Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

Introduction

SITTING ON THE STEP outside my office on a sunny summer evening, when a peace seems to settle, I sometimes think I can see all of Scotland’s history. Not through an effort of imagination but in the ways in which the five or six hundred generations before us left their marks on the land.

The shape of our little valley was scarted out by slow-motion primeval drama, by the rumble of the glaciers of the last Ice Age as they began to groan, crack and splinter, grinding out the river courses, shearing off cliff faces, rounding the distant hills of the Ettrick Forest and depositing the fertile soil where plants, trees and animals would come to thrive. On the flat valley floor, on the banks of the burns and on the slopes to the south stood the great Hartwood, the Deer Wood. After the ice shrank back and the land began to green, native trees carpeted Scotland with the Wildwood, a temperate jungle that reached up to the flanks of the highest hills and mountains. Willow scrub, birch, Scots pine, alder and ash were amongst the first to take root and they still grow well in the Hartwood, often on the regimented edges of Alaskan sitka. And the deer are still in the forest – velvety, perfect, skittish little roe deer flit into the shadows and disappear in a moment. This year, a hind nested in the Crow Wood behind my office, where each evening the birds bicker and squabble over the best roosts. In the morning’s grey dim and at dusk, she brought out two leggy fawns to graze the grassy fringes by the track.

The pioneers, the first to come north after the ice, saw much of what I see. Like the deer, their shadows flitted through the Wildwood, barely rustling the leaves of the six thousand autumns, winters, springs and summers when their descendants hunted and gathered a wild harvest across prehistoric Scotland. At the foot of the slope near my office there is a small standing stone. Twenty years ago when the old orchard by the burn was a tangle of nettles and willowherb, I fell – or rather skidded – over it. The stone was lying flat, recently tumbled, having kicked the earth out of its socket. With a shovel and a fencepost, I managed to lever it upright and now it stands approximately where it did. Perhaps it is not ancient, perhaps it is a boundary marker near the bank of the burn, but it is mysterious – something raised for a forgotten reason by nameless people a long time ago.

Fertile, free-draining and sheltered, the little valley was home to generations of hunter-gatherers and then settled communities of early farmers. From the dark furrows of my neighbour’s newly ploughed fields, I have picked up a few beautifully knapped flints and what looks like part of an axe-head. And, further down the valley, a spring plough skinned the stone lid off a cist and, for the first time in four thousand years, the sun warmed the dust and bones inside. To the east of where I sit rises the Deer Park and, in the green folds of the hill, there are scooped-out depressions that offer welcome shelter from the west wind. When a sugar-dusting of snow falls, they are easy to see. Perhaps they were shielings where herd-laddies kept watch on beasts summering out on the higher pasture.

No conjecture swirls around the identity of those who arrived in the valley at the end of the 1st century AD. The thud of hooves, the jingle of bridles and the rhythmic tramp of marching soldiers announced that the Empire had come north. About three miles to the west of where I sit in the evening are the grassed-over banks and ditches of Oakwood Fort, built by a cohort of 500 men, a mixture of cavalry and infantry under the overall command of the great general, Agricola. Watched by the hostile native kindred – the Selgovae – squads of imperial soldiers dug ditches, built ramparts and laid out roads and a signal station. Through a depression in the ridge of the Deer Park, the men at Oakwood could look east and see the signal station built on the summit of Eildon Hill North, above the sprawling supply depot at Trimontium. For only one generation, 20 years, the Romans marched up and down our little valley, filing intelligence reports, skirmishing with the war bands of the Selgovae, laying down the controlling framework of a new province for the Empire. But then in AD 100, the Emperor Trajan withdrew troops from Britain for his invasion of Dacia, modern Romania, and the frontier was pulled back to the line of the Tyne and Solway. And perhaps in triumph, the Selgovae war bands burned the wooden gate towers at Oakwood.

Ownership of a gentler sort was discovered on one of the sheep walks in the Deer Park in 2003. Part of an ogham stone was recognised. Ogham was a strange and ancient tree language which formed its letters like the branches or twigs of a tree cut in straight lines like runes but arranged on either side of a central trunk. Usually spelling out personal names, probably the marks of the ownership of land, the earliest ogham stones were carved in Ireland in the 4th century AD. The finding of a stone so far east in Scotland is striking – perhaps evidence that Gaelic-speaking chieftains were carving out holdings in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, the centuries known as the Dark Ages.

Not far from where the ogham stone was picked up, a ditch runs up the slopes of the Deer Park and across its summit. In places, the ditch has been hacked out of the hard whinstone rock that lies close to the surface of the rough pasture. An immense labour, the ditch and the bank on its eastern side must have demarcated an important boundary. By the early 12th century, it was certainly used as part of a fence. On top of the bank, what was known as the park pale was built. Palus is the Latin word for ‘a stake’ and it later came to mean a row of stakes, a fence – the phrase ‘beyond the pale’ derives from it. Since a badly frightened deer can jump an eight- or nine-foot fence, the pale had to be high and the ditch immediately in front of it made it even higher. Hunting was an obsession with medieval Scottish kings and the Deer Park lay next to a royal castle at Selkirk and at the eastern end of the vast game reserve known as the Ettrick Forest. In early winter, deer-herds drove pregnant does into the park where they could be fed through the hungry months. Once they had dropped their fawns in the spring, the does and their young were released back into the forest. It was a traditional use of the hill that lasted into the middle of the 20th century when deer were still kept there, browsing the rough pasture.

West of where I sit, backlit by a setting sun, the fields rise gently towards an eminence that looks down over the confluence of the Rivers Ettrick and Yarrow. Below it there is a place name that remembers bands of men who rode north in search of riches and land. The Hartwood burn suddenly splashes over a very picturesque waterfall known as the Motte Linn and it remembers what was once a motte-and-bailey castle built on the hill above at the behest of Norman adventurers, many of whom were granted land by David I of Scotland in the first half of the 12th century. An old, well-made track leads up the flank of the hill and, especially on horseback, it is easy to see the nettle-covered remains of the outer bailey, its ditch and the higher mound of the motte that once rose up behind the palisade. No record of the lord who caused this earth and wooden castle to be built has survived but, when the sun dipped behind Huntly Hill and food and drink were served to him and his retainers, they probably described the landscape around them in Norman French.

