THE EARLIEST TRIBES

HE first inhabitants of Britain were not Celts. Apart from that, we can say very little about them. Archaeological evidence, usually from grave sites, reveals the same patterns of hunting and farming, and of the developments in metalworking, which we find in continental Europe, but there is no clear cultural identity as there is with, say, the ancient Egyptians, even though it could be argued that, in their own way, some of the henges and barrows of the first Britons are as impressive as the Pyramids. In Greek mythology, there was a legend of a land to the north, shrouded in a permanent fog, where the Hyperboreans, the beyond-the-north-wind people, lived. There is some evidence that tin may have been worked from streams and small open-cast workings in Cornwall as early as 2500 BC. There are barrows and burial chambers, quoits and menhirs, stone rows and stone circles; there is the extraordinary alignment of timber posts at Flag Fen in the wetlands of East Anglia, which appears to have been a ritual site from about 1200 BC; and then there are the spectacular sites like Stonehenge (completed about 1500 BC), Avebury and Silbury Hill (although we have convincing evidence that ritual sites like Stonehenge, Flag Fen and Avebury were subsequently used by Celts, it was not Celts who built them). Each tells us something about the pre-Celtic peoples who inhabited Britain, but collectively we still know very little about them.

Nor are we certain when the first Celtic tribes came to Britain. Some time after 250 BC, there is evidence of La Tene culture, which has generally been interpreted as being evidence of either invasion or intense cultural interaction with the tribes of Belgica in Gaul. It is possible that the same Celtic tribal movements around 450 BC which led Celtic tribes south into Italy also led Celtic tribes north into Britain. It is possible that Celtic incursions into Britain

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Began some hundreds of years earlier, although any date earlier than 900 BC appears highly unlikely. Indeed, any specific date before 250 BC, when we have definite evidence of La Tene culture, seems speculative. The generally accepted timetable, vague as it is, is that Goidelic Celts may have settled in Britain and Ireland as early as 900 BC, Brythonic Celts perhaps from about 600 BC, and a wave of Belgae from Gaul from the end of the second century BC.

Britain has an abundance of ancient hillforts, and while it is certain that many of them predate the arrival of the Celts (some show evidence of inhabitation from as early as 1000 BC), it is equally certain that many of them were later occupied by Celtic tribes, with considerable extensions and additions. Some, like that which sits 460 metres (1 500 ft) above sea level on Mam Tor in Derbyshire’s Peak Distria, were probably used in summer only, at times of maximum danger. Some, mostly from later periods, are so small that they are really fortified farms or permanent homesteads, rather than hillforts in the traditional sense. At some stage in the development of hillforts, the Celts introduced a very effective system of double walling; Caesar calls it murus gallicus, ‘the Gallic wall’, and gives a detailed description of how the inner and outer ramparts were separated by an infill of rubble which made the whole construction extremely resistant to penetration - the later wall built by Emperor Hadrian followed the same design principle. Among the best examples of developed hillforts in England are the promontory hillfort at Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire, probably first occupied in about 600 BC; Cissbury and Torberry on the Downs in Sussex; Hembury in Devon, occupied from about 600 to 400 BC; Ingleborough in Yorkshire, and Carrick Fell in Cumbria, both accessible only after a steep climb, but well worth it for the magnificent views; and Hambledon Hill in Dorset, where the ramparts, ditches and walkways have been exceptionally well maintained. Perhaps the most spectacular hillfort in Britain is Tre’r Ceiri, Gwynedd, Wales, which offers commanding vistas across the Menai Strait to Anglesey, down the Lleyn peninsula, and across the mountains towards Harlech.

Llyn Fawr (Great Lake), a sacred lake in Wales, was dredged in 1911 and 1912, and yielded a horde of bronze and iron objects which had been cast into the lake about 650-600 BC, including finely worked harnesses and vehicle fittings in the Hallstatt style, and two bronze cauldrons of local manufacture. Llyn Cerrig Bach (Lake of the Little Rock) in Anglesey produced similar artefacts, clearly votive offerings, but dating from the second century BC through to the first century AD.

