“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis” – Inferno:The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri

A wonderfully arcane and self-contradictory article has appeared recently on the Internet. It is an unpublished paper by the English academic Alex Woolf (University of St Andrews) which he has given several times in different venues. It was originally written in about 2001 as a response to Ewen Campbell’s “Were the Scots Irish?‟  Antiquity 75 (2001), 285-92.

Woolf says that he had never got around to finally writing it up for publication and although he hoped he would eventually do so he could not see himself getting it done anytime soon. Various people working in the field, such as the Canadian James E. Fraser, formerly of the University of Edinburgh, now Chair of the Scottish Studies Foundation at the University of Guelph and the Irish-American Thomas Clancy, now in the University of Glasgow, had seen it in draft and responded to it so he felt he should put it into the public domain and therefore posted it on Academia.edu on 9th April 2012. It had not been significantly updated since 2005.

Campbell had assumed an obviously Scottish Nationalist approach to propose that Scottish Gaelic Dalriada came first and Irish Dalriada was formed from it and not the other way round. Woolf accepts this on what he feels are linguistic grounds, even though he knows Campbell’s archæological evidence is untenable and his own conclusions are convoluted and even bizarre, but  the  hypothesis has now established itself in the academic pseudo-historical canon . Frazer downplays the Cruthin in Ireland in his work on the Picts, although it clearly worries him to do so. Clancy is responsible for promoting the notion that St Ninian and St Uinniau (Finnian of Moville) are one and the same person.

Woolf’s article contains the usual anti-intellectual and elitist approaches to my own work by politically motivated nationalistic “serious” academics, as my view that the Cruthin were the pre-Celtic inhabitants of these Islands, although they later spoke Gaelic (“Irish”) and Old British (“Welsh”), is completely misrepresented. And purposely so, to confuse and control the unwary.  I have transcribed his words with emphasis in bold on a most remarkable and telling admission, which explains everthing.

“One of the most sensitive topics in the study of late prehistoric and early historical Ireland is that of the population group known as the Cruithin or Cruithni. Their name is the normal word used in medieval Irish for the Picts but it was also used for a group of túatha in the north of the country up until about AD 774. In origin this word is the Irish form of the British word for Britons, Pretani. In medieval Irish the Latin loan word Bretan was used for the Britons south of the Forth and Cruithni was reserved for the less Romanised peoples of the North who were termed Picti in Latin.

At one time some historians, including the great Eoin MacNeill, believed that the Pretani were the original inhabitants of both Britain and Ireland and that the Gaels had arrived at a late stage in prehistory displacing them from most of Ireland. According to this argument the Cruithni of northern Ireland were the last remnant of the pre-Gaelic inhabitants of the island. It has now become clear that this view is not supported by linguistic, historical or archaeological evidence. If British-speaking Celts ever did settle in Ireland they must have done so subsequently to the development, in situ, of the Gaelic language.  Unfortunately the idea that Northern Ireland was British ab origine has proved attractive to certain elements within the Unionist tradition during the political troubles of that province. As a result „Cruithni Studies‟, to coin a phrase, have become the preserve of Unionist apologists such as Ian Adamson whose most recent book on the Cruithni concludes with a chapter on the Scots-Irish experience in the Appalachians.

Serious historians of early Ireland, tending as they do to have nationalist sympathies or to be politically neutral have tended, understandably, to steer clear of the topic.  Jim Mallory is typical of most serious scholars when he summarises his brief discussion of the topic thus: “about the only thing the Cruthin hypothesis does emphasise are the continuous interactions between Ulster and Scotland. We might add that whatever their actual origins and ultimate fate, when the Cruthin emerge in our earliest texts they bear Irish names and there is not the slightest hint that they spoke anything other than Irish.”

Well actually they spoke Gaelic..And Mallory is wrong because there is an underlying substrate of P-Celtic or British (Cymric or Welsh) in our place names. He must surely know that Islay is a pre-Celtic name. There are place-names in many parts of Great Britain, especially river names (which are well known everywhere to preserve remnants of older languages), which are pre-Celtic in origin. English examples are the rivers Ouse, or the Thames-Teme-Tamar-Teviot series; or in Northern Scotland the Isla, Affric, Liver, Nevis and many others. And, of course, there are the pre-Celtic tribal names of Caledonii, Taezali, Vacomagi and Venicones of historical Pictland, the latter tribe becoming the Venniconii of modern Donegal. This language of Pretanic became more and more Celticised as one went further south by Gallo-Brittonic, so that a linguistic hotch-potch was created which we know today as Pictish. This may be reflected for us in the Bressay inscription.

