Many people all over the world claim to be Scots. Their claims are based on residence,
birth right, ancestral history, or genetic inheritance. The problem is that Scotland's
neither homogeneous, genetically singular or static, and I'm making a series of five videos,
to dip our toes into the water swum by these peoples, who made Scotland, and today we start
with a rocky outcrop that guards the Clyde at Dumbarton; Dun na Bhretain, the Fort of the Britons.
If you're interested in the people, places and events in Scottish history, then click the
subscribe button at the bottom right hand side of the screen, in the meantime, let me tell you a story.
Now if you visit Dumbarton Castle today, you'll see the 18th Century buildings and fortifications at
the location from which Mary, Queen of Scots left for France aged four, but if I take you back to the
6th, 7th and 8th Centuries, it was part of something, that to me, is even more intriguing.
You see before this fort, on those double peaks, there were hillforts that formed a
national capital. This was Alt Clut, named after this great river, the rock of the Clyde, but to
tell the story we need to go back even further. You see, five miles east up the river towards Glasgow,
is Old Kilpatrick. It was the most westerly point of the Antonine Wall; the frontier built by the
Romans from the Clyde to the Forth. Now in truth, this frontier was never very secure, which is why
not long after building the wall, the Romans fell back to the more solid version built by Hadrian.
When the Romans arrived in what they called Britannia, this whole island
was a patchwork of British tribes. In the intervallic region, between these two walls
we had the Votadinnii, Selgovae, the Novantae, and the Damnonii. Now the Damnonii powerbase was
located on the north side of the Clyde. The place name was a Brythonic word for a rocky place,
a bit like this one. In fact, they tell me that this is the oldest, continually occupied fortress
in Britain. When Angles, Saxons and Jutes came across the North Sea, they began to dominate
in the east, and the Britons retrenched gradually over time, splitting the Cymru people of the north,
west and south. Now I'm sure that there'll be people in the comment section, who'll want to debate
about whether these Britons were supplanted, displaced or assimilated. What are they
like? I just don't have time for that debate in this video, plus I'm not actually an historian,
you know that don't you? The point is, that as the western Roman Empire broke down, the province of
Britannia also broke down into smaller kingdoms. In the east, headed by Anglo-Saxon warlords, but in the
west, the same people who gave Wales the name Cymru, gave the more northern area at various
stages the names Cumbria, Cumberland, etc. Now all these names have the root in the more ancient
Brythonic word combrogi, which means 'compatriots'. Anyway at this stage we stop hearing about those
inter-vallate tribes that are mentioned and more about the single kingdom of Britons of Alt Clut.
What's now Scotland in that post-Roman period, saw tribal groups consolidating
four kingdoms. Today we focus on the Britons, who stretched from the Lake District to Loch Lomond.
Now of course Loch Lomond sits on that Highland faultline, the mountains rising suddenly in
the north and west, were a physical barrier between these Britons and the Scots in Argyll.
I've done a video about them. Further east, anyone that drives past Stirling will notice how the
rock of Stirling Castle, rises out of what was boggy low lying marshland, providing another
physical barrier between the Britons, and those consolidating into what we all know as the Picts. I'll
do a video on them later, and of course the newly arrived Angles were pushing from the south east.
You'll be hearing about them too. The 6th to the 10th Centuries saw varying alliances, and conflicts;
Angles attacked Britons, Scots attacked Angles, Picts attacked Scots, and towards the
end of the period, Vikings came across the North Sea, so that they could be in charge,
basically, medieval Scotland was like Game of Thrones, without the smart arsed midget.
I wonder how long that joke will have currency?
It seems that the earliest, verifiable King of Alt Clut, was a guy called
Rhydderch. I have no idea how to pronounce it. I'll put the spelling on screen, sort it out yourself.
Anyway he's talked about in Welsh poems and manuscripts and the Dalriadan
book describing the life of St Columba. Apparently Columba thought he was a good guy.
Rhydderch also lived at the same time as St Mungo, the Patron Saint of Glasgow.
