A Narrow Sea

The Irish–Scottish Connection in 120 Episodes

Jonathan Bardon

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780717180592
• eBook ISBN:
  9780717180608
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Based on the popular BBC Radio Ulster series of the same name, A Narrow Sea traces the epic sweep of Ireland's relationship with Scotland, exploring the myriad connections, correlations, personalities and antagonisms that have, over the years, defined the relationship between these two spirited neighbours.Roving freely across the centuries, from the first migrations of the regions' intrepid Mesolithic pioneers, to the grand colonial projects of the Vikings, Normans and Stuarts, this is the dramatic story of how one culture came to found two very different nations and, in doing so, project its influence as far afield as North America and Australasia.In 120 brief and accessible episodes, A Narrow Sea offers a stirring and panoramic view of a connection that has shaped the course of history on both sides of the narrow sea.

EPISODE 1

THE CLASSICAL WORLD LEARNS ABOUT SCOTLAND AND IRELAND

Three hundred and twenty five years before the birth of Christ, Pytheas, a navigator from the Greek colony of Massilia (now the city of Marseille in the south of France) set out on an epic voyage of exploration. He managed to slip past the Carthaginians guarding the Pillars of Hercules, through the Straits of Gibraltar, into the Atlantic Ocean. After making landfall at Cornwall, he set out northwards again. Pytheas, the first man from the Mediterranean to describe the Orkneys, then sailed on towards Iceland and Norway to witness the summer midnight sun, the Northern Lights and icebergs.

Though Pytheas’s account of his explorations does not survive, clearly it circulated widely in his classical world. It gave Mediterranean traders for the first time the correct position of the ‘Pritanic Isles’, the British Isles. Himilco, the Carthaginan, had journeyed to the ‘Tin Isles of Scilly’ 150 years earlier and had warned of dense sea entanglements and threatening sea monsters just beyond Cornwall – by circumnavigating the British Isles Pytheas had proved him wrong.

And what of the peoples inhabiting these islands in the ocean on the far north-western edge of Europe? For a time Paleolithic peoples had been able to settle in the far south of Britain. Scotland and Ireland, however, remained among the last places on earth to be inhabited by human beings. Why? The explanation is the hostile climate: ice sheets, in some places a mile thick, ensured that for thousands of years Britain and Ireland were completely uninhabitable. Only after the last Ice Age was over, about 10,000 years ago, could human beings return to Britain and Ireland.

At Cramond on the Firth of Forth just outside Edinburgh archaeologists excavating an ancient habitation site found burned hazelnut shells in a fire pit. Radiocarbon analysis of the shells, dated at around 8,500 BC, established that this is the earliest habitation site in Scotland that we know of. In exactly the same way, analysis of charred hazelnut shells at Mount Sandel just outside Coleraine confirmed a date of about 7,000 BC. Radiocarbon testing proved that this was not only the oldest human settlement known in Ulster but also, at the time of discovery, in all of Ireland.

Though separated by more than a thousand years, the Stone Age hunter-gatherers of Cramond and Mount Sandel appear to have had very similar lifestyles. Both communities erected large circular huts, each about six metres wide, made of saplings driven into the ground and bent over to form a domed roof by being lashed together, and then covered with bark, deer hide and grass turfs. Pieces of hard stone, chert at Cramond and flint at Mount Sandel, were roughed out into axe heads, arrowheads, knives, hide scrapers and other tools. They lived by harpooning fish, gathering nuts, seeds and berries in season and hunting wild pigs in the wild wood.

The Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), written in the eleventh century AD, claimed that the Gaelic Irish had been led by the sons of Míl directly to Ireland from Spain. A great many of our ancestors did indeed come from Spain but it is much more probable that, instead of attempting to brave Atlantic storms to cross the Bay of Biscay, they worked their way northwards along the west coast of France to cross the Channel over into Britain. From there they and their descendants travelled further north into Scotland. It seems very likely that the first bands of human beings to come to Ireland crossed the North Channel between Galloway and the Ards peninsula or between the Mull of Kintyre and the north Antrim coast, or made their way westwards from the Isle of Man. Indeed, it could be said that the forebears of those who eventually became Irish were – at least for a time – British. There was to be much coming and going across the North Channel, the legendary Straits of Moyle, for century after century, which would do much to shape the history of these islands.