In typically provocative style Professor Dumville alluding to this kind of statement in his, so far unpublished, British Academy Rhŷs Lecture in Edinburgh a few years ago (1997?), asked what the evidence for such an assertion might be. I can only imagine that Dumville was questioning whether we had any texts of Cruthnian provenance and whether we could be certain that Gaelic writers, clearly able to Gaelicise Pictish personal and place names were not doing the same for the Irish Cruithni. Mallory is of course right that there is not the slightest hint that the Cruithni spoke anything other than Irish just as Dumville is correct, if I understood him, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but is this really all that can be said? St Patrick aside, contemporary literary witness in Ireland begins only in the course of the century between AD 550 and AD 650 and it is true that our sources, the chronicles and hagiography, give us only the name of the Cruithni, which appears periodically between 446 and 774, to suggest their foreignness.

At the beginning of the sixth century the western frontier of the Cruithni seems to have been in the neighbourhood of the Lough Foyle although by the 570s they had been pushed back beyond the river Bann by the northern Uí Néill. In the East the boundary of the Cruithni seems to have been somewhere in the region of Belfast Lough. Crudely speaking their territory at the dawn of history was equivalent to the modern day counties of Antrim and Londonderry. To the West were the Uí Néill, to the South the Airgialla and to the East the Ulaid. In the middle of this territory, pushed up between the Bush valley and the north coast lay the lands usually assigned to the Dál Riata in Ireland by modern scholarship. This enclave was entirely surrounded by Cruithni túatha .

Is it not odd that the most Irish people in Britain were, in their Irish territories, surrounded by those Irish people who were described by their countrymen as British? Can it be coincidence? The simplest explanation of this paradox would be to assume that, pace the later synthetic historians and genealogists the Dál Riata and Cruithni were in origin two parts of the same people, perhaps ultimately British in origin, who formed a political, cultural and linguistic bridge between the two islands.”

So it is acceptable for “serious historians” of early Ireland to have “nationalist” sympathies but not “unionist” ones, is it ? For, certainly, the Englishman Richard “Indiana” Warner, with his Lost Crusade against the Cruthin, has stated publicly his sympathies are with the former. Warner and his colleague the Irish-American J P Mallory, formerly of the Queen’s University, Belfast, have spent  years following their Quest for the Holy Gael. We have seen that their definition of the first “Irishman” remarkably is someone who spoke the “Irish” language, that is Gaelic, The bulk of the population before this are relegated to the term “Irelander”. One would like to say that only an Englishman or an Irish-American could say this with a straight face. But no…Woolf says that “Jim Mallory is typical of most serious scholars”. Woolf, by the way, amazingly leaves out the Iveagh Cruthin of Down to the south of Ulster as well as the Cenel Conaill to the west in his article, suporting the myth that the Cenel Conaill are “northern Ui Neill”. And by “British”, he means “from Great Britain”, since he seems to deny that epithet to “unionists” and the ancient Pretani people of Ireland, mesmerised as he is by the term “Irish”.

Actually the people of Scottish Dalriada are Gaelicised native Epidian Cruthin and spoke Old British before Gaelic and non-Indo-European before that. They were Gaelicised from Ireland in the Late Roman period by a process of commerce and conquest, as the Venerable Bede has stated. And they now speak Gaelic, Scots or, universally, English, though they remain, as they have always been, Epidian Cruthin, The truth is the truth and we are bound by it, as Professor Rene Frechet of the Sorbonne University in Paris instructed me. Much of what I had written was new to him, and he was amazed and indeed appalled that he had never heard it before. He wanted to translate my work into French…the Irish academic elite wished to burn it.  But their “politically neutral” counterparts, friends and colleagues in Great Britain did nothing and in doing so supported them. And they are the most reprehensible of them all. As Woolf and Frazer seem totally unaware that the Donegal Cenél Conaill of the so-called “northern Ui Neill” were actually Cruthin, although also completely Gaelicised in the Late Roman period, it is to the Venniconian Cruthin Kingdoms of Donegal  that we must turn.

The traditional understanding of the history of the Venniconian Kingdoms of Donegal maintained that at some time in the late fifth century the sons of Niall of the Nine hostages, Caipre, Conaill, Enda and Eogan had launched an invasion into that territory from Tara, having defeated and conquered the indigenous people, or at least the rulers of those people. The four brothers were said to have divided out the territory of Donegal between them and each then established a kingdom which subsequently bore his name.  In one form or another these kingdoms were believed to have lasted for all of the early mediæval period.

