Megalithic shipping and trade routes

[hvered]

It seems you're right about the Viking kinship, TisI, the map shows not one but two 'Orme' place names at Kilchoan



Kilchoan Bay is small but protected and is the most westerly anchorage in Scotland, a useful landing place on the north-south sea route.

The church, now ruined, was dedicated to St Comgan for whom Kilchoan was apparently named but about whom not much is known, except he's supposed to have been the brother of the far better known St Kentigern and was buried in Iona. Intriguingly, he's sometimes called St Comgan the Culdee. His church is on a low hill above the village, easily visible from the Sound of Mull.

It seems odd that the Gaelic-sounding Kilchoan should be surrounded by what appear to be Norse place names, as noted in this Kilchoan blog http://kilchoan.blogspot.co.uk/p/ormsaigmore.html.



The chambered cairn used to be mistakenly described as a 'Druidical circle'. There are two groups of stones, one is said to be a 'passage grave' and the smaller group a cist grave though how they can be so sure is anybody's guess, stones being routinely re-cycled here as elsewhere.



Looks very like a standard dolmen to me.

[Boreades]

It seems odd that the Gaelic-sounding Kilchoan should be surrounded by what appear to be Norse place names, as noted in this Kilchoan blog http://kilchoan.blogspot.co.uk/p/ormsaigmore.html..

Well, there must have been places our Celts and the Vikings did meet and trade (it wasn't all rape and pillage). Maybe this was such a place?

[TisILeclerc]

'Well, there must have been places our Celts and the Vikings did meet and trade (it wasn't all rape and pillage). Maybe this was such a place?' (Boreades)

This sums up the debate at the moment, were the Vikings very naughty boys or were they misunderstood. No doubt today they'd be given an Asbo and sent on a diversity awareness course.

What we forget is the presence and absence of the Picts. Northern Scotland, including the Outer and Inner Hebrides were once Pictish.

Curiously there is a tale in Skye in which a farmer disturbs an underground house while ploughing. The 'fairy' who lives in the house comes up out of the ground and slags the farmer off in English which apparently was the language of the Skye fairies.

The Norwegians were active in the area from as early as the seventh or eighth centuries so the presence of Norse place names is understandable. In fact the majority of place names in these areas seem to be Norse rather than gaelic or at least a combination.

A study of place names on Islay by Dr Alan MacNiven suggests an original gaelic speaking population taken over by a Norse speaking population. Then, post Norse, gaelic makes a reappearance.

'LIES, DAMN LIES, STATISTICS AND THE TRUE SIGNIFICANCE OF ISLAY’S NORSE PLACE-NAMES' http://www.spns.org.uk/CtArgyll.html

In the Outer Hebrides wiki claims that Norwegian may have been spoken as late as the sixteenth century:

'The obliteration of pre-Norse names in the Outer Hebrides and in Coll, Tiree and Islay in the Inner Hebrides is almost total and there is little continuity of style between Pictish pottery in the north and that of the Viking period. The similarities that do exist suggests the later pots may have been made by Norse who had settled in Ireland, or Irish slaves.[87][88][89] There are frequent references in early Icelandic history to slaves from Ireland and the Hebrides, but none from Orkney.[90] Gaelic certainly continued to exist as a spoken language in the southern Hebrides throughout the settlement period, but place name evidence suggests it had a lowly status[91] and Norse may have survived as a spoken language until the 16th century in the Outer Hebrides.[92]'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Scotland

What is surprising is not that there is a substantial Norse place name presence but that it was replaced so quickly by Gaelic.

[Mick Harper]

Curiously there is a tale in Skye in which a farmer disturbs an underground house while ploughing. The 'fairy' who lives in the house comes up out of the ground and slags the farmer off in English which apparently was the language of the Skye fairies.

A curious detail. The language of the fairies is usually held to be 'the old tongue' or some such. As you know, THOBR claims that English is the 'old tongue' of the Hebrides. That is the languages the natives spoke before the Gaelic-speakers arrived.

[Boreades]

Indeed. The whole history of the Picts is steeped in confusion.
What if they were the northern-most Brits before the Celts arrived?

[TisILeclerc]

'What if they were the northern-most Brits before the Celts arrived?'

There have been many discussions over the centuries about who the Picts were and where they came from. It usually revolves around them being some sort of British speaking a 'P' Celtic language or perhaps an older form of Celtic language pre dating Gaelic and the 'Welsh' languages.

