Female royal burials at Govan

Early medieval cross-slab at Govan, re-used in modern times when it was inscribed with the initials A.R.I.R. From Stirling-Maxwell’s Sculptured Stones in the Kirkyard of Govan (1899).

There is little doubt that the kirkyard of Govan Old Parish Church was a burial ground for the kings of Strathclyde from the ninth to eleventh centuries AD. Some of the surviving carved stones may have marked the graves not only of the kings themselves but also of other members of the royal family – queens, princes and princesses.

Although we cannot identify any particular stone as a royal grave-marker, the chances are that the largest and most ornately carved examples represent this category: the hogbacks, the Sarcophagus, and perhaps some of the finer recumbent slabs.

In this blogpost I’d like to indulge in some idle musing on a specific question: how many queens of Strathclyde were buried at Govan? It’s a question that cannot be answered with any measure of certainty, but it’s probably worth a rough guess. I started to think about it a few weeks ago, while writing about a much earlier princess of the kingdom.

My starting-point is a list of kings who ruled the Clyde Britons from 870 onwards. In that year, the old royal stronghold at Dumbarton was sacked by Vikings and the centre of the kingdom moved upstream to Govan and Partick.

The following list can also be viewed in ‘family tree’ format in an older blogpost.

Artgal, son of Dyfnwal [slain by Vikings in 872 while being held captive in Dublin]
Rhun, son of Artgal [married to a Pictish princess]
Eochaid, son of Rhun [king of the Picts c.877 to 889, but may have ended his days in Strathclyde as king of the Britons]
Dyfnwal [possibly a brother, son or nephew of Eochaid]
Owain, son of Dyfnwal [fought at the great battle of Brunanburh in 937]
Dyfnwal, son of Owain [died 975. His queen is the subject of Jim Ferguson's story The Bride Of King Dyfnwal]
Mael Coluim (‘Malcolm’), son of Dyfnwal [died 997]
Owain, son of Dyfnwal [died 1015]
Owain ‘the Bald’ [fought at the battle of Carham-on-Tweed in 1018]
Mael Coluim [a prince of Strathclyde, possibly a son or grandson of Owain the Bald, who briefly replaced Macbethad (Macbeth) as king of Scotland in 1054. May have ended his days in Strathclyde as king of the Britons - perhaps as their last king]

If the bones of the above men lie in the churchyard of Govan Old, then it’s a reasonable inference that their wives are also buried there. This would give us a rough figure of 10 graves of queens, without taking into account the possibility that some kings were married more than once, and without allowing for other variables (such as burial in another cemetery). Unfortunately, we don’t know the names of any of these women.

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Note 1: Princesses
Queens would not have been the only royal females buried at Govan. The churchyard undoubtedly holds the graves of princesses – sisters and daughters of kings – but we cannot even venture a wildly approximate guess at their numbers. Some princesses would have been betrothed to men in neighbouring kingdoms via political marriages arranged by their respective families. Their graves presumably lie outside Strathclyde, and in some cases outside mainland Britain. Others would have been married to powerful noblemen within Strathclyde, in which case their graves could lie in distant corners of the kingdom, far from the church at Govan where they would have worshipped as children.

Note 2: Artgal’s queen
Assuming that King Artgal’s wife was captured at the siege of Dumbarton and taken as a high-value prisoner to Viking Dublin, she may have died alongside him when he was murdered there in 872. If, however, she was released alive (perhaps after being ransomed by her son Rhun) she may have seen out her remaining years at the new royal settlement in Govan, where her grave might even be the first female royal burial in the churchyard.

Note 3: Rhydderch’s wife
Rhydderch, son of the Dyfnwal who died in 975, is omitted from the above list of kings because the historical record suggests that the kingship passed to his brother Mael Coluim. No source calls Rhydderch a king, so I’m assuming his wife wasn’t a queen. In 971, this couple were hit by tragedy when their daughter was raped (and possibly murdered) by the Scottish king Cuilen, whom Rhydderch later killed in revenge.