Collectively these kingdoms were never linked but are known to us now as the “Northern Ui Neill”, who went on to conquer the rest of western and central Ulster. Two of the kingdoms, Cenel Conaill and Cenel nEogan, were said to be the most dominant and for about three centuries after their establishment, the kingship of the whole territory was shared between them.  In addition, when each of their kings was ascendant, they respectively claimed provenance of the prestigious kingship of Tara, which seems to have had some sort of overriding national influence. The ancient principality of Tír Eogain’s inheritance included the whole of the present counties of Tyrone and Londonderry, and the four baronies  West Inishowen, East Inishowen, Raphoe North and Raphoe South in County Donegal.

As we now know, however, that story is a later propagandistic fiction, rather than a summary of what actually happened.  Almost certainly it was given its classical form by and on behalf of the Cenel nEogan during the reign in the mid eighth century of their powerful and ambitious king, Aed Allan, who died in the year 743. Whatever his actual victories and political successes, they were underlined by a set of deliberately created fictional historical texts which reported to give him and his ancestors a more glorious past than they had actually enjoyed.  The same texts projected his dynasty back to the dawn of history and created a new political relationship with the neighbouring kingdoms.  Whatever the initial reaction to them, these political fictions were plausible enough to endure and have been ultimately accepted as history by most commentators over the past thirteen hundred years. Aed’s pseudo-historians were probably led by the Armagh Bishop Congus, who exploited the opportunity provided by the alliance with the King to advance the case for the supremacy of his own church.  Congus died in 750.

There appears to be no evidence that any of the rulers of the Venniconian Kingdoms of Donegal were related by blood to Niall of the Nine Hostages or to the Ui Neill.  On the other hand it seems that there is evidence that Cenél Conaill were a Cruthin people associated in some way with the Ui Echach Coba and other east Ulster peoples.  The Cenel nEogain, on the other hand, may well have had connections with the Dal Fiatach of maritime Down.  The remarkable fact in all this is that of the groups said to have belonged to the Northern Ui Neill, Cenel Cairpre may have been the only genuine decendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages to have invaded South Donegal in the sixth century.  And whatever evidence we have for the mid sixth century seems to show that it was the Cenel Conaill, rather than the Cenel nEogain, who were dominant among the Donegal Kingdoms at that time.

Conall Gulban , perhaps as Conall  Cernach of the Ulster Cycle, is the figure most closely related to the ancestry of the Cenél Conaill. Whether he existed or not as an actual person, his name demonstrates a powerful political reality of some sort, in that he was definitely  the ancestor of the fully historically attested Cruthin people of Ui Echach Coba of County Down, the Conaille Muirthemne of north Louth, the Sil nAedo of County Meath, and the Clann Cholmain of County Westmeath. The rise to power of what was said to have been Conall Gulban’s immediate descendants is equally something of a mystery. And among those descendants was our Colum Cille (Columba), the founder of the Monastery in Iona, where ironically in an Irish context the practice of keeping Annals and therefore  the study of history seems to have been promoted.

We know almost nothing genuinely historical about Colum Cille’s early clerical life prior to his departure for Iona.  On one occasion Adomnán writes that “this blessed boy’s foster-father a man of admirable life, the priest Cruithnechan” was apparently responsible for the child Colum Cille  In view of the identification above that the saint’s people, the Cenél Conaill, actually belonged  to the Cruthin, the priest’s  name, which is diminuative of that, may be very significant indeed.

Glasgow is the modern form of the ancient Cumbric , Old British or Brittonic  name Glas Cau, meaning “Green Hollow” (Glas-gau in Cymric or Modern Welsh). possibly referring to the area of Molindar Burn where Glasgow Cathedral now now stands. The later Gaelic name Baile Glas Chu, town of the grey dog, is purely a false charachterisation like the pseudo-Gaelic Craic for the Old English or Scots Crack. Glasgow was once part of Yr Hen Ogledd (The Old North), a Brittonic “Welsh” or Cymric term which refers to those parts of what is now northern “England” and southern “Scotland” in the years between 500 and the Viking invasions of c. 800, with particular interest in the Brittonic or Old British-speaking peoples who lived there. Until recently, knowledge of the Old North has been suppressed by the partisan nationalist academic elites of Ireland, Scotland and England, but teaching our people about it through the internet will be an essential part of the modern Ulster and Appalachian cultural revolution.

