The Great Caledonian Invasion. The uninterrupted lines show the probable route; the broken lines show the possible route. For more detail, see figs 14 and 15.
The Great Caledonian Invasion
Despite appearances, this is the end to the story of the Debatable Land: the discovery of its lost beginnings and the recognition of its lasting place in British history. The future of another United Kingdom was soon to be decided, and although physical geography in the twenty-first century seemed to have become detached from political history, there was a powerful sign of long-term forces at work in the fact that the paths of that epic campaign of the second century led back to the borderlands.
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In about AD 163, the Antonine Wall was abandoned and Hadrian’s Wall, eighty miles to the south, once again became the main line of defence. To control the troublesome northern tribes, several forts between the two walls retained garrisons. The borderlands then became a Roman buffer zone or limes, with command centres at Castledykes (Lindum) and Newstead protecting the main roads to north and south.
In the early 180s, ominous tidings reached the south. The unconquered tribes of Caledonia had ‘crossed the wall which separated them from the Roman legions’: ‘they proceeded to do much mischief and cut down a strategos [a general or military governor] together with his troops’. The account by Cassius Dio is corroborated by signs of destruction or rebuilding at various forts in northern England and the Scottish lowlands (fig. 14).
Fear of invasion spread far beyond the frontier. In southern Britannia, a massive building programme was launched. Between the mid-180s and the mid-190s, many towns, both large and small, which until then had been open and undefended, began to surround themselves with earthworks. Nowhere else in the Roman Empire was there such a rush to protect the urban population. The crossing of the wall (whether Hadrian’s or the Antonine) and the killing of a Roman general and his troops were alarming enough to induce a sense of panic, and there is palpable evidence of the relief that was felt at the end of the emergency in the coins which were struck in 184 and 185 to celebrate a victory in Britannia.
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More than a thousand years separate the Border reivers from the confederate army of British kings, but the geography of the region is largely unchanged and the pastoral, cattle-raiding society of the Celts would have been recognizable to a medieval warden. The Caledonian warriors were ‘very fond of plundering’, says Cassius Dio. ‘Consequently, they choose their boldest men as rulers.’ They ride ‘small, swift horses’ and ‘can endure hunger and cold and any kind of hardship’.
Cassius Dio probably owed his information to a Roman Robert Carey who had seen his enemy disappear into the trackless mosses:
They plunge into the swamps and exist there for many days with only their heads above water, and in the forests they support themselves upon bark and roots, and for all emergencies they prepare a certain kind of food, the eating of a small portion of which, the size of a bean, prevents them from feeling either hunger or thirst.
These hardy tribes of the northlands, equipped with nimble ponies and the Iron Age equivalent of the energy bar, either marched south from the Antonine Wall or sailed down the coast from the Firth of Clyde. After an opposed landing at the mouth of the Glen in Irvine Bay – which was once the largest port in western Scotland – another four battles were fought along the Douglas in the region of Lindum (Castledykes). Here, the road connecting the Antonine Wall with Hadrian’s Wall met the road which crossed Britain from the Irish Sea to the North Sea. For several days, weeks or even months, this vital crossroads of the northern British network became the theatre of war. After the fifth battle, the invaders finally broke through into the Southern Uplands where the roads led south into the heart of Roman Britain, towards the place which the battle poem calls ‘the City of the Legion’.
The sixth battle, on the river ‘Bassas’ – somewhere on the route from Castledykes to the border – was probably at the fort of Tassies Height (Coria, on Ptolemy’s map) along the shallow river Annan, which flows to the Solway Firth. The seventh was in a place we now know well: Celidon Wood, where the bard called Myrddin took refuge after the Battle of Arfderydd in the parish of Arthuret (here).53
Remnants of that wood still exist along the steep banks of the Liddel where most of North Cumbria’s ancient woodland grows, preserved from browsing deer and wood-cutting humans by its inaccessibility. On a modern map, the patches of old broad-leaf forest on the Debatable Land boundary from Netherby and Carwinley to Penton Wood look like the shredded cloak of someone fleeing through the thickets towards the Kielder Forest. They are still a refuge for several threatened species of plant and animal.