In fact they both died in 614 AD, so at the start of the 7th Century, you can see a kingdom
spread south and east, beyond today's Scottish border, consolidating its capital around this area,
with diplomatic links, ecclesiastical links, and respect in neighbouring kingdoms. The video that
I did relating to the Scots, I mentioned how Aeden MacGabrain, possibly the most renowned of the kings
of Dalriada, had attacked Alt Clut, and then taken on Aethelfrith and the Angles. This would have
been at the time that Rydderch was the King here at Alt Clut. The Britons seemed under pressure.
By the time we got to the 9th Century, the Vikings had come, and they'd weakened each of
the four previously mentioned groups in different ways, but particularly the Picts and the Scots,
and in 849 AD, the Britons crossed that boggy marshland at Stirling,
and sacked a Pictish centre at Dunblane. The Britons may have been on the rise, but
20 years later in 870, the Britons would be the butt, rather than the beneficiaries of the
Vikings. A Viking force from Dublin came up the Clyde and blockaded Alt Clut, before sacking it
and taking off 200 ships with booty, slaves and prisoners for ransom, across the Irish Sea.
The kingdom of Alt Clut was over, but a new kingdom of Britons was beginning.
I have crossed the river, and come slightly further upstream to Govan.
Now I hear you. When you think about early medieval religious centres and sites of government,
Govan is not what comes to mind, and yet here in Govan Old Church, you can come and see an
incredible treasure trove of ancient monuments and early medieval sculptures, or you will be able to
once Covid's disappeared and they've finished the building.
Now the churchyard, just up here, contained oodles of ancient memorials to high status people, from about
the 9th to the 11th Centuries. They were contained in a heart-shaped graveyard, round about the
old original church, built at the start of the 6th Century. You see toppling Alt Clut, didn't
mean the end of the Britons, but a change. Moving up river from Alt Clut, the rock of the Clyde, they came
and based themselves in the valley of the Clyde, Strath Clut. They were now the Strathclyde Britons.
They were what the English of their day might have called Cumberland.
The Strathclyde Britons would have still shared language and culture with their southern countrymen,
who became the Welsh. In fact I've heard these people called the Strathclyde Welsh,
but some of the monuments that you'll see displayed inside this church,
show that of the high status folk being memorialised, some of them were Viking.
Kings of Strathclyde have also married royalty of Picts and Scots. The landscape was gradually
changing. See that Shakespeare play? It means that you'll all have heard of Scottish kings like
Macbeth and Duncan and Malcolm, and it was around that 11th Century that the Kingdom of Strathclyde
came under the control of Scottish kings, although it was a process, rather than an event.
Twenty years after his invasion of England in 1066, William the Conqueror completed his Doomsday Book,
cataloguing his land, but Carlisle wasn't yet part of it. By the 12th Century, when David the
First of Scotland brought Walter Fitz Allan north, and gave him lands just south and west of here,
he chose a knight from Brittany, to control the people who'd been Strathclyde Britons.
Little did he know, that that family would go on to form the Stuart monarchs.
Sometimes we forget the Britons in their role that they had in the development of Scotland.
Even The Proclaimers didn't mention them in Scotland's story.
Maybe it was difficult to find a rhyme. I don't know. They seem to have disappeared,
along with their language and culture don't they? Now it's not their genetic code disappeared,
after all we're all ultimately Africans and we've all got a little bit of Neanderthal genetic code in
us as well, so when our colonial cousins do their 23andme tests and stuff like that, they're bound
to find remnants of the Strathclyde Britons in there somewhere too, and of course the culture
isn't entirely gone either. Remember they shared a little culture with what we call
the Welsh and the Cornish, and maybe that's why King Arthur's associated with all three places.
One of the ancient Welsh manuscripts y Gododdin, I think that's how you pronounce it,
came from what we now call Scotland and I know every Scot doesn't feel British, but the British
were part of the people who made Scotland. If you want to understand more about the people who made Scotland,
then click the link coming up on screen now. In the meantime, tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh.
Tiorridh an drasda.