Places in the Old North, the Middle Lands, that are mentioned as kingdoms in the literary and historical sources include:

• Alt Clut or Ystrad Clud – a kingdom centred at what is now Dumbarton in “Scotland”. Later known as the Kingdom of Strathclyde, it was one of the best attested of the northern British kingdoms. It was also the last surviving, as it operated as an independent realm into the 11th century before it was finally absorbed by the Kingdom of Scotland and its ecclesiatical centre of Govan superceded by Glasgow.
• Elmet – centred in western Yorkshire in northern “England”. It was located south of the other northern British kingdoms, and well east of present-day Wales, but managed to survive into the early 7th century.
• Gododdin – a kingdom in what is now southeastern Scotland and northeastern England, the area previously noted as the territory of the Votadini. They are the subjects of the poem Y Goddodin, which memorialises an ill-fated foray by an army raised by the Gododdin on the English of Bernicia.
• Rheged – a major kingdom in Galloway and Carrick that may have included parts of present-day Cumbria, though its full extent is unknown. It may have covered a vast area at one point, as it is very closely associated with its king Urien, whose name is tied to places all over northwestern Britain.

Several regions are mentioned in the sources, assumed to be notable regions within one of the kingdoms if not separate kingdoms themselves:

• Aeron – a minor kingdom mentioned in sources such as Y Gododdin, which gave its name to Ayrshire in southwest Scotland. It is frequently associated with Urien of Rheged and may have been part of his realm.
• Calchfynydd (“Chalkmountain”) – almost nothing is known about this area, though it was likely somewhere in the Hen Ogledd, as an evident ruler, Cadrawd Calchfynydd, is listed in the Bonedd Gwyr y Gogledd. William Forbes Skene suggested an identification with Kelso (formerly Calchow) in the Scottish Borders.
• Eidyn – this was the area around the modern city of  Edinburgh then known as Din Eidyn (Fort of Eidyn). It was closely associated with the Gododdin kingdom. Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson argued strongly that Eidyn referred exclusively to Edinburgh, but other scholars have taken it as a designation for the wider area. The name  survives today in toponyms such as Edinburgh, Dunedin, and Carriden (from Caer Eidyn), located fifteen miles to the west. Din Eidyn was besieged by the English in 638 and was under their control for most of the next three centuries.
• Manau Gododdin – the coastal area south of the Firth of Forth, and part of the territory of the Gododdin. The name survives in Slamannan Moor and the village of Slamannan in Stirlingshire. This is derived from Sliabh Manann, the ‘Moor of Manann’. It also appears in the name of Dalmeny, some 5 miles northwest of Edinburgh, and formerly known as Dumanyn, assumed to be derived from Din Manann. The name also survives north of the Forth in Pictish Manaw as the name of the burgh of Clackmannan and the eponymous county of Clackmannanshire, derived from Clach Manann, the ‘stone of Manann’, referring to a monument stone located there.
• Novant – a kingdom mentioned in Y Gododdin, presumably related to the Novantae people of southwestern Scotland.
• Regio Dunutinga – a minor kingdom or region in North Yorkshire mentioned in the Life of Wilfrid . It was evidently named for a ruler named Dunaut, perhaps the Dunaut ap Pabo known from the genealogies. Its name may survive in the modern town of Dent, Cumbria.

Kingdoms that are not descibed by the academic elite as part of the Old North but are part of its history include:

• Dalriada (Dál Riata) – Alhough this was a Gaelic-speaking kingdom in early Mediæval times, its people were indigenous Epidian Cruthin (Pretani) and the family of Áedán mac Gabráin of Dalriada appears in the Bonedd Gwýr y Gogledd (The Descent of the Men of the North).
• English Northumbria and its predecessor states, Bernicia and Deira, which engulfed the Middle Kingdoms.
• The Caledonian Cruthin or Pretani Kingdom of Pictavia.
• Bryneich – this is the Brittonic name for the English kingdom of Bernicia and was the  pre-Anglo-Saxon Brittonic kingdom in this area. 
• Deifr or Dewr – this was the Brittonic name for the English Deira, a region between the River Tees and the Humber. The name is of Brittonic origin, and as with Bryneich, represented the earlier Brittonic kingdom.