Gurgling past the little standing stone at the bottom of the garden, the Common Burn marks the southern boundary of the farm and it took its name from the common land owned by the burgh of Selkirk. From the 16th century onwards, these large holdings gradually shrivelled as surrounding lairds encroached but, every year, a long cavalcade of horsemen and -women ride the bounds to the north of the town and every forty years or so, they trot along the southern bank of the Common Burn to check that no boundary markers (like the little standing stone?) have been moved. With a standard-bearer carrying the town flag, the common riding stirs ancient memories. From a distance, they look like a squadron of light cavalry. Which is exactly what they used to be.

No such suspension of disbelief was needed on the morning of 13 September 1645. If I had been looking south from my house, I would have seen an awesome sight. During the civil war fought all over Britain and Ireland, the Scottish army led by General David Leslie surprised the Royalists and the Marquis of Montrose at Philiphaugh, west of Selkirk. In the early morning mist, he sent about 2,000 cavalry troopers through our little valley, perhaps keeping to the metalled surface of the old road leading to Oakwood Fort. They moved quietly around Howden Hill and, while Leslie led the rest of his army in a frontal assault, the cavalry attacked the rear of the Royalists and scattered them. Philiphaugh was a savage, sadistic rout with much unnecessary slaughter excused by fundamentalist piety.

The greater part of the landscape of the valley was much altered after 1645. The fields, the thorn hedges, the shelterbelts of hardwoods, the steadings, the big houses and their policies are not old. After the middle of the 18th century, the pace of agricultural improvement quickened and shaped much of the countryside we see now and believe to be traditional. One of the most important catalysts was drainage and below where I sit in the evening stretches the 35-acre Tile Field. It is billiard-table flat because it was scraped for clay and at the western end stood a tile works. Its kilns were fired by the trees of the Hartwood and the clay puddled in a pond formed by the Common Burn and the Hartwoodburn. Bright orange drainage pipes were laid and they brought much more land into cultivation. Modern deep ploughing has sliced into much of this back-breaking labour, destroying and clogging the drainage system. Now winter rain lies in large pools on the Tile Field and swans nest by the side of the old pond, its waters now undisturbed by the bustle of manufacture.

As the sun dips behind Howden Hill and the lights twinkle in the kitchen, another day slows down to its close. Shadows gather in the Crow Wood, the birds flock in, wheeling over the treetops, cawing and screeching at each other, and a fox barks in the distance. As night settles and I switch off the lights in my office, it occurs to me how seldom we have the time to reflect on the transit of our lives. As we worry about tomorrow, about what’s next, we perhaps think too little about the days that have gone, about our past. But it is only the past that makes tomorrow, nothing else, and it is our shared past that makes us who we are – that makes Scotland.

The industrialisation and urbanisation of the last three centuries have changed the landscape dramatically, sometimes obliterating the ancient footprints of our ancestors. But their story can still be seen, written on the land, and it can be understood and told. The history of Scotland should never be thought of as remote but rather a deeply personal matter, the only really worthwhile context against which we can see our short lives under these big skies. The story of this remarkable little nation on the north-west edge of Europe belongs to all of us and it matters to all of us.

1

The Collisions

FIRE AND ICE MADE Scotland. For hundreds of millions of years, the molten core of the Earth has been pushing up through fissures in the outer crust, the land we live on and the ocean bed. This ancient, continuous process was only recently discovered by accident. When, in the middle of the 19th century, it became possible to send messages along a telegraph wire, scientists reasoned that it might also be feasible to shrink geography dramatically and lay an undersea cable to link Britain and North America. Communications that took weeks to deliver by ship might be relayed in moments.

In December 1872, HMS Challenger sailed from Portsmouth with a group of scientists on board. While exploring the bed of the Atlantic Ocean for the best route for the course of a new cable, the team, led by a marine zoologist from Edinburgh University, Charles Wyville Thomson, came across a very substantial undersea ridge approximately halfway between the Irish coast and Newfoundland. More like a range of mountains, it turned out to run the whole length of the Atlantic, occasionally breaking the surface in the shape of islands such as Tristan da Cunha, Ascension Island and the Azores. Iceland is the largest. Along the axis of the ridge is a very deep rift valley and this was found to be the place where magma or molten rock from the inner crust of the Earth, the asthenosphere, comes to the surface. In the chill depths of the ocean, it immediately cools and forms new crust or lithosphere. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is part of a 29,000-mile-long system of ridges found under all of the Earth’s oceans.

Known as ‘seafloor spreading’, this phenomenon makes the land we live on dynamic, moving it and the bed of the ocean very slowly. Each year the Mid-Atlantic Ridge shifts the crust between half an inch and one and a half inches, about the same rate at which fingernails grow. This long network of oceanic ridges and also fault lines found on land – such as the San Andreas Fault in California – moves vast segments of the Earth’s surface known as tectonic plates. Depending on definitions, there are seven or eight plates and, as magma rises from the fiery core of our planet into the Mid-Atlantic Rift Valley, it moves the continents on either side of the ocean. Through a process known as subduction, tectonic plates also move very slowly under each other, eventually slipping into the asthenosphere. The Farallon Plate pushed up the southern ranges of the Rocky Mountains many millions of years ago but it has now slid deep into the Earth’s mantle. Subduction has the effect of equalising, of keeping the total of the surface of the Earth the same.