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References

Alan Macquarrie, ‘The Kings of Strathclyde, c.400-1018′, pp.1-19 in A. Grant & K. Stringer (eds) Medieval Scotland: Crown, Lordship & Community (Edinburgh, 1993)

Tim Clarkson, The Men of the North: the Britons of Southern Scotland (Edinburgh, 2010), pp.159-93 [on the kingdom of Strathclyde]

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Govan Conservation Area

Fairfield shipyard offices

Last month I was delighted to receive a couple of beautifully designed postcards from Govan. They were a gift from Geraldine Greene, an artist involved in a number of Govan-based projects. One card shows the frontage of the former Fairfield Shipyard offices; the other shows a close-up of ornamental stonework on a building at Water Row. The images are screen-printed onto a sturdy material which has a wonderful texture and a kind of antique feel.

Ship’s prow and Zephyrs: ornamental stonework at Water Row.

These cards are limited editions so I feel very honoured by the gift. Geraldine tells me a third card was also produced but got distributed so quickly that there weren’t any left. She did however send me a digital copy (see below). It’s a view of the area known as Govan Cross, with the Aitken Memorial Fountain in front of the new parish church (‘new’ as in ‘built in 1883′).

Govan Cross: Aitken Memorial Fountain and new parish church.

All three cards were produced at The Portal, a community arts venue inhabiting six formerly derelict shops. The Portal is one of a number of projects undertaken by Central Govan Action Plan (CGAP), a key agency in Glasgow City Council’s plans for the regeneration of Govan. CGAP commissioned the three postcards, intending them to highlight the work currently being done to preserve Govan’s rich architectural heritage. One aspect of this work is the Govan Cross Townscape Heritage Initiative whose remit covers the features shown in two of the postcards. The THI is supported by the City Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund, and one of its aims is to ‘bring history to life, offer opportunities to learn about and promote Govan’s rich heritage, and provide training and job opportunities linked to the conservation of traditional buildings and historic environments’.

Screen-printing postcards at The Portal.

An important bedrock of the regeneration process is central Govan’s designation as a Conservation Area, a formal acknowledgement by the City Council that this is ‘an area of special architectural or historic interest, the character or appearance of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance’. Conservation Area status puts Govan in a group with 22 other places around the city that are recognised as having unique heritage features worthy of protection. Raising awareness of this is one of the aims of the postcards, which mention the Conservation Area on the back (see image below).

Reverse of the Water Row postcard

The Govan Conservation Area comprises most of the central part of the town. It extends westward from the edge of the Riverside Housing Estate to the Victorian green space of Elder Park. Three of the four features associated with the early medieval period are included within it: the old parish church (‘Govan Old’) with its stunning collection of sculpture; the line of the processional pathway of the kings of Strathclyde; and the route to the ancient ford at the end of Water Row, leading to the royal residence at Partick on the north bank. The presumed site of the ceremonial mound known as Doomster Hill, now largely hidden beneath the Riverside Estate, lies just outside the Conservation Area but gets a mention in the appraisal document drawn up in support of the designation.

A page on the city council’s website defines a Conservation Area Appraisal (CAA) as ‘a vital tool to enable the active management of the conservation area. It identifies the area’s special features and changing needs through a process which includes researching its historical development, carrying out a detailed townscape analysis and preparing a character assessment.’

The Govan CAA gives a rather neat and useful summary of the town’s richly layered history, starting with the traditional view of its beginnings:
‘The origins of Govan as a settlement are believed to pre-date that of Glasgow, with the formation of a monastery by St Constantine around 564 AD on or near the site of Govan Old Parish Church….’
These words introduce the reader to a period when Govan was the principal royal settlement or ‘capital’ of the kingdom of Strathclyde (c.870-1050 AD). The archaeological excavations undertaken at the old parish church get a quick mention, as do the sculptured stones and the mysterious Doomster Hill. There then follows a tour through later times in which the royal capital dwindled in status to become a country village before re-emerging in the 19th century as one of the great industrial powerhouses of the world. Although necessarily brief, the historical summary in the Govan CAA gives a good overview of 1500 years of continuous settlement and activity around one of the most important crossing-points on the Clyde. Anyone interested in reading it can download a copy from this page at the Get Into Govan website.

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Notes

I am grateful to Geraldine Greene for sending me the two postcards and the other images used in this blogpost.

The cards are so nicely produced that I expect I’m not the only person who hopes to see more in the series. Perhaps Geraldine will design another three? I guess we’ll have to watch this space and keep our fingers crossed.

Geraldine is one of the project leaders on Weaving Truth With Trust, a heritage-related project closely associated with the Govan Stones.