Fresh arrivals brought the latest information from abroad. Knowledge of farming, first developed in the Middle East, arrived more or less at the same time in Ireland and Scotland about 6,000 years ago. Finds of exquisitely crafted brooches, torcs, swords and axes show that the skills of moulding and fashioning gold, copper and bronze were established some 2,000 years later. Around 500 years before the birth of Christ iron was being smelted, cast and forged throughout these islands. By then all the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland were speaking a Celtic language of one form or another.

During the last century before the birth of Christ, Julius Caesar led his legions into Gaul and one by one he conquered the Celtic-speaking tribes there. He then laid plans to invade what Pytheas had called the Pritanic Isles. Caesar called it Britannia and he intended to make it a province of the Roman Empire.

EPISODE 2

AGRICOLA, CALEDONIA AND HIBERNIA

During the spring of AD 43 the King of the Orkneys (an archipelago 16 km off the far north-east of Scotland) made the long and perilous journey by sea to Camulodunum, now the city of Colchester in Essex. This had been the capital of the British tribe, the Trinovantes; now it was a stronghold of the Roman Empire. Here the King – we do not know his name – along with ten other British kings bowed his head in homage before the Emperor Claudius. Julius Caesar had invaded Britain twice, first in 55 BC and again in 54 BC, but on both occasions he had been forced to withdraw. It was Claudius who had overseen the conquest and now he was here in person. He would make sure these kings would accept that Britannia was now a province of the Roman Empire.

That Empire stretched from Egypt and the sands of the Sahara in the south, from Persia and Mesopotamia in the east, and north to the Danube and the Rhine. That the King of the Orkneys had travelled so far south was a striking recognition that he regarded Claudius as ruler of almost all of the known world. Could the Roman Empire expand further to include all of these islands set in the Atlantic Ocean, here on the edge of the world? Could it encompass Scotland, the land the Romans called Caledonia, and that mysterious island to the west, known to the Romans as Hibernia?

One man developed a burning ambition to achieve this goal. Gnaeus Julius Agricola had first been posted as a military tribune to Britannia in AD 61. Here he served under Suetonius Paulinus, leading his cohorts forward during Boudicca’s rebellion to crush the Iceni and Brigantes with unflinching ruthlessness. Rewarded by being given command of the 20th Valeria Victrix Legion, he directed the Irish Sea flotilla. Perhaps it was then he thought that Hibernia was an island worthy of conquest.

Recalled to take up a post in the province of Asia in AD 64, Agricola went on to become Tribune in Rome and after that Governor of Aquitania, a province of Gaul. Then, after 21 years’ absence, Agricola was appointed Governor of Britannia in AD 78. At last he had been given the opportunity to achieve the dream of his youth. First he descended on the Ordovices who had wiped out Roman cavalry stationed in north Wales. He crushed these Britons mercilessly and forced survivors desperately holding out on Mona’s Isle, Anglesey, to make abject submission to the power of Rome. Then in AD 79 Agricola led his legions on to overwhelm what is now the north of England and the following year he crossed the Uplands into Caledonia. Within two years he had established Roman power as far north as the line across the country marked by the Clyde in the west and the Forth in the east. Here, along the forty-mile strip of land between these two rivers, Agricola had a chain of twenty forts built by AD 81. The Britons living south of these forts – the Damnonii, the Novantae, the Selgovae and the Votadini – came to accept Roman rule and their chiefs sent their sons to learn Latin and be schooled in Roman ways.