More than five hundred million years ago, different parts of Scotland’s familiar and beloved geography lay far distant from each other – some were attached to huge continents, some were splintered fragments and still others lay submerged on the bed of an ancient ocean. Lying between three palaeocontinents, Laurentia, Baltica and Avalonia, was the great expanse of the Iapetus Ocean. Larger than the Atlantic, it was beginning to shrink as tectonic movement shaped and reshaped the crust of the Earth. By 410 million years ago, the Iapetus Ocean had closed completely and much of what became Scotland had risen out of the prehistoric sea and been welded together into one of the most geologically distinct places on our planet. Scotland is therefore the deposit of a series of slow-motion, ancient collisions. And, throughout our prehistory and in more modern times, these collisions and the angles at which they hit would remain central to an understanding of our nation and its people. Our history is written in our rocks just as surely as it is in monastic chronicles, census returns or the stones and bones of archaeological digs.

The most important collision, symbolically and historically, was with England. Much of what was to become Scotland lay on the leading edge of Laurentia while England was attached to the shores of Avalonia. As the great palaeocontinents welded both of these landmasses together, the harder rocks that made up Scotland ground against the softer strata of northern England, buckling and corrugating them. This process forced the coal and iron seams close to the surface and, in this way, our geology made West Cumbria and Tyneside a gift of their traditional industries.

As these enormously powerful forces moved the crust of the Earth, forming and reforming continents, smaller bits sometimes sheared off. Known as terranes, they drifted across the planet over millions of years. When Laurentia, Baltica and Avalonia moved closer, four very different terranes were ground together to make the distinctive shape of Scotland. Forged deep in the molten inner crust, Lewisian gneiss was pushed upwards to make the Western Isles, Coll, Tiree, Iona, the western peninsula of Islay known as the Rhinns and part of the Atlantic coastline. Gneiss is old – one of the most ancient rock formations found anywhere in the world.

To the east and south, thick strata of Old Red Sandstone were laid down and north of the Great Glen its most spectacular monuments are the Torridon Mountains and the singular peak of Suilven. Durness Limestones overlay much of the Old Red Sandstone and they are solid proof that these terranes were once attached to the coastline of ancient Laurentia. At that time the palaeocontinent lay south of the equator and the limestone and sandstone were beach deposits that contained fossils, evidence for some of the earliest life forms. The Old Red Sandstone also underlies some of Scotland’s most fertile farmland – the Moray coastlands, Aberdeenshire, parts of the Central Belt and much of Berwickshire.

LIZZIE

In the mid 1980s, at a quarry in Bathgate, a fossil hunter, Stan Wood, found the remains of a small lizard-like creature which he thought might be old. Perhaps a little predictably, he called it ‘Lizzie the Lizard’. In fact, Stan had found a fossil that was 338 million years old, the oldest reptile remains ever found anywhere in the world. At about 20 centimetres in length, Lizzie was not large but she was successful – if she was a she. Once the find had been confirmed, matters became a little more formal as the fossil was renamed Westlothiana lizziae. She lived near an ancient freshwater lake and hunted for smaller creatures who had the misfortune to live nearby.

The north-east to south-west orientation of the Great Glen marks the angle at which one terrane collided with another. Below it, the Central Highlands were built from different rocks, thick strata of shales, limestones and sandstones. Known as the Dalriadan and Moine formations, they made the Cairngorms as the Earth convulsed with volcanic eruptions.

South of the Highland massif, Scotland’s geography becomes even more abrupt. Along a line from Stonehaven down to the southern shores of Loch Lomond, the mountains suddenly give way to green valleys and ranges of low hills. This is the Highland Boundary Fault, where another collision took place. The Dalriadan and Moine mountains were pushed against what became the Midland Valley, a rift valley of a very different character, now the Central Belt. Again, the angle of the collision runs north-east to south-west. Formed originally in tropical latitudes, the valley was once home to vast, dense forests and swampland. Many millions of years ago this terrane began to move northwards and, as the trees and other tropical plants died and fell, they laid down strata of organic carbon. Much later these would become Scotland’s coalfields.

Running from Ballantrae in South Ayrshire to Dunbar in East Lothian, the Southern Upland Fault once again follows the characteristic orientation of Scotland’s geography. Below it lie the rolling hills of Galloway and the Borders and, in the lower-lying river basins, some of the most fertile farmland was laid down.

Some way to the south of the Southern Upland Fault lies a fascinating geological relic. On the west coast of the Isle of Man, near the hamlet of Niarbyl, the cliffs of a small cove have running diagonally across them a thin, greyish-white seam of rock. It is visible for only a hundred metres or so before it disappears into the waters of the Irish Sea but it is a memorial to the making of Scotland. Known as the Iapetus Suture, it marks the precise place where the vast continents of Laurentia and Avalonia collided, having welded the four terranes together. And it too runs north-east to south-east, just as the modern border between England and Scotland does.

Sixty-five million years ago, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was a tectonic seam in the middle of a single, huge palaeocontinent known as Pangaea. Scientists hypothesised that North and South America once fitted neatly into Africa and Europe like a geological jigsaw before the ridge very slowly began to prise them apart and allow the Atlantic Ocean to form. What eventually became Scotland, and Britain and Ireland, was pushed towards the east. As the Atlantic filled and the crust of the Earth was stretched and thinned, magma broke through to form a line of huge volcanoes whose remains can be seen in the dramatic shapes of St Kilda and Ailsa Craig. Over five million years, the skies darkened and thunder boomed as unquantifiable amounts of ejecta flew into the atmosphere and thick ash clouds drifted across the land and the ocean. Ben More on Mull once roared and erupted but perhaps the most spectacular volcanic landscape in Scotland is on Skye.

SKYESAURUS

Two hundred million years ago, the Jurassic period began. Also known as the Age of Reptiles, it lasted for aeons, until 140 million years ago. The Isle of Skye was patrolled by plant- and flesh-eating dinosaurs and their fossilised remains are preserved in the Jurassic sediments found along the east coast of the Trotternish Peninsula. One of them was huge. Cetiosaurus stood ten metres in height but it was less terrifying than some of the others who stalked the island. It ate only plants. Probably as a result of a catastrophic meteor strike which ushered in a long nuclear winter when vegetation and animals perished in the sunless cold, the dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago.

