- The Early Celts in Scotland -
prt:uswric Celts living in Scotland, and the final section will try to show how a study
of recent highland society can throw light on that of its iron age forebears.
CELTIC LANGUAGES IN NORTH-WEST EUROPE
As is explained more fully in Ci.apter 2 the modern Celtic languages divide into two
families; the p-Celtic group includes Welsh, Cornish and Breton while the q-Celtic
group includes Scottish and Irish Gaelic and the old Manx language of the Isle of
Man. A simple illustration of the difference is the Old Welsh map meaning 'a youth'
which is equivalent to the Gaelic mac, originally maquos (Watson 1926: 2). When the
two language groups split apart in this way is not so clear but it must have been well
before the Iron Age since both the continental Celtic names recorded by classical
writers and the Celtic place-names surviving in those parts of Europe and Britain
showing archaeological traces of the Celts are of p-Celtic type (Piggott 1965: 173 and
figs 95-7: Jackson 1953). This was first demonstrated more than four centuries ago
by the Scot George Buchanan (1582).
It will immediately be obvious that there is a problem with linking the historical
Celtic peoples of Ireland and highland Scotland -who spoke q-Celtic Gaelic dialects
- with the iron age p-Celtic-speakers who (if language is a good guide) had been
separated from them since at least as far back as the Bronze Age. One can only
provisionally assume that the long linguistic separation did not cause other aspects
of the two groups of Celtic societies to diverge too much.
Early Accounts
There are a number of early historical traditions about who the first peoples
of Scotland were. After the movement into Argyll of Gaelic-speaking Scots from
Ireland from about AD 500 onwards (and before the coming of the Norsemen) it
was understood that the other peoples of Alba (then meaning Britain as a whole)
were the Cruithne, the Saxons and the Britons (Watson 1926: ch. I). Cruithne later
meant 'Picts' but originally meant 'Britons', or 'Pretani' in the original form. The
Cruithne, or 'northern Britons', were also apparently in north-east Ireland before
being supplanted by the Gaels, and such close links with Ulster may be confirmed by
the fact, known from a contemporary source, that the powerful Brigantes tribe lived
both in northern England and eastern Ireland at the end of the first century (Rivet
1978: fig. I).Early Place-names in Scotland
There is also abundant evidence from surviving place-names that a people speaking a
p-Celtic language inhabited the southern and eastern lowlands of Scotland in ancient
times and this is confirmed by historical evidence, both from the Iron Age itself
(below, p. 656) and for the existence of the British kingdom of Strathclyde in
south-western Scotland until well on in the first millennium AD (Duncan 1975: 63ff.).
Watson gave the first systematic account of the subject (1926: ch. II), both in terms