This would therefore be the earliest known of the many battles that were fought around the Debatable Land or, as it was then, the buffer zone of the Damnonii, the Selgovae and the Votadini. A victory in this crucial area would have opened the way to the south. If ever ‘Arthur’ saw the twin knolls of Arthuret, it would have been after his seventh battle. The wood which covers the knolls is known locally, but not on maps, as Crow Wood. The people of Longtown who played in Crow Wood as children like to think of it as the grave of King Arthur. On a foggy day, when the lower slopes are draped with shining white sheets of plastic mulch, the site has an almost ceremonial air.
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Invasions tend to follow the same routes from one century to the next. Like the Jacobite army in 1745, the Caledonian invaders headed for Carlisle, where an inscription of the AD 180s, unearthed on the site of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s headquarters in English Street, gives thanks to the deified emperor Hercules-Commodus for ensuring the safety of the garrison when it was attacked by a barbarian horde. The inscription does not explicitly commemorate a victory: the ‘barbarians’ may simply have passed through that notoriously pregnable city. The battle list shows that they had a more distant goal: beyond Shap and the forbidding and beautiful gorge of the river Lune, where the drystone walls and teetering sheep give an exact measure of the fells’ steepness, lay the fort of Guinnion.
The Great Caledonian Invasion. The uninterrupted lines show the probable route; the broken lines show the possible route. For more detail, see figs 14 and 15.
‘Guinnion’ is a later form of ‘Vinnovium’, which is shown on Ptolemy’s map of northern England. Previously assumed to be Binchester on the other side of England, it can now be identified as Lancaster, where vestiges of a Roman fort have been found on Castle Hill. The geographical logic of the battle list is obvious: Lancaster lies on Roman roads to Chester and to York, and, like several of the battle sites, it was an inland port. A century before, Agricola had advanced up the west coast with the fleet on the Irish Sea supporting the ground forces. The British kings might have used a similar strategy. The first eight battles – from Irvine Bay to Lancaster – suggest a mass attack on the western seaboard, while the later battle sites are consistent with a parallel or subsequent invasion from the east.
After the victory at Guinnion, which the author of the Historia Brittonum attributes anachronistically to the power of the Virgin Mary, the hypothetical route divides. The ninth battle took place ‘in the city of the Legion’. This must be either Chester (labelled ‘Legio XX’ on Ptolemy’s map) – which was no more than a ‘rearward works establishment’ in the 180s – or, more likely, York (labelled ‘Legio VI’), which by then was the main base of Roman power in the north. For the British kings, the legionary fortress at York would have been the more significant target. The final battles were fought north of the Humber, and so ‘the Legion’ would naturally have referred to the Sixth, which operated all over the north, from Manchester to the Antonine Wall, and which, at that time, was stationed in York under the command of Lucius Artorius Castus.
A spectacular Roman road runs through the Aire Gap and over the moors to the city of York. By following this route, the Britons would have remained on familiar, upland territory. Along that road of terraced climbs and hair-raising descents, two forts, Ribchester and Ilkley – both shown on Ptolemy’s map – were rebuilt in the late second century and may have been wrecked in the invasion.
The tenth battle, at ‘Tribruit’, is a mystery but the search can be narrowed to a tidal estuary on the North Sea coast – probably Tweedmouth near the eastern end of the future Anglo-Scottish border or South Shields at the terminus of Hadrian’s Wall. The site of the eleventh battle is less mysterious: Bregion or Bregomion is the fort of Bremenium, which stood at a junction on Dere Street. Its location is confirmed by Ptolemy’s map: it lies off the main Newcastle road below the border pass of Carter Bar, beyond the rotting hulk of a reconstructed Iron Age house and a sign marked ‘No Access to Military Vehicles or Troops’.
Bremenium was one of the forts in the frontier zone north of Hadrian’s Wall which retained a Roman garrison after the abandonment of the Antonine Wall. Its ruins are as evocative of Border reivers as of Romans. In the sixteenth century, a bastle was built out of the crumbled walls as a defence against the rampaging Elliots of Liddesdale. But some of the stones were left in situ and several burial mounds and monumental tombs have been found nearby. The cemetery at Bremenium remained in use from the early second to the early fourth centuries and was apparently reserved for officers. Perhaps it was there that the general mentioned by Cassius Dio was ‘cut down together with his troops’.