Could Agricola advance further across the Highland Line to the wild northern regions of Caledonia where mysterious barbarians who tattooed and painted their skins held sway? And surely Hibernia, known for its lush pastures, would be a fine addition to the Empire? In AD 82 Agricola turned west, to that tongue of Scottish mainland closest to Ulster, now known as Galloway, to conquer the British tribes there. It was then that he decided to invade Ireland. Agricola’s son-in-law, Tacitus, informs us that Agricola now planned an invasion of Ireland with a king in exile:

Agricola received in friendly fashion an Irish petty king who had been driven out in a civil war, and kept him for use when opportunity offered. I have often heard him say that Ireland could be conquered and held by one legion and a modest force of auxiliary troops; and that it would be advantageous in dealing with Britain too if Roman forces were on all sides.

Was this king Túathail Techtmar, founder of the Ulster Uí Néill dynasty, 106th King of Ireland and believed to be of mixed Irish and Scottish descent, who had been forced to seek aid in Britain to recover his throne? We cannot be certain. Agricola summoned the Irish Sea flotilla to the Solway Firth and called all available cohorts to Galloway. But the invasion of Ulster never took place. A legion of Germans stationed in Galloway mutinied, and there was disturbing news that the barbarians in the Highlands were massing for an attack southwards. Setting aside his plan to conquer Ireland, Agricola now gathered legions from across the Empire to bring all of Caledonia under Roman rule.

EPISODE 3

‘LOATHSOME HORDES OF SCOTS AND PICTS’

Eighty-four years after the birth of Christ, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, Governor of Britain, led the greatest Roman army ever to appear in Caledonia deep into the Highlands. Facing him at a place called Mons Graupius were 30,000 barbarians, known to the Romans as Picts because they painted and tattooed pictures or ‘picts’ on their bodies. There Agricola won a famous victory the Empire would not forget. According to his son-in-law Tacitus, the Picts lost 10,000 men:

The next day … an awful silence reigned on every hand; the hills were deserted, houses smoking in the distance, and our scouts did not meet a soul.

But it was a hollow victory. The wild Highlands proved beyond the capacity of Rome to subjugate. The Picts were proving themselves far less barbarous than the Romans thought them to be. Occupying the most fertile land in Scotland, they could sustain long campaigns and use to great advantage their intimate knowledge of the glens and hills to harass the enemy with their fierce attacks. Indeed, soon the empire was becoming overstretched. Forty years after Mons Graupius the Romans pulled out of Caledonia altogether and built a wall from the Tyne in the east to the Solway in the west. Painted white with lime to make it visible at a great distance, and reinforced with watch-towers and forts, Hadrian’s Wall took the work of three entire legions over six years before it was completed in AD 122. It was a defensive wall 80 Roman miles (17.5 kilometres) long and 20 feet wide in places (6 metres) and over 11 feet high (3.5 metres). With no equal in all of the rest of the Empire, it was the largest Roman artefact anywhere.

For the next two hundred years Hadrian’s Wall served its purpose well. Then the Roman Empire, weakened by bitter internal disputes and its frontiers overrun by barbarians, began to fall apart. Legion after legion was withdrawn from Britain, many of them sent to defend the River Danube where Germanic tribes from the north and east were massing. One by one the Roman castellae were abandoned. At Inchtuthil, a Roman legion left behind almost one million unused nails, carefully hidden below the floor of a workshop. The Votadini, a British tribe long allied to the Romans, evacuated their great hill fort of Trapian Law in East Lothian on the Scottish borders so rapidly that they abandoned a treasure hoard of immense value. As the fourth century drew to an end, the writer Ammianus Marcellinus chronicled the desperate situation:

At this time, with trumpets sounding for war as if through all the Roman world, the most savage tribes rose up and poured across the nearest frontiers. At one and the same time the Alamanni were plundering Gaul and Raetia; the Sarmatae and Quadri Pannonia; the Picts, Saxons, Scots and Attacotti harassed the Britons with continual calamities.

And who were these Scots mentioned by this Roman author? Scoti – meaning marauders or pirates – was the Latin name the Romans gave to the Gaelic-speaking people in Ireland. Many centuries would pass before the word Scot would mean an inhabitant of that part of Britain north of Hadrian’s Wall or, indeed, before there would be a kingdom of Scotland. And now these Gaelic-speaking Irish, sailing east from Ulster, joined the Picts from the north in pillaging an empire becoming weaker by the year. Gildas, a Briton from Strathclyde who later settled in Wales, described the worsening situation:

Britain was robbed of all her armed forces, her military supplies, her rulers, cruel as they were … Britain remained for many years groaning in a state of shock, exposed for the first time to two foreign tribes of extreme cruelty, the Scots from the north-west, the Picts from the north….