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A Govanite on the Scottish throne

Earl Siward (from a painting by James Smetham, 1861)

The title of this blogpost should really be turned into a question: Did a man from Govan become king of Scotland? It takes us into a rather obscure period of Scottish history, a period less well-known than the age of Bruce or the Stewart monarchs, but I believe we can glean enough information to answer the question with a cautious Yes.

Our starting-point is the year 1018, when a great battle was fought at Carham on the River Tweed. On the losing side was an English army led by the Earl of Bamburgh, fighting on behalf of their half-Danish, half-Polish king Cnut (‘Canute’). The victors were the Scottish king Mael Coluim (‘Malcolm’) and his ally Owain the Bald, king of Strathclyde. It was a famous battle, possibly with far-reaching consequences, one of which may have been that the Tweed became the Border between England and Scotland.

Owain and his people weren’t Gaelic-speakers like their Scottish allies. They were known simply as ‘Britons’, and their language was basically a northern dialect of Welsh. It gave us place-names we still recognize today, such as Rhyn-frwd (Renfrew), Llanerch (Lanark) and Glasgu (Glasgow). But the people of the Clyde weren’t ‘Welsh’ in the sense of being ‘from Wales’. Even when their English enemies referred to them as ‘Strathclyde Welsh’, this simply meant that their speech sounded similar (in English ears) to the language of Wales. The Britons of Strathclyde belonged firmly to the North, just like the Scots. They called themselves ‘Britons’, but they also used another word: Cumbri (‘Cumbrians’) which translates roughly as ‘fellow countrymen’.

Carham-on-Tweed is the last battle in which the ‘Cumbrians’ or Strathclyde Britons are listed among the participants. Nor do we hear anything more of Owain the Bald, although there is no reason to believe that he died in the battle. Some historians think he may have been the last king of Strathclyde, and that the kingdom was taken over by the Scots soon after 1018. Others, including myself, see the kingdom continuing for another generation at least. At the heart of the matter is the identity of a mysterious figure called Mael Coluim who makes a brief appearance in history in 1054. In that year, the English king Edward (‘The Confessor’) sent one of his most able commanders, the Danish warlord Earl Siward, to Scotland. The campaign was noted in the contemporary Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

‘At this time Earl Siward went with a great army into Scotland, with both a fleet and a land-force, and he fought against the Scots, and put to flight their king Macbethad, and he slew all that were best in the land, and brought back much plunder, such as no man had ever obtained.’

Macbethad is the historical character behind Shakespeare’s villainous ‘Macbeth’. In reality, he was a wise ruler who knew how to play the tricky game of eleventh-century politics. Having married a woman of royal blood (probably after slaying her husband, his own cousin) he got close enough to the Scottish crown to make a bid for it. In 1040, he toppled King Donnchad (Shakespeare’s ‘Duncan’) and placed himself on the throne.

Fourteen years later, however, he had to face the onslaught of Earl Siward, described as ‘almost a giant in stature, and of strong hand and mind’. Despite being a competent warlord in his own right, and even with a bunch of tough Norman knights at his side, Macbethad was soundly defeated. He fled the battlefield, and probably went into exile, no doubt getting as far away from Siward as he could.

The 19th century actor Edwin Forrest as Macbeth

When the English counted the bodies on the battlefield they discovered Siward’s own son among the slain. A messenger was sent to bring the grievous news to the Earl.
‘Did he receive the mortal wound in front of his body, or behind?’ asked Siward.
‘In front,’ the messenger replied.
‘I rejoice wholly,’ said Siward, ‘for I would deem myself or my son worthy of no meaner death.’

The Scottish throne was now effectively vacant, but Edward the Confessor had already selected Macbethad’s replacement. The English chronicler John of Worcester, writing in the twelfth century but drawing on earlier sources, tells us that Siward ‘as the king had commanded, set up as king Mael Coluim, son of the king of the Cumbrians’ (Malcolmum, regis Cumbrorum filium, ut rex jusserat, regem constituit).