This year 2017 is the 1500th Anniversary of the birth of Comgall, venerated as the Father of Monks by the Protestant, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches and a significant figure in our Common Identity. Originally a soldier and not a nobleman, Comgall  was born at Magheramorne, County Antrim in 517 of the People of the Dalaradian Pretani or ancient British.  Having shown great promise in his early years of a vocation to the Christian ministry, Comgall was educated under St Fintan at Clonenagh among the Loigis Pretani of Southern Ireland, and is also said to have studied under Finnian at Clonard and Mobhi Clairenach at Glasnevin.

Following his ordination as a deacon and priest, Comgall was imbued with a great missionary zeal and founded many cells or monasteries before finally establishing Bangor on the coast of County Down under the patronage of Cantigern, Queen of Dalaradia, whose life he had saved. To distinguish it from the other Bangors in the British Isles it became known as Bangor Mór, ‘Bangor the Great’. Bangor means a wattled enclosure in Old British or Brittonic and there is an ancient City of that name in Wales.

The original language or languages of Ulster have long been subsumed but elements of the Old British or Brittonic tongue, now known as Cymric, Cornish and Breton, may be traced in the personal names of the oldest inhabitants, the Cruthin and Ulidians whose political influence declined following defeat by the Gaelic “Ui Neill” at the Battle of Moira (637) and Crew Hill (1004). This was the original tongue of Dalaradia, and indeed of the tribes such as the Brigantes, Manapii, Velaborii, Coriondii and Gangani, recorded by Ptolemy in his second Century map of Ireland or Brittania micra, Little Britain.

The Brittonic or Old British languages (Cymric or Welsh : ieithoedd Brythonaidd/Prydeinig, Cornish: yethow brythonek/predennek, Breton: yezhoù predenek) form one of the two branches of the Celtic language family; the other is Gaelic or Erse  The name Brittonic derives ultimately from the name Prettanike, recorded by Greek authors for the British Isles. Some authors reserve the term Brittonic for the modified later Brittonic languages after about AD 600.

The Brittonic languages derive from the Common Brittonic tongue, spoken throughout Great Britain south of the Firth of Forth during the Iron Age and Roman period. Brittonic was  originally spoken in the British Middle Kingdoms straddling the Borders between  modern England and Scotland, many of whose inhabitants, known as the Border Reivers, were forced into Ulster by James 1. These kingdoms were Strathclyde (Areclut) or modern Glasgow, Goddodin or modern Edinburgh, Aeron or modern Ayrshire, Rheged or modern Galloway,  Dumfries and probably Cumbria, Elmet or modern Yorkshire, Bryneich , later Northumbria, Deifr or Dewr , a region between the River Tees and the Humber.

Brittonic was also spoken in Ireland before Gaelic or Erse and elements are still present in placenames particularly in Antrim and Down (Old Ulster or Ulidia) but also throughout the island. Prominent are Bangor, Lambeg, Glenavy, Tullycarnet, Ballymiscaw (Stormont), Castlereagh and Knockbreda In addition, North of the Forth, the Pictish Language is considered to be related; it is possible it was a Brittonic language, but it may have been a sister language. In the 5th and 6th centuries emigrating Britons also took Brittonic speech to the continent, most significantly in Brittany and Britonia. During the next few centuries the language began to split into several dialects, eventually evolving into Cymric, Cornish, Breton and Cumbric.

Paul Tempan has identified the following place names in Ulster, which have unsatisfactory meanings in Gaelic: Drummillar ( Gaelic droim + Old British or Brittonic moel bre ‘bare hill’), Rathlin Brittonic or Cymric (Welsh). rhygnu “to rub/scrape”; Skettrick cognate with Cymric (Welsh) scethrog ‘rocky place’; letter (as in Letterkenny) cognate with Cymric (Welsh) llethyr ‘slope’; Breda < Bredach ‘ higher ground’ cognate with Brigantes; Teelin cognate with Cymric (Welsh) telyn ‘harp, bow’ ; Old name for Downpatrick, Dún dá Lethglais = ‘fort of Lleth Gadwal’, Old British or Brittonic  form of ‘Cathal’s half’. But there are also Brittonic elements throughout Ireland, for example, the term Gaoth which occurs in Gaoth Barra and Gaoth Dobhair (Gweedore) in Donegal, as well as Gaoth Sáile in Mayo.

The name Gael itself is derived from the Brittonic ‘Guidel’, modern Welsh ‘Gwyddel’, meaning ‘raider’, and would suggest that the newcomers had no common name for themselves until they had come into contact with foreigners. The Romans called them Scotti (Scots) or marauders. And prominent families here more recently spoke the tongue; families such as Welsh, Walsh or Wallace, Rice or Price (ap Rhyss), Lewis (Llywelyn) , Evans or Bevan (Ifan), Griffith or Griffin (Gruffudd) and Meredith (Morgetuid or Margetiud). We still use Cymric in our British passports, translating The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as Teyrnas Gyfunol Prydain Fawr a Gogledd Iwerddon. The ancient name of Pretania is retained in the Cymric as Prydain.

