and of Holy Mary His Mother.
The ninth battle was in the city of the Legion.
The tenth battle was fought on the shore of the river which is named Tribruit.
The eleventh battle was on the hill which is called Agned. (Variant: which we call the battle of Bregion [or Bregomion].)
The twelfth was the battle of Badon Hill, in which, in one day and a single charge by Arthur, nine hundred and sixty men fell, and he alone and no one else cast them down, and in all those battles he emerged the victor. (Alternative: The Battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell.)
Since early Brittonic texts usually contained factual rather than legendary material, even if there never was a real Arthur, this record of a military campaign at the dawn of British history is potentially priceless. This would be the earliest detailed account of historical events in Britain from a British point of view. Unfortunately, only two of the places can be identified; the others are either ambiguous or completely obscure. One scholar has angrily dismissed it as a poet’s fabrication, but most agree that the list of battles refers to real places and that, if they could be identified, ‘Arthur’ and his world might return to the light of recorded history.
Having memorized the list imperfectly, I was trying to recall what came after the river called Dubglas in the region of Linnuis. ‘Linnuis’ is the Old Welsh form of the Roman name for the region of Lindum, which is now the city of Lincoln. The problem is that no river Dubglas (or Douglas) runs anywhere near Lincoln. Then I remembered that Ptolemy’s map of Britain shows two places called Lindum. One is Lincoln; the other can now be identified as the Roman fort of Castledykes near Lanark.
This had been one of the little gems thrown up by the restored map. The Scottish Earls of Lindsay, who owned a large part of Lanarkshire and whose family goes back at least to the Norman Conquest, have never been able to explain the origin of their name. The Lindsays had no connection with the part of Lincolnshire once known as Lindesey and there was no district of that name either in Normandy or Scotland. The identification of Lindum as Castledykes solved the mystery: the territory of the Lindsays was indeed the region of Lindum or Linnuis. Perhaps this northern Lindum would also be the key to the four battles on the elusive river Dubglas . . .
*
After the post-communion cup of coffee, I cycled home with a tailwind and unfolded the map of the Upper Clyde Valley. Three miles south of the fort of Lindum, the Clyde is joined by one of its main tributaries. Printed along the winding blue line on the map was the long-lost coincidence of river and region . . . The name of the river is Douglas Water or, as early Britons said, ‘Dubh-glas’ (‘black water’).
The second and third and fourth and fifth battles were on another river, which is called Dubglas and is in the Linnuis region.
Now, when I looked back at the second-century map, figures seemed to be moving across it. An invasion force landing on the west coast, in the bay which Ptolemy calls Vindogara, might, like the later Viking invaders, have followed the river valleys to Lindum and the Dubglas.
Suddenly, the map lit up with another lost connection. The Roman road between the Irish Sea and Lindum runs alongside a river which flows into the sea at Irvine. The river is now called the Irvine, but, ‘strictly speaking, its parent stream, on account of its length and the volume of water it carries’, is the river Glen.50 Of the three British rivers called Glen, this is the only one that could be said to have a mouth or an estuary (‘ostium’).
The first battle was at the mouth of the river named Glein.
There was no longer any doubt that these places had existed. Not only that, but they also appeared to have been listed in a logical, geographical order. This was a campaign which had actually taken place. The date of the campaign and the identity of the ‘leader of battles’ were still a mystery, but pieces of that Dark Age puzzle were beginning to fall into place like the tumblers of a lock.
The twelve battles of Arthur are usually thought to have taken place in the sixth century. The fact that the key had been supplied by a map of the second century seemed to be no more than a fortunate coincidence. I made a note of the discovery and filed it away. It had no obvious connection with the history of the Borders and the Debatable Land, and I was not keen to make it public. By then, my book on the ancient Celts had been published. One of its themes was the seductive power of insignificant coincidences. I had illustrated the point with a jokey reference to the defunct ‘Camelot’ amusement park near Wigan in Lancashire. This had generated garish articles in two national newspapers and a corresponding chorus of tweets and retweets: a ‘historian’ with my name and face was claiming to have discovered the fabled court of King Arthur just off the M6 motorway.
The newspapers reported this as though Camelot, that Hogwarts of the Middle Ages, might conceivably have existed. If I published the discovery now, it would be tantamount to saying, ‘I haven’t found Camelot, but I am on the trail of King Arthur – and, by the way, he’s Scottish!’ I decided to attribute the discovery of the battle sites to an anonymous reader and pursued the investigation.