In 1054 the term ‘Cumbrians’ was synonymous with ‘Strathclyde Britons’, so Mael Coluim was a royal prince of Strathclyde. His name, however, is Gaelic rather than Welsh, so perhaps he was of mixed Cumbrian-Scottish parentage. His mother may have been a Scottish princess, maybe a daughter of the Scottish king Mael Coluim who had fought alongside the Britons at Carham in 1018. Did the Scottish Mael Coluim marry his daughter to his ally Owain the Bald? If so, then it is possible that the Cumbrian Mael Coluim of 1054 was Owain’s son, named in honour of his Scottish grandfather.

To be a son of ‘the king of the Cumbrians’, Mael Coluim must have been born when his father was still reigning on the Clyde, at a time before the kingdom of the Britons fell to the Scots. The capital of Strathclyde was Govan, where the royal family worshipped in an old church beside the river, and where they held important ceremonies on the huge mound called Doomster Hill. I think it very likely that Mael Coluim was born at Govan, or perhaps in the royal palace of Partick on the opposite bank, and that he recited his childhood prayers in the church where Govan Old stands today. He may have stood with his father on the summit of the Doomster Hill on days of great ceremony.

In 1054, he became king of Scotland. He was the second man of mixed Cumbrian-Scottish blood to achieve this status, but probably the only Govanite to do so.

Sadly, his reign lasted no more than a year, maybe even less. His position was severely weakened by the death of his patron and protector, Earl Siward, sometime in 1055. In the ensuing uncertainty Macbethad returned from exile, no doubt with help from anti-English factions at the Scottish court. Mael Coluim was removed from the kingship and was either assassinated or forced to flee. If he managed to escape Macbethad’s vengeance, he may have sought refuge with friends in England, perhaps with Siward’s former henchmen. Or he may have gone back to his father’s old kingdom on the Clyde, back home to Govan, to see out his remaining years in what was probably the land of his birth.

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Notes

The events of 1054 involving Mael Coluim ‘son of the king of the Cumbrians’ are discussed by Alex Woolf in his book From Pictland to Alba, 789-1070 (Edinburgh, 2007), pp.262-3 and by me in The Men of the North: the Britons of Southern Scotland (Edinburgh, 2010), pp.191-2.

To see why ‘Cumbria’ had the same meaning as ‘Strathclyde’ in early medieval times, check out this piece I wrote a couple of years ago, neatly reproduced by Diane McIlmoyle at her blog.

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The Dumb Proctor of Lochwinnoch

The main cemetery for the community of Lochwinnoch in Renfrewshire sits high on a hillside on the edge of the village, above the west bank of the River Calder. Among the numerous memorials and tombstones is a strange-looking object known as the ‘Dumb Proctor’ which stands like a sentinel among the graves of the Ewing family. The old Scots word ‘proctor’, a shortened form of ‘procurator’, refers (in most instances) to a religious official. This one is ‘dumb’ because it’s made of sandstone. It does indeed resemble a stooping, hooded figure. To local historian Derek Parker, who described the stone some years ago, it seemed like “a brooding monk silently summoning sinners to repentance”.

‘a brooding monk’

The front of the stone is dominated by a large boss in the upper section, below which is a serpent. Beneath the serpent is a horseman, now much weathered, above a square panel containing five horizontal bars. A report from 1890 described a border of Celtic interlace but no trace of any such pattern is visible today. On the reverse is the lower part of a large human figure wearing a long tunic or robe.

Although the Dumb Proctor was once regarded as mysterious, we now know that it is a Christian monument of the early medieval period. The serpent is the last survivor of a quartet which once formed a cross around the central boss. These creatures symbolize redemption and rebirth, the analogy being the periodic shedding of their old skin. Arranged in a cross-shape they display the Christianity of the wealthy patrons who commissioned the stone. Likewise, the large figure carved on the back may represent the Crucified Christ, by analogy with examples from elsewhere.

The horseman, although now indistinct, conforms to a type seen on stones of the ‘Govan School’ of sculpture. Govan appears to have been the premier stonecarving centre in the kingdom of Strathclyde during the 9th-11th centuries. Artistic styles developed at Govan were disseminated throughout the kingdom, appearing on monuments in frontier regions such as Ayrshire and the shores of Loch Lomond. The area around Lochwinnoch must at one time have lain within the kingdom’s southwestern border, probably close to an interface between the Strathclyde Britons and the Gaelic-speaking Gall Gaidhil who had been colonising Ayrshire since the 9th century. Lochwinnoch lay on an important route connecting the core of Strathclyde to the Irish Sea coastlands. It is possible that the Dumb Proctor was originally placed as a wayside cross along this route, perhaps to mark a boundary. The horseman – a mounted warrior – indicates that this was a secular monument rather than an ecclesiastical one.