[As]the Romans returned home, the loathsome hordes of Scots and Picts eagerly emerged from their coracles that carried them across the gulf of the sea, like dark swarms of worms that emerge from the narrow crevices of their holes when the sun is high and the weather grows warm. In custom they differed slightly one from another, yet in their single desire for shedding blood they were of one accord, preferring to cover their villainous faces with hair, rather than their private parts and surrounding areas with clothes. Once they learned of the Romans’ departure and their refusal to return, more confident than ever, they seized as settlers the whole northern part of the country as far as the wall.

Hadrian’s Wall proved no defence and the Picts and Scots surged southwards:

What more can I say? The townships and high wall are abandoned; once again the citizens are put to flight; once again they are pursued by the enemy; once again massacres yet more cruel hasten upon them.

On every frontier the Roman Empire was reeling under the attack of peoples from central and northern Europe seeking new corn lands and pastures. Legion after legion was withdrawn from the outposts to defend Rome. All to no avail: Alaric the Goth took Rome itself in AD 410. In the east the Roman Empire, with its capital of Byzantium, would survive for more than 800 years. But the western empire was no more. For the first time in over 800 years, its provinces were being carved into kingdoms by rampaging Germanic peoples, including Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Burgundians, Lombards, Franks and – in eastern and southern Britain – Angles and Saxons.

Those English – described by Gildas, the sixth-century monk, as ‘fierce Saxons, hated by God and men’ – were soon to play their part in shaping the land we now know as Scotland.

EPISODE 4

DALRIADA

During the first century after the birth of Christ the Roman Empire was approaching the height of its power. Its legions overran Britain and advanced north as far as the Highland Line. But Ireland, known to the Romans as Hibernia (the Érainn, the Irish, called their country Ériu) was never to become part of that empire. Here a Celtic-speaking Iron Age society – very similar to that conquered by Julius Caesar in Gaul – survived undisturbed for many centuries.

Ireland was then a land of many kings. They enforced their rule from well-defended forts where high-born men served as a warrior caste riding on horseback, equipped with lances, throwing-spears and short iron swords held in richly decorated bronze scabbards, and defended with large round shields. No doubt several of these warrior kings had been driven westwards out of Gaul and Britain by the might of Rome. All Irish kingdoms had constantly shifting frontiers. Uladh, or Ulster, was then one of the island’s largest. Its capital was at Emain Macha (Navan fort) in Armagh. At the kingdom’s greatest extent its southern frontier ran from the Drowes River flowing into Donegal Bay in the west to the mouth of the River Boyne in the east. During the first centuries after the birth of Christ, however, Ulster was on the defensive. Claiming descent from the legendary Niall of the Nine Hostages (circa 370–450), members of the Uí Néill dynasty had emerged from their north Connacht homeland to thrust eastwards into Meath and northwards over the fords of Erne towards Inishowen. In wild country overlooking the marshland that separates the Inishowen peninsula from the rest of Donegal, the Uí Néill built the Grianán of Aileach. From this imposing circular hill fort, constructed massively of stone with inset stairways, wall passages and triple earthen bank defences, the power of the northern Uí Néill would in time extend over much of the rest of Ulster – but never including the lands along the western shores of the Narrow Sea.