The gentle slopes and scarps of the Trotternish Peninsula and of north-west Skye were once the lava fields of a huge volcano that spewed magma up from the inner crust of the Earth. The magma chamber, the boiling caldera of the volcano, was towering, rising to more than six thousand feet. Erosion has sheared and planed it but its ruins are still tremendously impressive. They are the jagged mountains of the Black Cuillin and the rock known as Skye gabbro is the legacy of the millions of years when the Earth shuddered and boiled.

Fire forged much of Scotland’s landscape but, in much more recent times, ice scarted, ground and bulldozed the rocks and soil into their familiar shapes. We live in an inter-glacial period, a brief interval between Ice Ages. For the last 2.4 million years, in the era known as the Quaternary Period, much of the surface of the planet has periodically been buried beneath ice sheets and glaciers.

Relatively recently, around 24,000 BC, the weather began to worsen once more. Storms blew and snow fell and lay on the hilltops all year. Over a short time, perhaps only one or two generations, the temperatures fell steeply and Scotland quickly became uninhabitable. The last Ice Age was beginning. Vegetation shrivelled and died as more snow fell and the animals that depended on it fled south. Our species, Homo sapiens, had certainly reached Europe before the ice came and perhaps some explorers had crossed the land bridge across the Channel and the North Sea to walk to the farthest north-west, to stand on the edge of the ocean, the edge of beyond, and gaze at the endless horizon. But, as the cold gripped the land and the ice sheets formed, all trace of those who may have been the first to see Scotland was erased.

Nothing and no one could survive in the savage sub-Arctic climate. The ice formed into domes, huge hemispherical mountains around which constant storms blew. On the summits of the ice domes there appears to have been permanent high pressure and clear skies. For thousands of sterile years, Scotland lay sleeping under a blanket of ice as the sun shone on a dazzling white landscape of devastating beauty. So much water was locked up in this frozen world that the levels of the world’s oceans were lowered and so heavy were the domes that they pressed down hard, crushing the crust of the Earth under them.

Around 14,000 years ago, the ice cap that covered Scotland slowly began to crack and splinter. The weather was warming once more and, over a short time, glaciers rumbled over the landscape and began to change it. As it moved, the ice smoothed rock, bulldozed debris and soils, scraped out corries and watercourses and deepened valleys to form the freshwater and sea lochs of the Highlands. In the Midland Valley, glaciers moving from west to east struck the hard volcanic rocks that Stirling and Edinburgh castles sit on. This forced the glaciers to divide and leave behind the classic crag and tail formation that allowed towns to be built in the eastern lee of the rocks. When the ice began to melt, it created torrents of such tremendous force that they could make melt-water flow uphill, especially under or in the ice, from one valley into another. Glaciers deposited debris such as erratic rocks or ridges of gravel and soil known as eskers. As the sun shone and the air warmed, Scotland was stirring, beginning to awake.

But it turned out to be a false dawn. Only a few hundred years after the thaw, an ecological disaster was waiting to burst on the world. In northern Canada, a vast freshwater lake, far larger than all of the Great Lakes combined, had been held back by ice dams. As these slowly melted, water from what came to be called Lake Agassiz spilled southwards to help carve out the Missouri and Mississippi river systems. But some time around 10,500 BC a mighty roar was heard as the ice dams to the north of the huge lake crashed down to release a mega-flood. Its path has been traced as a giant tsunami raced through the Mackenzie River basin out into the Beaufort Sea, through the Davis Strait and into the North Atlantic. Within 36 hours of the dams falling, a vast cubic tonnage of freshwater had stopped the warming currents of the Gulf Stream in their tracks, turning it back south before it could reach the shores of Britain and Ireland. Temperatures plummeted, snowstorms blew once more, a vast ice dome formed over Ben Lomond and animals and people fled south.

What geologists call the Loch Lomond Stadial and historians the Cold Snap lasted for about a thousand years. The North Atlantic eventually regained its salinity and the conveyor effect once more brought the warm waters of the Gulf Stream northwards. In a process known as climate flickering, the melt may have been rapid, perhaps in the span of only a handful of generations. When the land warmed, the first colonists were plants – hardy willow scrub, crowberry and birch came. They were followed by ash and hazel, then oak, elm and pine. With the weight of the ice lifted, the land began to rebound and rise, keeping pace with the level of the seas as they filled with melt-water.

As the trees grew and seeded more growth, Scotland’s Wildwood spread and offered cover for all manner of animals migrating north. The aurochs, the giant wild cattle with a seven-foot horn spread, browsed the shoots and grasses, red and roe deer came, wild boar snuffled through the undergrowth and elk flitted amongst the greenwood shadows. It may be that smaller animals were the earliest arrivals – martens, polecats, squirrels and stoats skittered through the canopy. In the streams, rivers, lochs and seas, fish teemed, the mighty salmon amongst the first, waterfowl built their nests and otters and beavers fished and swam. Predators also entered the Wildwood and brown bears, wolves and lynx prowled through the trees. And they were followed by the most deadly predator of all, our ancestors, the first settlers, the pioneers who walked into an unknown land after the ice.

2

The Pioneers

THROUGHOUT THE millennia of ice, many of those who would become our ancestors sheltered from the biting winds and the bitter cold in steep-sided valleys on either side of the Pyrenees. These were the Ice-Age refuges and their people have left a remarkable record of their lives as they shivered through the harsh winters and cool summers. More than 350 caves have been discovered in south-western France and northern Spain where immensely talented and mysterious prehistoric artists have left paintings on the walls. Almost all are of animals – the Ice Age fauna such as reindeer, wild horses, the aurochs, cave lions and red deer. While storms blew outside and the world of ice froze the landscape still, painters worked in the black darkness. Lit only by the flicker of torches, they mixed red, yellow and black ochres to create frescoes of charging bulls, galloping horses and fleeing deer. And, even though it is ancient – amongst the oldest works of art ever found – their work is not primitive. When Pablo Picasso saw the paintings in the cave at Lascaux in south-western France after the Second World War, he declared that in the last 20,000 years artists had learned nothing.