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By the time the British rebel army reached Bremenium, it would have covered more than four hundred miles. It had ravaged northern Britannia, caused panic in the south and was being talked about in Rome. The British kings and ‘Arthur’ now found themselves on the principal frontier of the Roman province and the only permanently defended border in the far north of the empire.
Arthurian scholars have long suspected that the twelfth and last battle in the Historia Brittonum list was borrowed from another source. The famous Battle of Mount Badon was fought in an entirely different time and place: in the south of England, in the sixth century and against the Saxons. As a British victory, it provided the ninth-century historian with a gratifying conclusion, but, as we know, second-century Britain was not reconquered from the Romans by a barbarian horde. Another ‘last battle’ is recorded in the tenth-century Welsh Annals: the Battle of Camlann, at which Arthur died. Many scholars believe that this unhappy episode was the original ending. The itinerary suggested by Ptolemy’s map supports this theory, as does the fact that ‘Camlann’ would have fitted the rhyme scheme of the battle list.
The location of Camlann is well established. Souvenirs of Hadrian’s Wall manufactured in a pseudo-Celtic style were sold to Roman veterans of northern Britannia. Three items of cookware have been found on which the names of Wall forts are inscribed in the correct sequence. They show that Camlann or Camboglanna was the fort which stood between Carlisle and Birdoswald. Its modern name is Castlesteads.
This is one of the key strategic positions on the western Wall. Roads presumed to be Roman lead north-west towards Netherby and east to the valley of the South Tyne and the fort at Whitley Castle. The area was often occupied by invaders. Nearby, at Lanercost Priory, the ailing King Edward I spent five months in bed on his way to fight the Scots; in 1311, Robert the Bruce made the priory his army’s headquarters. In the second century, the British army might have been heading for Carlisle to re-join the western invasion route or to secure a link between the west coast and the east. Beyond Carlisle, ships would be waiting on the Solway to ferry the warriors back to Caledonia. The whole expedition would have followed the circular route of an epic cattle raid.
When the translator of William Camden’s Britannia visited Castlesteads fort in the late eighteenth century, he saw the ‘foundations of walls and streets’, a profusion of iron nails stuck in mouldering lumps, and ‘good stone of all sizes for building, most of them black as if the whole building had been burnt’. There were ‘several foundations of houses still standing there pretty high but hard to come at for the bushes’.
War damage can be repaired, but it takes an enormous, continual effort to prevent natural destruction. A few years after the Caledonian invasion, a sandstone altar was erected at Camboglanna to commemorate the restoration of a temple to the Mother Goddesses of Every Nation which had ‘fallen in through age’. The site of the fort is now a secret, subtle place compared to the more famous forts to the east. Even on a bank holiday, the Hadrian’s Wall tourist traffic barely touches Castlesteads, and it ceases altogether when the lanes head off across the treacherous expanse of Walton Moss.
At the top of a farm track, an undulating path leads through an oak wood glowing with bluebells in spring to a sudden drop: a mere filament on the map, the Cam Beck cuts like a ploughshare through the clay and has devoured large portions of the hillside. Much of the fort has been lost to the river. The blight of landscaping which destroyed the Roman ‘citie’ at Netherby continued to eat away at the remains of Camboglanna. The site of Arthur’s last battle is now marked by the towering sandstone wall of a private garden.
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According to the Welsh Annals, the general known as Arthur died at Camlann, but the leader of a British uprising would not have been buried at a Roman fort. When the rebel army reached Camboglanna, it was heading west along the great Wall towards Carlisle and the Irish Sea, and towards the other fabled site of Arthur’s death.