Others have argued that they came from the continent and may have been Scythians. A book was published some time ago in which the author claimed that the Pictish inscriptions were old Norse.

Their 'sphere of influence' was always northern Scotland from what I can gather. If they came originally from the south they seem to have left little trace.

I put a comment somewhere on this site regarding research done in Norway on ancient spruce tree remains. It appears that these trees were living right through the last ice age. DNA tests have shown that the Norwegian spruce of today is related to these ancient remains but is different from spruce in Sweden and Finland etc.

The authors of that report come to the obvious conclusion that if trees were able to live so could insects and animals. And if animals were living in that area I would assume that people would be there as well.

One of the strange thing about human DNA is that there is one group which is specifically 'European' and that is the 'I' haplogroup. It is not found anywhere else in the world except where Europeans have migrated. The grouping shows a dispersal from Norway where is is a major DNA group to the south, west, and east.

The so called 'Celtic' group is the R1b group which is found all over western, southern and eastern Europe as well as north Africa.

Could it be that the British Isles were settled by people from the south and by those trapped in a Norwegian 'refuge'?

[Boreades]

Could it be that the British Isles were settled by people from the south and by those trapped in a Norwegian 'refuge'?

I think you have a good point. We should remember that Norway, despite all the fyords and glaciers, is warmed by the Gulf Stream. Could it be that people on the western-fringe of Europe, as far north as Norway, were still able to live "normal" lives while much of the rest of northern Europe was under ice? That would be yet another reason for all the ancient connections between "Celtic" areas and Norway. If travel by sea was the norm, they would only be as trapped as they wanted to be!

As anecdotal evidence of how normal life can be, my children's godmother is back in Norway and keeping bees. She is collecting about 20Kg of honey per hive, which is about the same as we get here in the UK.

[TisILeclerc]

Doing a quick internet search it appears that there are quite a few sites discussing this.

Here's a quote from a fairly recent post:

'Back in 2002, for example, physical geographer Leif Kullman of Umeå University in Sweden radiocarbon dated fossilized pieces of the trunks, roots, and cones of spruce, pine, and birch in Sweden's Scandes Mountains to as early as 14,000 years ago, when ice sheets still covered Scandinavia. But some other researchers argued that the samples might have been contaminated.

To try to resolve the issue, a team led by Eske Willerslev, an ancient DNA expert at the University of Copenhagen, analyzed lake sediments and pollen from the Trøndelag region in central Norway and lake sediments from Andøya Island in the country's north. As the team reports in this week's issue of Science, it was able to recover spruce mitochondrial DNA at Trøndelag in sediments dated as early as 10,300 years ago. And in sediments from Andøya Island, Willerslev and his colleagues found spruce chloroplast DNA dated to 17,700 years ago and pine chloroplast DNA dated to about 22,000 years ago, at the height of the last ice age. The team considered the possibility that young DNA might have contaminated older sediments but rejected it because lake sediments generally immobilize organic compounds in place. '

That was from Michael Balter in 2012

http://news.sciencemag.org/plants-anima ... candinavia

Digging a little deeper it appears that the idea of ice age refuges was being discussed in the nineteenth century.


Eilif Dahl of the University of Oslo has an undated article dealing with these ideas from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The evidence presented deals not only with plants but also geology and the nature of coastal areas around high mountain zones and how that affects ice developments.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 5058.x/pdf

As more research is done on this subject I can see a few old apple carts doing cartwheels.

[TisILeclerc]

Cornish pasties may be older than we thought.

The BBC reports that they've found ancient wheat underwater off the Isle of Wight dating back eight thousand years.

'DNA from an archaeological site off the Isle of Wight suggests there was an international wheat trade 2,000 years before agriculture came to Britain.'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-31647440

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31648990

[hvered]

Yes, archaeologists are being forced to revise dates based on findings. The writer of the BBC article seems to have got thoroughly confused, writing that eight thousand years ago Britain was still connected to mainland Europe.

I assumed it was commonly accepted that agriculture is an older activity than previously thought after excavations of prehistoric sites complete with storage jars and so forth e.g. in the Orkneys. There must be an underlying assumption because every time anything suggesting a calendar is found, the archaeologists nod sagely and pronounce it to be a farming calendar.