The caves appear to have been temples, places where mysteries were enacted, where the animals that were central to the lives of the peoples of the refuges were brilliantly memorialised. Only visible in firelight in their great subterranean chambers or by torchlight in narrow passages, the paintings almost certainly played a part in unknowable rituals as the moving shadows of worshipper-hunters were projected on to the walls amongst the herds of bison or deer. Perhaps the paintings were a means of recognising an absolute dependence on the animals, central to ceremonies involving dance, song and music designed to ensure that the annual migrations did not cease and that the herds would once more thunder through the steep-sided valleys on their way north to summer pasture. Those migrations brought the herds to ambushes, to narrow places or river crossings where hunters could get close and wound or kill many animals. In the late 19th century, the dances and rituals of the Plains Indians of North America were recorded. They wore headdresses and imitated the behaviour and movement of the bison they depended on and enacted rituals to bring them back after the hungry months of the winter.

For many millennia, small populations of hunter-gatherers subsisted in the frozen landscape. The highest peaks of the Pyrenean ranges were encased in a brilliant white ice cap that was lit by the sun all year round. That horizon was a constant reminder that the climate could be even harsher. Down in the deep valleys, the refuges were sometimes shielded and bielded by dense stands of pinewoods whose branches will have bent low, loaded with snow. On windless days when the smallest sound echoed across the frozen rivers, the animals of the Ice Age searched the ground for food. Woolly rhinoceros, with their vicious horns, snuffled and rooted for the bitter grass. The aurochs, their horn spreads swaying, browsed amongst the trees and, on the valley floor, mammoths plodded on the gravel terraces, their long and dense hair brushing the lifeless ground.

Watching for weakness or older animals struggling to withstand the cold, predators patrolled the valleys. Cave lions, panthers, hyenas, wolves and bears waited. But our ancestors will have rarely ventured out in the extreme cold of the Ice-Age winter. Instead, small family bands lit fires at the mouths of their refuge caves, huddling for warmth, depending for most of their food on what they had dried and stored from the wild harvest of the summer to last through the long winter darkness. The constant demand for firewood meant that their ranges were wide and the lack of seasoned wood will no doubt have been a compelling reason for hunter-gatherer bands to move on.

When the ice at last began to melt, life may have changed very quickly – and erratically. Climate flickering meant that thaws could be followed by colder periods and, after the chill certainties of the centuries of ice, that will have caused hardship. The seasonal migrations of the herds they depended on will have been disrupted and those who preyed on them will have suffered more than confusion when migrations ceased or took different routes. But, when the ice first shrank back about 14,000 years ago, the herds of reindeer and shaggy wild ponies moved ever further northwards, perhaps quickly, over the span of only a few generations. Unable to evolve as fast as the climate was changing, raising temperatures and altering their feeding habitat, these cold-adapted animals chased the chill temperatures of the moving ice frontier and the open tundra and grasslands on its margins. And, in turn, they were chased by the bands of hunters who depended on them. The retreating cold pulled the herds north and they pulled our ancestors behind them.

BEST FRIENDS

It used to be thought that men and women began to domesticate wolves after the end of the last Ice Age but recent discoveries of 33,000 canine fossils in Belgium and Siberia strongly suggest that this happened much earlier. The great value of domesticated dogs was in hunting. Armed with spears and later with arrows with flint points, hunters could not hope to bring down prey, especially large animals like mammoths, bison and wild horses, with a kill shot. But they could wound them. That is when a pack of dogs became important. They could track and pursue a wounded animal, make its heart pump faster so that it lost blood faster and, when close to exhaustion and fighting for its life, the mammoth or bison could be finished off by a band of hunters with spears. At that point, wolf dogs were helpful in that they could drive off scavengers such as lions and leopards. Good friends – and perhaps another reason why we out-competed Neanderthals.

At Howburn Farm near Biggar in South Lanarkshire, archaeologists made a startling discovery: clear evidence of the earliest pioneers to see Scotland after millennia under the blanket of ice. Some time around 12,000 BC, perhaps right up against the melting ice sheets, a band of hunters set up shelters on the lower slopes of the Black Mount overlooking the upper reaches of the valley of the River Clyde. Excavators found more than 5,000 flint artefacts, points made for spears and blades and burins made for other uses, evidence of the hunting gear needed to bring down horses or deer and process the carcasses. The concentrated pattern of these finds suggested to archaeologists that the flint-knappers worked in oval-shaped tents probably made from hides. No organic material was discovered and the very early date of the encampment at Howburn has been derived from artefact typology, the comparison of characteristic tanged flint points with others of exactly the same manufacture found at sites in northern Germany and southern Denmark that certainly date to the same period.

The hunters at Howburn may have been an expedition from the south, sent out in early spring or late autumn to intercept herds migrating to or from summer pasture further north. Some of the flint appears to have come from Yorkshire, and other nodules may have been picked up on the way to the encampment. Perhaps the reindeer and shaggy ponies followed the course of the Clyde and crossed it somewhere south of Biggar at a place where the spearmen could get close enough to ambush them. Archaeologists have identified points probably notched for hafting on to wooden spears, blades made as scrapers for cleaning the hides of slaughtered animals and burins for piercing them so that they could be sewn together with sinew cords.

The finds at Howburn are nothing short of sensational but they surely cannot be unique. Others bands walked into Scotland after the first ice melt following their prey and somewhere, as yet unnoticed, more evidence of the first pioneers will come to light to give a clearer picture of the lives of these early, temporary visitors. There can have been no greater disruption than the shock of the Cold Snap, as skies darkened once more, temperatures plummeted and the ice returned. As the snow drove people south, there may have been conflict. Refugees from the north cannot have been welcome in the ranges of the warmer south.