Although no literature has survived of the old British language in Ulster, the Goddodin of Aneirin and the Odes of Taliesin, who wrote in praise of the war-like deeds of his Lord, Urien of Rheged in South-West Scotland, have survived. Cymric and Breton continue to be spoken as native languages, while a revival in Cornish has led to an increase in speakers of that language. Cumbric is extinct, having been replaced by Gaelic and English speech. The Isle of Man and Orkney also  originally spoke a Brittonic language, as did the whole of Ireland, later replaced with a Gaelic one. Due to emigration, there are also communities of Brittonic language speakers in England, France and Y Wladfa (the Welsh settlement in Patagonia, Argentina).

On 9th March, 1999, as an Ulster Unionist MLA , I gave a speech on Linguistic Diversity. I said then that Ulster sits at the north-eastern corner of Ireland, facing Scotland across a narrow sea. The characteristics of her language, since the dawn of human history, had been moulded by population movements, large and small, between the two islands. Therefore, we have had a wide range of dialects in the northern part of the island, including dialects of Gaelic and of the older Scottish tongue. When I read the part of the Belfast Agreement which deals with rights, safeguards and equality of opportunity, I was delighted with these words:

The Gallic Wars

Gallia

 

 

 

On Wednesday 30th June 2010, our Somme Pilgrimage took us from Arras on a full day’s tour into Belgium. On the road to Ieper (Ypres) I had the opportunity to tell our group of the continuation of the Roman Road to the land of the Belgae from whom Belgium gets its name and the tribes who once lived there.

On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, 9th, 10th and 11th January 1963 I played the role of Julius Caesar in William Shakespeare’s play of that name performed in the school hall in Bangor Grammar School. Brutus was played by Gus Hancock, who was to become the Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University The program explained the events leading up to the action of the play. The Roman Republic had long relied for its strength upon a sound citizen body headed by an aristocratic Senate. From just before 100 BC, the balance of power swung towards such successful generals as could control the now great empire. Julius Caesar was perhaps the greatest of these generals. He had out-generalled and defeated the great soldier Pompey; shown more political acumen than the Senators; conquered Gaul and fought in Britain, Spain and North Africa, Greece and Anatolia to assert his predominance and become dictator. He was now transforming the very basis of government throughout the empire.

He was a radical and tended to reform without sufficient concern for others. He was impatient with the reactionary Senate. The final and fatal error was his alleged aspiration to Kingship. This was quite alien to aristocratic sentiment. The play begins in 44 BC when a small group of men, because of the reasons mentioned and through their own private motives have conspired to act against Caesar, and assassinate him.

The last phase of colonisation of Britain before the Roman conquest came with the Belgic settlements in the south east during the first century BC. These Belgic colonies gave rise, according to Julius Caesar, to the different petty states of Britain the name of those from which they came. Caesar’s report was the first and only record from historical sources of Celtic or part Celtic migration to Britain. His famous Gallic Wars gives us a personal account of Gaul and the battles he fought there.

Caesar tells us that the Gaul of his day was divided into three parts, inhabited by three nations; Belgae, Celtae and Acquitani, all of whom different in language institutions and laws. Since the Romans knew all three as Gauls and the leaders and tribes at least have Celtic names, we may assume all were Celtic speaking though of different dialects and ethnic origins, the Belgae having strong Germanic elements.

Caesar limits the Celtae to that country included from north to south between the Seine and the Garonne and from the Ocean on the west to the Rhine in Helvetia, and the Rhone on the east. The Veneti were the most powerful of the Celtae and inhabited the country to the north of the mouth of the Loire, (Liger). We know that the Domnonii of Cornwall and Devon were the most cultivated of their British relatives and that the Veneti traded with them for the tin of Cornwall. The Domnonian Britons reserved the legend that they came from Glas-gwyn, from the country of the Liger. Migrating to Ireland under Roman pressure and displacing the aboriginal pre-Celtic Pretani or Cruthin, they called themselves Lagin or Domnainn maintaining the tradition that they were originally from Armorica. When the Irish Lagin later invaded the Lleyn Peninsula in Wales later from Ireland it took the name of Guined (Gwynedd) which derives directly from Veneti.