The Dumb Proctor owes its current shape to alterations made since its discovery in the early 19th century. It was unearthed in a field on the old farm of the Ewings, who placed it in their garden before re-shaping it as a gravestone. How much of the monument was lost during this process is unknown, for there is no contemporary illustration from the time of discovery. Nevertheless, the surviving portion was correctly identified as the upper part of a free-standing cross as far back as 1890. More recently, Alan Macquarrie proposed that the cross-head was probably similar to others of the Govan sculptural style, such as the still-intact example from Barochan (now in Paisley Abbey). The device of four serpents emerging from a central boss is reminiscent of the Sun Stone at Govan.

A reconstruction drawing of the Dumb Proctor appears on page 17 in the published version of Alan Macquarrie’s Govan Lecture for 2005. This was redrawn by Ingrid Shearer for a new book by Derek Alexander and Gordon McCrae on the history of Renfrewshire. My own attempt at a reconstruction can be seen below. It’s how I imagine the Dumb Proctor might have looked today if it still had its cross-head (in which case I suppose it wouldn’t look much like a proctor at all).

My ‘reconstruction’ of the Dumb Proctor.

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Notes & references

All photographs and illustrations in this blogpost are copyright © T Clarkson.

Alan Macquarrie, Crosses and Upright Monuments in Strathclyde: Typology, Dating and Purpose (Govan: Friends of Govan Old, 2006), pp.17-18

Derek Alexander & Gordon McCrae, Renfrewshire: a Scottish County’s Hidden Past (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2012), pp.91-2.
[In my opinion, this book is an essential resource for anyone researching the kingdom of Strathclyde]

Derek Parker, ‘The Timeless Message of the Dumb Proctor’, Chatterbox, no.180 (2008)
[Chatterbox is a newsletter published by Lochwinnoch Community Council]

See also the entry for the Dumb Proctor on the Canmore database.

Allen and Anderson’s Early Christian Monuments of Scotland makes no mention of the Dumb Proctor, despite including Renfrewshire’s other surviving monuments of the Govan School. The Lochwinnoch volume of Archaeological and Historical Collections Relating to the County of Renfrew (the 1890 report mentioned above) had recognized the Proctor as an early Christian stone a dozen years before the compilation of ECMS. Were Allen and Anderson unaware of this?

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Govan’s textile heritage

A new project relating to the history of Govan gets its official launch on Saturday 2nd February at Govan Old Parish Church. Weaving Truth With Trust is a collaboration between community groups, artists and archaeologists to create a textile screen depicting key aspects from Govan’s rich history. The project will also celebrate the town’s longstanding links with textile manufacture, a connection reaching back to the handloom weavers who lived and worked in Govan when it was still a rural village. ‘Weaving Truth With Trust’ was the motto of the Govan Weavers Society in times past.

The project leaders are archaeologist Ingrid Shearer (of Northlight Heritage) and artists Geraldine Greene, Fiona Fleming and Alexandra Bowie.

When finished, the textile screen will hang inside Govan Old near the sculptured monuments of the kingdom of Strathclyde. Artistry from different eras, expressed through the different media of cloth and sandstone, will thus be brought together to commemorate more than 1000 years of local creativity.

The launch event on 2nd February will include short talks, an exclusive film screening, song, poetry and visual arts. See the flyer below for more information (click on the image to enlarge).

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Take a look at the Weaving Truth With Trust website.
Follow the project on Twitter and Facebook.

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Romancing the Govan Stones

The Govan Sarcophagus (Photo © B Keeling)

Here’s an excellent opportunity to learn about the history and archaeology of early medieval Govan.

Romancing the Govan Stones: Archaeological Explorations of an Ancient British Capital, a talk by Professor Stephen Driscoll (University of Glasgow) at 6.30pm on Tuesday 22 January in the Pearce Institute, Govan.

Prof Driscoll’s talk will be followed by another on heritage-led regeneration: Govan – Recovering the Place, presented by planning consultant David Robertson.

This is the first in a series of free ‘Winter Warmer’ events organised by Govan Cross Townscape Heritage Initiative. Further information can be found at the Get Into Govan website or on the flyer below.