About the middle of the fifth century Emain Macha fell to the northern Uí Néill. The over-kingdom of the Ulaidh gradually shrank to little more than the modern counties of Antrim and Down. Yet this shrinking provincial kingdom in the north-east of Ireland was intimately connected with the wider Gaelic world of Argyll and the inner isles of the Hebrides, west of Scotland. For a considera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Episode 1: The Classical World learns about Scotland and Ireland
• Episode 2: Agricola, Caledonia and Hibernia
• Episode 3: ‘Loathsome hordes of Scots and Picts’
• Episode 4: Dalriada
• Episode 5: The Dove of the Church
• Episode 6: Iona
• Episode 7: Vikings
• Episode 8: Cináed mac Ailpín, the Kingdom of Alba and the Stone of Scone
• Episode 9: The eastern coastlands of the Narrow Sea: Norman infiltration
• Episode 10: The western coastlands of the Narrow Sea: Norman conquest
• Episode 11: De Courcy and de Lacy
• Episode 12: The Earldom of Ulster
• Episode 13: Normans making their home in Scotland and Ireland
• Episode 14: The Red Earl and the ‘Hammer of the Scots’
• Episode 15: Robert the Bruce takes refuge on Rathlin
• Episode 16: The road to Bannockburn and Larne
• Episode 17: ‘Wasting and ravaging’: Edward Bruce in Ireland
• Episode 18: ‘In this Bruce’s time … falsehood and famine and homicide filled the country’
• Episode 19: Hebridean warriors: gallóglaigh seek their fortunes across the Narrow Sea
• Episode 20: From the Isles to the Glynns: the rise of Clan Donald
• Episode 21: How did Dalriada, the Mounth, Galloway, Twescard, the Route and the Glynns get so called?
• Episode 22: ‘Daunting the Isles’: the road to Harlaw
• Episode 23: Donal Ballach MacDonnell, the Glensman who led the Islanders to victory at Inverlochy in 1431
• Episode 24: Pibroch of Donuil Dhu ‘The war-pipe and pennon, Are at Inverlochy’
• Episode 25: ‘Daunting the Isles’: the fall of Clan Donald
• Episode 26: ‘Surrounded by Irish and Scots … without succour of the English for sixty miles’
• Episode 27: Lords of Tír Chonaill, allies of the King of Scots
• Episode 28: 1513: James IV and Hugh Dubh O’Donnell make a pact
• Episode 29: 1513: a Scots naval assault on Carrickfergus
• Episode 30: 1513: The Battle of Flodden
• Episode 31: ‘The reek of Maister Patrik Hammyltoun’: the Scottish Reformation begins
• Episode 32: Success for the Protestant reformers in Scotland
• Episode 33: ‘Such mirrours of holiness and austeritie’: the Reformation resisted in Gaelic Ulster
• Episode 34: ‘A heresy and a new error’: the Reformation’s failure in Ulster
• Episode 35: Mary Queen of Scots and her son James VI
• Episode 36: James VI and the mission to the Gaidhealtacht
• Episode 37: The MacDonnells and the ‘cankred dangerous rebel’, Shane O’Neill
• Episode 38: ‘They be occupied still in killing’: a massacre on Rathlin
• Episode 39: ‘This Scottish woman will make a new Scotland of Ulster’: Sir John Perrot’s ‘rash, unadvised journeys’
• Episode 40: Gaelic Ulster defiant
• Episode 41: ‘We spare none of what quality or sex soever’
• Episode 42: Randal MacDonnell, the great survivor in a time of defeat, destruction and conquest
• Episode 43: The escape of Conn O’Neill
• Episode 44: ‘Parishes more wasted than America’
• Episode 45: ‘Every Body was innocently busy’: colonising Down
• Episode 46: Planting the Isles with ‘answerable In-lands subiects’
• Episode 47: Colonising County Antrim
• Episode 48: The Flight of the Earls
• Episode 49: The Rebellion of Sir Cahir O’Doherty
• Episode 50: Inviting Scots to plant
• Episode 51: Making Ulster Visible – a civilising enterprise which would ‘establish the true religion of Christ among men almost lost in superstition’
• Episode 52: The Printed Book
• Episode 53: ‘Make speed, get thee to Ulster’
• Episode 54: ‘Great things move slowly’