The Belgae inhabited what is now north eastern France and the Low Countries. The tribe which never sued for peace from Caesar was the Manapii who were originally seated on the Meuse and on the Lower Rhine. This great tribe was to become known to the later Gaels as the Fir Manaig, Men of the Manapii , who gave their name to Fermanagh and Monaghan, an area originally known by its Pretanic name of Erdinia. It is probable that they also inhabited the Isle of Man (Monapia) before the Gaelic conquest. It was the Manapii along with the Morini and other Northern tribes who maintained an independent Gaulish area following Caesar’s campaign of 57 BC, when he massacred 50,000 Belgic warriors at the earliest recorded Battle on the Somme.

In 56 BC the Veneti threw off the yoke of Rome and the whole coast from the Loire to the Rhine joined the insurrection. Caesar attacked the powerful Venetian navy and destroyed it, selling the defeated captives into slavery to a man. And it was the help they received from their British relatives which prompted his invasion of Britain in 55 BC.

To be continued

Second Lieutenant J.R.R. Tolkien

Part 1: The Two Heroes

During the Great War, J.R.R. Tolkien enlisted into the Lancashire Fusiliers as a Second Lieutenant. The Lancashire Fusiliers enjoyed a fine reputation They dated back to the landing of William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and had shattered the French Cavalry at the Battle of Minden in the Seven Years War. Following the Napoleonic War, Wellington had described them as “the best and most distinguished” of British regiments, just as he had also said that “the 27th of Foot (Inniskilling Fusiliers) saved the centre of my line at Waterloo”.

My grandfather Samuel and his brother from Bolton served with them in the Boer War when they suffered the heaviest casualties in the attack on Spion Kop, but had gone on to the relief of Ladysmith. Of Tolkien’s school friends in the TCBS (Tea Club and Barrovian Sociey) Robert Quilter Gilson had joined the 11th Suffolks and Geoffrey Bache Smith the 3rd Salford Pals (19th Lancashire Fusiliers).This battalion had just achieved fame in the securing of “W Beach” in Gallipoli when it had won a historic six VCs in one morning.

Late on Sunday 4th June 1916 Tolkien set off for London and thence to France where he was present at the Battle of the Somme. The approximate centre line of the battlefield was defined by this Old Roman Road to the Land of the Belgae which runs straight from Albert in the West to Bapaume in the East. Tolkien’s battalion disembarked in Amiens and marched on to a hamlet called Rubempré ten miles away. Here they were billeted in those conditions of the Western Front to which they would soon become accustomed.

Then on Friday 30th June they moved near to the Front Line. The attack began early the next morning, but they were not to be in it, for they were to be held in reserve, going into battle several days later when it was planned that the German line would have been smashed open and the Allied troops would have penetrated deep into enemy territory.

At 7.30am on Saturday 1st July the troops of the British Front Line went over the top including, of course, the famous 36th Ulster Division. Rob Gilson of the TCBS serving in the Suffolk Regiment was among them. Tolkien’s battalion remained in reserve, moving to a village called Bouzincourt, where the majority bivouacked in a field. Soon the awful truth dawned that on the first day of battle twenty thousand allied troops had been killed and the 36th Ulster Division had suffered five-and-a-half thousand casualties. To their right the 1st Salford Pals (15th Lancashire Fusiliers) were all but wiped out, the remnants joining the Ulstermen. Only they had been able to penetrate the German lines, which generally had remained intact. On Sunday 2nd July, Tolkien attended Mass in front of a portable field altar, being administered by a Chaplain of the Royal Irish Rifles as his battalion’s Padre was an Anglican averse to Roman Catholics, something Tolkien never forgot.

On Thursday 6th July, Tolkien’s 11th Lancashire Fusiliers went into action, but only A Company was sent to the trenches and Tolkien remained at Bouzincourt with the remainder. Finally on Friday 14th July, B Company went into action. The sights which Tolkien now experienced, the images, sounds and the people he met , stayed with him until his death in 1973. He never forgot what he called the “animal horror” of trench warfare.

His first day in action had been chosen by the allied commanders for a major offensive and his company was attached to the Seventh Infantry Brigade for an attack on the ruined hamlet of Ovillers, which was in German hands. The attack was unsuccessful and many of Tolkien’s battalion were killed around him by machine gun fire. On his return to the huts at Bouzincourt, Tolkien found a letter from his friend G P Smith, to say that Rob Gilson had died at La Boisselle, leading his men into action on the first day of battle. A Service of Remembrance is held at the Lochnagar mine crater near La Boiselle every year on the morning of 1st July and we visit it regularly.