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Picts at Govan

Pictish warriors on a stone at Aberlemno in Angus (Photo © B Keeling)

The sculptured stones at Govan Old Parish Church are sometimes inaccurately described as ‘Pictish’, probably because their carvings share similarities with those we see on genuine Pictish stones in Perthshire and elsewhere. It is certainly true that the Govan stonemasons borrowed ideas from their Pictish counterparts, but the territory in which they lived was not part of Pictland, nor were its inhabitants Picts. At the time when the stones were carved (9th to 11th centuries AD) Govan was the royal capital of the kingdom of Strathclyde, the last surviving realm of the Cumbri or North Britons.

Before the Romans invaded Britain in the 1st century AD, the ancestors of the Cumbri and the ancestors of the Picts were members of an indigenous population that inhabited the whole of Britain. All of these natives were known to the Roman invaders as ‘Britons’. Among their most famous representatives in Roman times were the fierce Queen Boudica and the rebellious warlord Caractacus. But 400 years of Roman military occupation left its mark and, when Rome withdrew in the early 5th century, these ‘Ancient Britons’ were no longer seen as one people. A large proportion of those in the far north were now referred to as Picti, ‘Picts’, which probably means ‘The Painted Ones’. The rest continued to call themselves ‘Britons’ but began also to use another term, Combrogi, which later became Cymry and which means ‘fellow countrymen’. The present-day Welsh – last modern remnant of the native Britons – still use Cymry when referring to themselves in their own language, and their country is Cymru (pronounced Cum-ree). Their former fellow-countrymen in the north used a similar term, Cumbri, but little trace of them survives today in their ancient territories in southern Scotland. However, their name lives on in the English county of Cumbria which was the southernmost province of the kingdom of Strathclyde a thousand years ago.

The people who commissioned the Govan stones, and the craftsmen who carved them, were therefore not Picts but Cumbri or North Britons. They spoke a language that we now usually refer to as Cumbric, basically a northern dialect of Welsh. Cumbric and Welsh, like Gaelic, were members of the Celtic language family but belonged to a separate branch known today as Brittonic or Brythonic. At one time, the Picts also spoke a Brittonic language, but around AD 800 they began to adopt the Gaelic speech of the Scots of Argyll and, by c.900, they were even starting to call themselves ‘Scots’. Their country – ‘Pictland’ – became known as Alba, still used today as the Gaelic name for Scotland.

So, the Govanites of 1000 years ago were not Picts. Nor can the carved stones in the ancient royal church be accurately described as ‘Pictish’. In fact, we know of only two instances when Picts were seen at Govan. The first was in 756, when a combined army of Picts and Northumbrian English attacked the Britons of the Clyde. The invaders besieged the great Rock of Dumbarton (Dun Breatann, ‘Fortress of the Britons’) and forced its king to capitulate. It seems that the Anglo-Pictish army assembled at Govan to receive the formal surrender. The second instance came in the following century, after a Viking raid on Dumbarton in 870 prompted the royal dynasty of the Britons to transfer the seat of royal power to Govan. A king called Rhun (prounounced ‘Rhinn’) was probably the first to rule from the new centre. His queen, whose name we do not know, was a Pict, a daughter of the Pictish king Cináed mac Ailpín (‘Kenneth MacAlpin’). She almost certainly worshipped in the church at Govan and was probably buried in the kirkyard beneath a finely carved tombstone.

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Notes

The ‘Welshness’ of the kingdom of the Clyde Britons is not in doubt. As well as plenty of evidence in the form of place-names and the names of kings, we have written testimony from the time. To their neighbours in Northumbria, the Govanites of a thousand years ago were Straecledwealas, ‘Strathclyde Welsh’, an Old English term found in the 10th-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Although I here describe the present-day Welsh as the ‘last modern remnant’ of the native Britons, this is not meant to exclude those people in Cornwall who proudly claim native British ancestry. It is, however, meant to apply to mainland Britain alone, and therefore excludes the Bretons (whose ancestors migrated to Brittany in the 5th century AD).

I’ve looked at the ‘ethnicity’ and cultural identity of early medieval Strathclyde in an earlier blogpost: People, Place & Memory. A fuller treatment of the topic can be found in my book The Men of the North: the Britons of Southern Scotland.

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