There exists slight and uncertain evidence of this new life in Scotland. Summer expeditions may have sailed north just as the Cold Snap was beginning. In 1993, an arrowhead was picked up in a freshly ploughed field in the Rhinns of Islay, the westernmost part of the island. It dated from as early as 10,800 BC and others, less well recorded and located, were found in nearby Jura and Tiree. It seems that part of the Atlantic coastline was ice free at that time and that mountain peaks, such as the Paps of Jura, poked through the ice sheets. Known as nunataks, these peaks could have acted as summer seamarks for the hunters in their curraghs, the hide boats almost certainly used throughout prehistory in the west of Scotland. Perhaps similar risky expeditions sailed north during the Cold Snap to bring back seal meat or other kills to refugee communities in the south forced to scrabble a meagre living on the margins of the ranges of those more established. And perhaps the memory of the buried lands of the north lived on through the thousand years of ice.

When the Gulf Stream began to warm Scotland once more, around 9,500 BC, the thaw appears to have come quickly. What also pulled people north was the changing pattern of migration. As the temperatures rose sharply, cold-adapted animals such as reindeer could not adapt fast enough. With their thick coats and particular diet, the herds needed to chase the cold as it moved northwards. And those bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors, who depended on these animals followed. The speed of the advance can be measured by a remarkable discovery in the caves at Creswell Crags, south of Sheffield. Rather than create paintings, artists had engraved the outlines of animals on the rock walls (there is some evidence that they were also painted). One of the engravings is of an ibex, a species of wild goat with extravagant, clearly recognisable long horns. When the artist was working at Creswell, there were no ibex in Britain. He or she was relying on memory, recent memory.

HOPS, HOPES, HOLMS, HAMS, HAUGHS, DEANS, LAWS AND LEAS

Scotland has its own vocabulary for the landscape created by the ice. A ‘hop’ or ‘hope’ is a high valley and an example near Stow in the Borders also produced a surname. A ‘hoppringle’ was a rounded or ring valley and it was applied as a place name to the example near Stow. Hoppringle was eventually shortened to the name Pringle, now principally known as a knitwear brand. Laws are rounded hills rather than peaks. And the name of the town of Huntly remembers an ancient feature – a lea or clearing where hunters waited for prey to be driven towards them. A ‘hirst’ was a wooded knoll and an isolated, tall tree that stood on its own and perhaps served as a landmark is what the name ‘pirnie’ or ‘pirn’ means. It derives from Old Welsh. The word ‘holm’ is Old English for a meadow and Langholm simply means the long meadow. Its equivalent in Scots is ‘haugh’. The Old English ‘ham’ can mean a house or, more usually, a village and a ‘dean’ is a small valley or declivity, so, for example, Dryden is a dry dean, one without a burn. A ‘sike’ is the opposite – a declivity with a burn running through it.

The cave paintings of the western Ice Age refuges on either side of the Pyrenees are not all anonymous. Some carry signatures of a sort. One haunting discovery in 1994 suddenly brought our ancestors very close. A painted cave was discovered in the Ardèche Gorge in south-western France and one of the first images to show up in the head torches of speleologists Jean-Marie Chauvet and his companions was not a charging aurochs or a cave lion. On a whitened limestone wall near the entrance to the cave, he saw a series of handprints in red ochre. Judging by the height of the prints and their size, they were made by a man who pressed his hand into ochre and then on to the limestone wall. He appeared to have a broken or arthritic pinkie and Chauvet and his friends found the same distinctive handprint elsewhere in the cave. Was he the artist who painted some of the animals? It seems likely.

And it also seems likely that many Scots are directly descended from the hunter-gatherer communities of the western refuges. Very recent ancestral DNA research shows that more than 40 per cent carry markers from the mitochondrial DNA haplogroups identified as H, H1 and HVO, all of which originated amongst the people of the painted caves. Each of us carries a great deal of information in our DNA but two small parts of our genomes are especially informative about ancestry. Men carry a Y-chromosome marker inherited from their fathers and their fathers before them, away back in time, and they also inherit mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, from their mothers and their mothers, again away back in deep time. Women carry only mtDNA but they pass it on to their children of both genders. So, men carry mtDNA too but can only pass on their Y-chromosome marker, their fatherline, to their sons. In the act of reproduction, when the 6 billion letters of DNA we carry are passed on, tiny errors of copying are made. These are known as DNA markers and both their origin and the date when they arose can be calculated. Therefore, it is possible to say with considerable certainty that more than 40 per cent of all Scots, men and women, carry the DNA of the people of the painted caves. It is a remarkable continuity, something that brings the nameless people of prehistory out of the shadows.

Faint memories of these ancient migrations can be found in unlikely places. When Abbot Bernard of Arbroath helped compose the letter to Pope John XXII that became famous as the Declaration of Arbroath, he began with the origins of the Scots and Scotland. Part of his purpose in writing to the pope was to achieve diplomatic recognition for the regime of King Robert I and to do that he needed to establish that his realm was unique and distinct from England. In a flowing passage of myth–history involving Greater Scythia and the Tyrrhenian Sea, the abbot wrote that the Scots had long dwelt in Spain before sailing north to claim their place amongst nations. An Irish origin legend, the Book of the Taking of Ireland, also remembered invaders from Iberia.

More concrete were the marks left on the land by those pioneers, amongst the first to come north after the ice. Most left little trace as they moved through the Wildwood, following tracks made by browsing animals, paddling their coracles and curraghs on rivers and lochs. A chance discovery at Cramond of a camp of hunters who came ashore on the banks of the River Almond shows how faint a trace most of our ancestors made. The holes made by the whippy green rods of a bender tent, probably covered in hide, were found and the organic evidence around it allowed archaeologists to date the encampment to the 9th millennium BC. But, not far to both the east and the west of Cramond, two sites with something altogether more substantial have recently come to light.

