The Celts
Celtic Scotland and Wales
If the evidence for the Celts is illusive in England, it may become clearer in Scotland and Wales, traditionally considered Celtic nations.
Brochs
In the Shetland Islands are the largest and most mysterious monuments of Celtic Britain, which look like modern cooling towers but are 2,000 years old. They are called brochs, and there are 500 of them in Scotland. Most are now derelict, but Mousa Broch is still in one piece. This amazing stone tower is more than 40 feet (12.2 metres) high and built without an ounce of mortar.
Brochs were constructed to house single families. Interiors were divided into communal space, hearth and water tank, and they would have had timber furnishings. The entire landscape for miles about could be surveyed from the parapet at the top, and attackers could be seen coming from a long way off.
Brochs were built in Scotland between 600 and 200 BC – at the peak of Celtic expansion in Europe. They were obviously not built by barbarians, but if not, then by whom? It’s not clear. But standing on Mousa makes one thing plain: the sea was the highway of the Celtic world. The people living in Mousa Broch expected all visitors – friend or foe – to arrive by sea. The British Isles, surrounded by this ancient highway, was open to all comers.
Castell Henllys
War was a major feature of Celtic society in both Britain and Europe; fortifications were everywhere. The most obvious physical remains in Britain are hill forts – some huge like Maiden Castle in Dorset, but many quite small.
Castell Henllys in Pembrokeshire is a Celtic fortified settlement that has been fully excavated and rebuilt on the foundations of the original. The family clan who would have lived there were local gentry, and would have farmed an area of just a few square miles. According to archaeologist Phil Bennett, ‘To build a round house like the ones at Castell Henllys, you would have needed lots of resources. So the person who lived here would have been locally important.’
The Roman sources suggest that there was a tribe in this area called the Demetae. But the fact that so many individual forts are located close together suggests that there probably wasn’t any centralised leadership. Instead this was likely to have been a clan-based society rather than a tribal one.
One of the most dramatic features at Castell Henllys was the placing of rocks to slow down attackers to the fort. Called a cheval-de-frise (literally ‘Frisian horse’), it consists of a series of small stones set on end, almost like an Iron-Age tank trap. If you did manage to attack through it, you’d get another nasty surprise: a huge hoard of stones for slingshots was found by the main gate. Masses of such stones have been found on hill forts in the area – there were more than 2,000 in just one cache at Castell Henllys.
Many of the features of Celtic life practised at Castell Henllys and elsewhere were not chronicled by the Romans. We are told that the Celts were fearsome warriors, but they were farmers, too, growing wheat, barley, peas and beans. The practical iron tools they made, similar to ones that we use to this day, made Celtic agriculture highly efficient. In fact, grain production was so good that the British Celts exported wheat and barley to the Romans. Ironically this export trade made Britain an attractive target for Roman expansion.
Celtic language
The Celts had no written language to tell their tale. However, their spoken language is perhaps the biggest clue to their existence and it is alive today, handed down through countless generations of their descendants. Today two million people claim to speak a Celtic language, and the largest single number of regular speakers are Welsh.
According to Professor Patrick Sims-Williams of Aberystwyth University, ‘One language was spoken, with slight variations, over the whole of Britain, and it carried on into France as well.’
The professor believes that a tribe that we’ve already encountered in Yorkshire – the Parisii, who were responsible for the Wetwang chariot burials – are significant: ‘Exactly the same name occurs around Paris. Now some of these names may be the same without coming from the same people, but the ones known as Parisii in Yorkshire and France were both using chariot burial, so the French ones may actually be the same type of people who migrated.’
Celtic languages on the Continent disappeared with the Roman invasion, but fragments of ancient Gaulish inscriptions have survived. Is it possible to compare them with modern Welsh and find a link? According to Professor Sims-Williams, the answer is yes: ‘Matt, which means “good” or “lucky”, turns up in later Welsh as mard – a slight change but it’s still recognised as “lucky”. And another Gaulish word catus, which means “battle”, turns up as cad in modern Welsh. This tells us that there was once a linguistic community of almost identical languages spoken in France and in Britain.’
So with Welsh and Gaelic and the few other surviving remnants of Celtic languages, do we see the last vestiges of something that was once Europe wide? ‘I think we do,’ says Professor Sims-Williams. ‘We’re talking about the language that spread – with slight variations, of course – all the way from Portugal to the Black Sea and even into Turkey. But it has only survived on the Atlantic fringe.’