Miranda Green describes a more recent find from the fourth century BC which has aroused considerable interest:

In August 1984, a mechanical digger turned up part of a human body in a peat bog at Lindow Moss in Cheshire. The body was that of a young man who had been placed, crouched and face-down, in a shallow pool within the marsh. The man was not a peasant: his fingernails were manicured and his moustache carefully clipped with a razor. . . . His body had been painted in different colours. . . . The young man had been pole-axed, garotted and his throat cut, before being kneed in the back and thrust into the pool. He wore nothing but an armlet of fox fur when he met his death. Just prior to being sacrificed, Lindow Man had consumed a kind of wholemeal bread consisting of many different kinds of grains, perhaps a ritual meal.

The most striking feature of the stomach contents was the presence of mistletoe pollen, which has led to speculation that the man may have been the victim of a druidic sacrifice. . . . Certain Irish mythological stories allude to a ritual threefold killing of the sacral king - by wounding, drowning and burning. It is tempting to link this with the triple injuries to Lindow Man; he was hit on the head, strangled and his throat cut.

If Lindow Man was a British Celtic king, he is the earliest for whom we have any evidence. We do have limited but convincing evidence of trade between Britain and the Mediterranean from the Iron Age onward. Pythias of Marseilles supposedly visited Britain before 300 BC and recorded many details of his visit, only to be branded a liar by later classical authors. There is evidence to suggest that Pythagoreans - perhaps even Pythagoras himself, who had certainly visited India and Africa - might have visited Britain even before 500 BC, but no classical author substantiates that story. Modem archaeology has identified connections between burial practices in the Mame area of eastern Gaul in the early fourth century BC and burial practices in East Yorkshire and Humberside, in both of which obviously wealthy persons were buried alongside two-wheeled chariots; this Arras culture, as it is called, may represent an early migration of a particular tribe or group from Gaul to Britain.

Diodorus Siculus identifies a promontory which he calls Belerion, and within that region a particular island called Ictis, as the centre of the tin trade. From the description of the island and its causeway which is revealed at low tide, we have every reason to believe that the promontory is Cornwall, and that the island is St. Michael’s Mount. However, the ancient and original Cornish name for St. Michael’s Mount is Karrek Loes y'n Koes (Grey Rock in the Wood), which tends to confirm the tradition of a much lower sea level in pre-Roman times, when St. Michael’s Mount would have been not an island, but rather a prominent granite hill on a sloping coastal plain.

Diodorus tells us specifically that the ancient trade route came south ‘across the strait to Gaul’, and that the merchants then made their way through Gaul on foot for some thirty days, bringing their wares on horseback eventually to the mouth of the Rhone. Hengistbury Head, near Christchurch in Dorset, appears from archaeological evidence to have been an important centre for trade with the Mediterranean during the Iron Age and into early Celtic times. Caesar tells us that the trade routes across the English Channel and through Brittany were controlled by the Veneti, a Gallic tribe whose territories were centred around modern Quiberon. Assuming that the wisdom that carrying heavy goods by water is much easier and cheaper than carrying them by land is as much ancient as it is modern, there is an obvious trade route from southern Britain around Ushant and Brittany into the Bay of Biscay and from there directly into the mouth of the Loire and into central Gaul, connecting overland to the upper reaches of the Rhone, or from Biscay further south into the Garonne to Tolosa in the western reaches of Gallia Transalpina, and from there briefly overland to Narbo and Massalia (Marseilles) and the whole of the Mediterranean. For many years, the assumption was that Britain became Celticized by a succession of invasions (and Irish mythology specifically names the tribal successions), but modern archaeology suggests that there was sporadic but significant trade between Britain and the continental mainland, and that Celtic settlement may have come about in a rather more complex way than simply by a series of discrete territorial invasions.