In the autumn of 2002, archaeologists investigated what at first seemed like an unpromising field at East Barns, near Dunbar. A local limestone quarry was about to bite into the land and there had been several scattered finds of flints nearby. What quickly came to light was sensational, nothing less than a substantial prehistoric house that dated to the centuries around 8,000 BC, the earliest yet found in Scotland. Unlike the flimsy green rods of the bender shelter by the River Almond, the East Barns house had been built to last. About 30 sturdy posts, some of them entire tree trunks, had been rammed into holes dug in an oval-shaped arrangement and canted inwards like a tipi to form a broadly conical shape. The timber frame was covered with turf and bracken, perhaps even timber walling, a hearth laid down and this large house could easily accommodate six to eight people snugly sheltered from the snell winds blowing off the Firth of Forth. It all spoke of permanence, a house that directly contradicted the conventional sense of hunter-gatherers as transients, bands of people constantly on the move, barely rustling the leaves of the Wildwood, the only marks they left behind being discolorations on the soil where fires had been lit.

More than permanence, the East Barns house also signified ownership or, at least, customary rights. It is difficult to imagine the extended family who went to all the labour of cutting the trees, trimming them, dragging them to the site, digging the postholes and heaving the structure upright allowing others to hunt and gather on their home range. And East Barns was an enviable place to live in prehistory. There was fresh water close at hand, a rising hinterland for summer and autumn hunting and the harvesting of fruits, roots, berries, fungi and all the bounty of the Wildwood. The seashore was close and it could supply food all year round in the shape of crustaceans and fish and seabirds’ eggs in spring. And, in 2012, it turned out that others also believed that the shores of the Forth was a desirable place to live. The people of East Barns had distant neighbours.

During construction work for the new road bridge across the firth, a second house of a very similar design and date was found. In a field at Echline, near South Queensferry, another oval pit, seven metres in length, was uncovered. From charred hazelnuts, another winter staple, and other organic material, the structure was dated to c. 8,000 BC and it may have been even cosier than the house along the coast at East Barns. Several internal hearths were found and around the site thousands of bits of flint and flint debris came up, many of them used for cutting tools and arrowheads. The discovery of both of these fascinating sites was prompted by construction and quarrying – which begs the obvious question of how many other prehistoric houses might be lying under unpromising fields.

Equally fascinating is the question of who built them. There stood another, very similar, house at Howick on the Northumberland coast. But, when its builders were hard at work, they were not planning to live on the shores of the North Sea. Around 8,000 BC, it barely existed. Instead, a vast subcontinent lay to the east of Britain, not so much a land bridge as a huge area in its own right, with its own culture and perhaps its own way of building houses. Known as Doggerland after the Dogger Bank, formerly a range of hills towards the north of the now-submerged subcontinent, it was home to thousands of hunter-gatherer bands who fished its rivers and lakes and stalked prey in its woods and estuaries. The population probably exceeded that of prehistoric Britain. So heavy had the ice-dome over Scandinavia been that it pushed up the crust of the Earth to the south and so much water had been locked up in the ice that the level of the world’s oceans dropped dramatically. Even after the Ice Age ended, the northern shores of the subcontinent stretched beyond Shetland. The only place where land did not rise out of the sea was the Storegga Trench, a deep channel off the Norwegian coast.

The finds at Howburn Farm made a fascinating and telling link that reached right across the subcontinent of Doggerland. In the absence of organic material, archaeologists made comparisons between the flints knapped in the tents on the slopes of the Black Mount and others found in northern Germany and southern Denmark, probably also belonging to bands of reindeer hunters. This not only supplied a secure date of c. 12,000 BC but also showed how contact and cultural exchange took place across the wide plains of Doggerland. The drowned land is the missing piece in the jigsaw of early prehistoric Europe.

THE FIRST SCOTS

In the 1,000-year period between the first retreat of the glaciers and their brief return c. 11,000 BC, bands of hunters came to Scotland, most likely on summer expeditions. Probably in pursuit of herds of wild horses or reindeer on their annual migration to the fresh grasslands of the north, groups of these people camped at Howburn in South Lanarkshire. There, archaeologists have found more than 5,000 flint artefacts that resemble others found in Europe that can be securely dated. It may be that the Howburn hunters walked across Doggerland, the great subcontinent that was submerged under the North Sea. Or, more likely, they were Doggerlanders from the warmer valleys south of the Dogger Hills. But, when what prehistorians call ‘the Cold Snap’ brought back the ice, no one ventured to Scotland for about 1,000 years.

Doggerland was enormously influential in Scotland’s prehistory but, for obvious reasons, very little archaeology has been possible. Nevertheless, it allowed pioneers to walk dry shod to settle in what was a peninsula at the north-western edge of Europe, and those ancient journeys are again remembered in our collective ancestral DNA. Migration from the east is more noticeable in the distribution of Y-chromosome markers. M423 is old and some of the ancestors of those Scots who carry it walked across the plains of Doggerland to settle in prehistoric Scotland. And a group of what might be termed Germanic and Scandinavian Y-chromosome markers are much more emphatically present in the east than the west. Those who carried them arrived over a long period, certainly during the time of the Anglo-Saxon incursions and the coming of the Vikings from the 9th century onwards, but also many millennia before that.

Patterns of early settlement began to shape the cultural map of Scotland. There are obvious and substantial geographical differences between the east and the west – most of the low-lying fertile land drains to the North Sea coasts, the climate there is generally drier and movement overland is easier. A glance at the map confirms all of that. But DNA strongly suggests that the peoples of the east and west had different origins and that is much less obvious. The western seaboard was, in part, settled by migrants from Iberia and south-western France and they often came by sea. There is a clear set of staging posts marked by a shared lexicon. Celtic languages were once spoken in Spain and are still whispered in Galicia, Breton clings on in Brittany, Cornish is being revived, Welsh thrives, Manx survives, Irish is constitutionally enshrined and Scots Gaelic hangs on, just. But once these cousin languages were very widely spoken down the Atlantic seaboard. Now they are the faint footprints of ancient migration routes.