The names of five of these battles reappear in a slightly garbled form in a fantastic twelfth-century compilation, the Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’). Its author, Geoffrey of Monmouth, borrowed, corrupted and mislocated but did not invent ex nihilo the place names of his Arthurian tales.54 One of those names – the Insula Avallonis or Isle of Avalon – might have fitted the rhyme scheme of the battle poem, and some scholars believe that it belonged to an unknown version of the battles of Arthur. It was there, supposedly, that Arthur died or had his wounds tended after the battle of Camlann. The Celtic name comes from ‘avallo’ or ‘abalo’, meaning ‘apple orchard’. Celtic ‘apple’ place names are common in Continental Europe but there is only one in Britain – the fort of Aballava or Avalana. The name is found on two of the Hadrian’s Wall souvenirs next to Uxellodunum and Camboglanna.
Aballava stood at Burgh by Sands near the western end of the Wall and the Solway coast. The fort had been built about twenty years before the invasion, when the turf of Hadrian’s Wall was being replaced with stone. As the site of a hero’s death, it might satisfy a film director or a nationalist – the bloodied warrior gazing out, like Edward I, over the ever-changing sand banks and river channels at the hills of what would one day be Scotland. But even this aquatic frontier is an illusion: Ptolemy’s map shows that both sides of the Solway lay in the territory of the same Celtic tribe. Neither Scotland nor England could claim this particular Arthur as their own.
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With the defeat of the British kings, the first official purge of the borderlands began. The most extensive reprisals were led by the Emperor, Septimius Severus. Like the wardens of the Marches, he found the northern tribes intractable and elusive. Advancing into the bogs and hidden valleys, he witnessed a tactic which was later used by the people of Tynedale in the days of the reivers. As Cassius Dio reported:
. . . he fought no battle and beheld no enemy in battle array. The enemy purposely put sheep and cattle in front of the soldiers for them to seize, in order that they might be lured on still further until they were worn out.
This is the earliest record of the skilful herding of livestock in the British Isles. Even in the second and third centuries, a walker in the fells might have thrilled to the sight of a distant flock spinning itself out over a hillside at the chivvying of a shepherd and his dog.
That stubborn pastoral society, which was considered a cause of trouble and anarchy by the Roman Empire and by the governments of Scotland and England, was also the source of some of the oldest British literature. Preserved by the lattice of its rhymes, the battle list traced the limits of a distinct linguistic zone – the area in which the Cumbric dialect of Brittonic was spoken. From ‘Glan’ to ‘Camglann’, through ‘Dubglas’ and ‘Bassas’, to ‘Celidon’, ‘Guinnion’, ‘Legion’ and ‘Bregion’, the battles of Arthur, like the legends of the tribes of Gaul, might have framed an epic which celebrated a cultural identity. For the descendants of the Damnonii, the Selgovae, the Votadini and the Brigantes, it might have recounted the birth of a new British kingdom.
The setting of these battles corresponds to the Dark Age kingdom of Strathclyde-Cumbria at its greatest extent, or the greatest extent of its territorial claims. Intriguingly, it also reflects the distribution of ‘Arthur’ place names in the north of Britain. Some of those Arthurian sites would have seen the invaders heading south in the 180s: Arthur’s Craigs above the Clyde; Arthur’s Seat and Arthur’s Fountain at the head of the Annan; Arthur’s Cross near Carwinley; Arthur’s Bower at Carlisle; King Arthur’s Well and Arthur’s Chair on Hadrian’s Wall.
Some time after the invasion, a Cumbric bard coaxed a simple narrative from the years of war in the bloody borderlands, fitting a period of history to a single human life. When a new enemy had emerged, and the Romans had been replaced by Saxons, the rhymes still told an epic tale of national resistance which served the purposes of other kingdoms and confederations. The battles could always be stitched into a colourful and coherent campaign, just as a certain form of nationalism unfurls rhetorical tapestries on which the heroes and martyrs of Scottish history run seamlessly through the centuries from Mons Graupius to Bannockburn and from Flodden Field to Culloden.
The region whose boundaries are traced by those ancient battles is now almost equally divided between Scotland and England. The frontiers have changed, but attempts are still being made to claim ‘Arthur’ for one administrative area or another. National pride is not the most resilient of emotions. Threatened by the arbitrariness of borders, the ambitions of political leaders and the size and diversity of its domain, it must attach itself to something stable. Perhaps only legend can defend it from change and allow its believers to call a halt to the infidelities of history and to say that, here, the frontier stood and should stand again.