*
It soon became clear that the map had more to say on the subject. It revealed one other battle site and confirmed the locations of two others, leaving only three unidentified sites. It also suggested a rational itinerary which might provide clues to the three remaining sites.
Those place names had not been conjured out of thin air by a Brittonic bard. The course of a forgotten war traced itself across the map, and the ghostly warriors of Arthurian legend began to look substantial, imbued with purpose and direction. The date of the battles was narrowed down to a period much closer to the map of Roman Britain than to the age of the Saxons. In fact, there was no sign at all of the Saxons whom the compiler of the Historia Brittonum supposed to have been the enemy: no Saxon invasion ever took place on the west coast of Scotland, and there are no Saxon settlements anywhere in the region.
If the battle list pre-dated the Saxons, who, then, had been the enemy? Piratical raids from the Irish Sea went on for centuries, but there was no full-scale invasion, and Vikings did not arrive in Irvine Bay until several decades after the Historia Brittonum was written. The text refers to a confederation of British kings fighting under a single leader. ‘King’, in Latin and in ancient Celtic, was the usual term for a tribal chief. This might suggest the Dark Age kingdoms which were established or restored at the end of Roman rule in the 400s, but the battles of this period seem to have pitted Briton against Briton and there is no trace of any pan-British alliance.
The historical chronometer has to be wound back to an even earlier age. The first two battle sites, and those to come, are Roman rather than British. Most – perhaps all – of the battles took place, not at Celtic hill forts, but at key military installations on the Roman road network. The original source seems to have had an unusually good grasp of the geography of a wide area: this is the most coherent sequence of place names in early British literature. Along with the alliance of kings under a single leader, this would imply a relatively stable political situation which was troubled for a time by an invasion sufficiently momentous to be commemorated in a poem.
One possibility, first raised in 1924, is that ‘Arthur’ was a Roman. A certain Lucius Artorius Castus commanded the Sixth Legion in Britain, which had its headquarters in York. An experienced and successful soldier, he had served in Syria and Judea, and later led two legions against the Armenians. The theory has been discredited by the tenuous speculations on which the chronologically deranged film King Arthur (2004) was based, yet the twelve battles do appear to have been fought between the Humber and the Firth of Clyde, which was precisely the area controlled by Artorius’s Sixth Legion.
Perhaps the name ‘Artorius’ stuck in the popular mind. Later, Celticized as ‘Art(h)ur’ or ‘Arto-rix’ (‘bear king’), the Roman name might have been attached to a home-grown British hero. But if Arthur’s army was a combined force of Romans and Britons, this would have been a strange campaign to celebrate in a Brittonic poem. Most of the battles would have been defeats, with the invaders pushing ever southwards through the lowlands, the borderlands and the Pennines until they reached the heart of Roman power at the ‘City of the Legion’.
The ‘Roman Arthur’ theory has proved compelling because it fits the traditional fable of the nation’s origins: the daggy, tartan-clad warriors of ancient Britain who skulked in smoky huts like people of the Stone Age, living on porridge, roots and beer, were given the gift of civilization by the Roman army. This view, which most Romans would have shared, has been repeatedly demolished by archaeology. The Celts had towns and roads, high-speed transport and well-managed farms. They used metal-working techniques which have yet to be reinvented. Several ancient texts refer to their meritocratic education system. Yet these sophisticated ancestors are still viewed with the same colonialist prejudice with which the metropolitan Scots and English of the Middle Ages regarded the barbarians of the borderlands.
The map of second-century Britain turns this tale on its head. This was not a Roman-led campaign of resistance to foreign invaders. The course of the war makes sense only if this was, as the battle list says, a British force united against a common enemy. That enemy was neither Saxon nor Celtic. The kings of Britain banded together – as Celtic ‘kings’ or chieftains often did in times of national emergency – in order to reconquer from the Roman usurpers the lands that had once been theirs.
*
A few weeks after finding the first battle sites on Ptolemy’s map, we set off from home, crossed the border into the Debatable Land and headed north. By then, I knew that the itinerary revealed by the map agreed with recorded history. The Roman chronicler Cassius Dio had described a major invasion of Britannia which took place in the early 180s.51 This invasion is consistent with the sequence of battles, and it was on a scale that might well have secured it a place in legend. According to Cassius Dio, it was ‘the biggest war’ fought anywhere in the Roman Empire during the reign of Emperor Commodus (AD 177–92). For the Romans, the invasion was a near catastrophe, but for the allied tribes, it would have been a formative event in the birth of a united British nation of the north.52