While the accidental nature of discovery should not be allowed to force Scotland’s early narrative into a particular form, it does seem likely that the pioneers preferred to live around the coasts. Far to the west of the shores of the Firth of Forth and the earliest sites at Cramond, Echline and East Barns, archaeologists sailed to investigate promising finds on the Hebridean island of Rum. At the head of Loch Scresort, at Kinloch, forestry workers had reported sizeable caches of worked stone, mostly chips of hard rock, and a beautifully made barbed and tanged arrowhead unearthed by ploughing. More than 150,000 small bits of stone were ultimately counted at Kinloch and most came from Creag nan Stearnan, a mountain on the northwest coast of the island. Known in English as Bloodstone Hill, its hard, flint-like stone was what had brought the hunter-gatherers sailing up Loch Scresort in the millennia after the ice.

Flint is rare in Scotland but it was a vital resource for the pioneers. They needed to quarry nodules of Rum bloodstone, a close geological cousin to flint, so that it could be knapped into cutting tools, scrapers, spear points and arrowheads. At the ‘factory’ site at Kinloch, flintsmiths tapped and chipped the nodules into tools that were often very beautiful, even delicate, but razor sharp. What the forestry workers had found was the debris of manufacture. And archaeologists found enough organic material to date the encampment on Rum to around 7,000 BC.

On a much less substantial scale than the houses at Echline and East Barns, tipis were raised, conical arrangements of long branches from hazel, birch and willow trees that grew in the shelter of Kinloch Glen. Once these had been staked in a rough circle in the ground and lashed together at the apex, the tipis were covered with hide and caulked to cut down the draughts. Although Kinloch looks east to Morar and the mainland, with its back to the Atlantic breezes, storms will sometime have blown in off the ocean and swirled around Rum.

The flintsmiths may have used their boats in the construction of their tipis. Still built in south-west Ireland, seagoing curraghs employ similar simple technology. A frame of whippy green wood is lashed together and a hide hull is then stretched over it. The skins of three or four adult red deer were enough to make a curragh and when sewn together and caulked, they formed an excellent craft. The benches for rowers or paddlers were used as thwarts to stiffen the structure and the curragh was so light that it could easily be carried by two men. With a draught measured only in inches, this apparently flimsy boat sat on the waves like a seagull, rising and falling.

Made as they were from entirely organic materials, the remains of prehistoric curraghs have never been found but there can be little doubt that they were widely used 9,000 years ago along the Atlantic seaboard. Whenever they could, the pioneers travelled on water. Curraghs were fast, especially running with the tide, and they could carry cargo. If a portage between lochs or rivers was necessary, they were easy to carry and, if the weather worsened, they could be turned upside down to make a watertight shelter. In high contrast to modern land-based perceptions, the earliest Scots understood Scotland from the sea, its lochs and rivers. It was probably seen less as a landmass with a scatter of islands offshore and more as a series of related shorelines. That was, in large part, because the shore was a good place to live, where the bounty of the land and of the sea met, and a curragh increased the reach of a hunter-gatherer band dramatically, extending their ranges much further than the distance men and women could walk.

Other, gossamer traces of the pioneers have been brought to light on the islands south of Rum. Hearths were found on Jura and an immense amount of flint debris on Islay. Two of the most eloquent discoveries concerned food. The raised beach at Staosnaig on Colonsay also faces east but, some time around 6,700 BC, it was thought to be a windy place. Probably on a summer expedition, a band of hunter-gatherers scooped out a sandy depression to make a shelter that would not need a high-pitched roof. After they had stowed their curraghs with a precious cargo, they filled the pit with something surprising. Archaeologists found hundreds of thousands of charred hazelnut shells, more than they could count. Nearby were smaller pits where the nuts had been roasted.

Colonsay was a prehistoric hazel orchard. Too far from the mainland to be inhabited and pillaged by hungry squirrels, hazel trees grew in abundance and each autumn pioneers came to harvest the nuts. Roasting not only improves the flavour of hazelnuts, it also allows them to be mashed into a nourishing paste which keeps through the winter. But, at some point, the gatherers appeared to act directly against their own interests and one year they did something very strange. After they picked the little nuts, they seem to have cut down and even destroyed many of the trees on Colonsay. Perhaps it was a religious act, something linked to the filling of the scooped shelter with shells, a way of returning the trees and their wild harvest to nature. Certainly it was not the act of a community who were starving. In the millennia after the end of the Ice Age, the weather appears to have been generally warmer and more settled. Perhaps the islands of the Hebrides and the Atlantic seaboard were lands of milk and honey where the sun often shone and nature was generous.

The waters around the islands were certainly rich in fish and shellfish. Linked to Colonsay at low tide, the little island of Oronsay revealed a remarkable prehistoric story, a story told by rubbish. Around the shoreline of this low-lying, undulating island, archaeologists discovered five huge middens. Resembling the sort of grassy hummocks seen on links golf courses, they appeared at first to be unremarkable. But once the sandy turf had been cut away, hundreds of thousands of shells came to light – discarded shells of mussel, clams, oysters, razors, limpets and scallops. And amongst the jumble of debris were fish bones, bits of antler – and human remains.

From the abundant organic material, archaeologists were able to date the middens to the millennium between 5,300 and 4,300 BC. Analysis of the fragments of human bones showed that the rubbish collectors lived on a marine diet that also included seabirds and seal meat. The nearby islands of Colonsay, Islay, Jura and Rum were all visited or inhabited by bands of hunter-gatherers before 5,300 BC and after 4,300 BC but during the millennium when the middens were piled up, they appear to have been deserted. It seems that Oronsay was permanently settled and perhaps the small island was the centre of a seaborne band’s range, the place to which hunting and gathering expeditions returned.

Antler bone and fragments of tools fashioned from antlers were found in the middens and they offer a sense of the purpose of a prehistoric hunting trip that set out from Oronsay. In Gaelic, Jura is rendered as Diura and it means ‘Deer Island’. It may well be that the Oronsay band hunted there for something essential to their marine lives. Antlers and venison were no doubt useful and welcome but the hide of a big animal like the red deer of Diura was essential for the building and maintenance of seagoing curraghs. In order to fish the inshore waters as well as mount expeditions to