• Episode 55: Borderers: ‘a fractious and naughty people’
• Episode 56: ‘Poisoned with Popery’: Strabane a refuge for Scottish Catholics
• Episode 57: Smouldering resentment
• Episode 58: The Eagle Wing and the Black Oath
• Episode 59: The 1641 Massacres and after
• Episode 60: A New Sunshine of Liberty?
• Episode 61: ‘Seven Ill Years’
• Episode 62: Scots ‘are coming over here daily’
• Episode 63: Hans Sloane
• Episode 64: John Toland, the champion of freethinkers
• Episode 65: ‘Jet-black Prelatic Calumny’
• Episode 66: Flaxseed
• Episode 67: ‘Like a contagious distemper’
• Episode 68: ‘In America they may get good land’
• Episode 69: The dawn of the Scottish Enlightenment
• Episode 70: ‘The pursuit of happiness’: Francis Hutcheson and his legacy
• Episode 71: ‘It is to Scotland that we look for our idea of civilisation’
• Episode 72: ‘A good wheen of ingens’
• Episode 73: ‘The pleasantness of this solitary wilderness’
• Episode 74: ‘Our cause we leave to Heaven and our rifles’
• Episode 75: ‘An Irish-Scotch Presbyterian Rebellion’
• Episode 76: Charles Thomson: ‘He who speaks the truth’
• Episode 77: ‘We seek for our Rights’
• Episode 78: ‘A cordial union’?
• Episode 79: ‘Every man with his destroying weapon in his hand’
• Episode 80: A young eyewitness on the eve of battle: Ballynahinch, 12 June 1798
• Episode 81: ‘Negotiating and jobbing’: the Union
• Episode 82: Mary Ann McCracken: revolutionary, radical and tireless activist
• Episode 83: The Rhyming Weavers
• Episode 84: Sarah Leech, a flax-spinning poet in Donegal
• Episode 85: New Light versus Old Light
• Episode 86: ‘Mr. O’Connell, look at Belfast, and be a Repealer – if you can’
• Episode 87: ‘Swarming with vagrants from the sister kingdom’
• Episode 88: ‘Old Hickory’ and the ‘Trail of Tears’
• Episode 89: Divided loyalties: the Scotch-Irish and the American Civil War
• Episode 90: ‘A second Belfast of the whole province’: Canada
• Episode 91: An Industrial Hub: Belfast and Glasgow
• Episode 92: A new life in Scotland: navvies and miners
• Episode 93: ‘The death rate from chest affections is very high’: harsh working conditions
• Episode 94: Orange and Green in Scotland
• Episode 95: ‘This Hibernian invasion has … stamped its impress on the country’
• Episode 96: ‘Rabbles’: the hiring fairs of Ulster
• Episode 97: Tattie Hokers: Donegal migrant workers in Scotland
• Episode 98: Paddy ‘the Cope’ Gallagher crosses over to Scotland
• Episode 99: Industrial Might … in Ulster …
• Episode 100: … And Industrial Might in Scotland
• Episode 101: ‘You and I are just about fit to mend his pens’: William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, scientific genius
• Episode 102: A question of identity: the Ulster crisis and after
• Episode 103: A Scottish radical’s road to an Irish revolution: James Connolly
• Episode 104: War, industrial unrest and intercommunal conflict: Scotland and Ulster 1914–21
• Episode 105: Troubles: political, sectarian and industrial
• Episode 106: ‘What about the 78,000 unemployed who are starving?’: the Belfast Outdoor Relief riots of 1932
• Episode 107: Two disasters: Arranmore and Kirkintillock
• Episode 108: From peace to war
• Episode 109: The Blitz
• Episode 110: Arsenals of victory
• Episode 111: Better times in Scotland …
• Episode 112: … And better times in Northern Ireland
• Episode 113: The Princess Victoria Disaster
• Episode 114: ‘I hoist my swag on my back’: Australia
• Episode 115: New Zealand: an Ulster plantation at Katikati
• Episode 116: ‘O yes, Hibernians, I beheld the Bard’
• Episode 117: Bluegrass: ‘played from my heart to your heart’
• Episode 118: The Old Firm
• Episode 119: The Hamely Tongue
• Episode 120: Epilogue
• References
• Bibliography
• Illustrations
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill Books