Day now followed day in the same pattern; a rest period, back to the trenches and more attacks. Tolkien was among those who were in support at the storming of the Schwaben Redoubt, a massive fortification of German trenches, upon which Northern Ireland’s National War Memorial, The Ulster Tower, stands facing Thiepval Wood which is now owned by the Somme Association. Although he was to make revisions to “Kortirion among the trees “during two days in a dugout in the Thiepval Wood front line, none of the “Lost Tales” which form the basis for the much later “Silmarillion” can be dated to his time in France, let alone in the trenches, when all his energies, like those of his men, were devoted to pure survival .

British losses continued to be severe and many more of Tolkein’s battalion were killed. On 27th October 1916 he was rescued from the battle by “Pyrexia of Unknown Origin” (PUO) or as the soldiers simply called it “Trench Fever”, a highly infectious disease caused by a Rickettsial organism Bartonella Quintana, carried by the louse Pediculus corporis. By 8th November he remained ill and was put on a ship back to England. But his other friend G B Smith was not so lucky. He had been walking down the road in a village behind the lines, when a shell burst near him and wounded him in his right arm and thigh. An operation was attempted, but fatal gangrene set in. They buried him in Warlencourt British Cemetery, where we visit him.

C S Lewis arrived at the Front Line trenches on his nineteenth birthday, 29th November 1917. To his great surprise he found that the Captain of his company of the Somerset Light Infantry was none other than his old teacher P G K Harris. Lewis was also to suffer from Trench Fever at the beginning of February 1918 but returned to the Front on 28th February and during the First Battle of Arras from 21st to 28th March 1918 he was in or near the Front Line. By this time three of his “old set” of friends had been killed, Alexander Sutton, Thomas Davy and room mate Edward Moore. Edward was posthumously awarded the Military Cross and, as he had promised, Lewis took care of his mother Jane until she died thirty-three years later.

Still around Arras, Lewis saw action in the battle centred on Riez du Village between 14th and 16th April when he was wounded by a British shell exploding behind him. The medical board described Lewis’ wounds thus: “shell fragments caused three wounds, in the left side of his chest, his left wrist and left leg.” The shell fragment in his left chest was to remain lodged in the upper lobe of his left lung for the rest of the War. Sadly the news that his Serjeant Harry Ayres had been killed next to him caused him great grief. Lewis remained in hospital until June, when he was transferred to convalesce in Bristol. He remained there until October and did not return to France.

Thus Tolkien and Lewis had survived the Great War and it was perhaps their similar experiences which drew them together in Oxford to form that legendary friendship which culminated in the development of the group of friends, all of whom were male and Christian, and most of whom were interested in literature, which was known as the Inklings. Certainly for Tolkien, Lewis must have seemed like all his former friends rolled into one.

The first story which Tolkien put on paper was written during his convalescence at Great Haywood early in 1917. This is the Fall of Gondolin, which tells of the assault of the last Elvish stronghold by Morgoth, the prime power of evil and these are the Elves who form the basis of the Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. Discussing one of the principal characters in the Lord of the Rings, Tolkein wrote many years later, “my Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war and recognise as so far superior to myself.” The Hobbit itself is almost a parallel of the Great War as Bilbo Baggins is plucked from his rural life and plunged into a brutal conflict. So also are Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins pitched against the forces of darkness and witnesses to a carnage in Middle-earth reminiscent of Armageddon which could only have been imagined by those Heroes of World War One.

To be continued

Your Honour the Mayor, Baroness Paisley, Aldermen , Councillors, Chief Executive and Distinguished Guests, It is a great privilege to attend this historic function and on behalf of my friend and colleague in Pretani Associates, Captain Mrs Helen Brooker and myself may I thank you most sincerely for the invitation. I was asked by the British and Irish governments to attend the Centenary Service at Messines today, because as founding Chairman of the Somme Association, I have attended there for the past 30 years or more, but this is a unique occasion for me, because the first Principal of Bangor, Comgall, was born exactly 1500 years ago.  I was glad that Robert’s first act as Mayor was to hold a minute’s silence for the soldiers who died at the Battle of Messines Ridge, as well as those who died in the recent outrages in Manchester and London.

Bangor, “a holy city, set on a hill, in which there was a great population who belong to God”, was by far the most important of the early Irish monastic settlements, founded in 555 on Ulidian territory by Comgall, perhaps the most famous of all the ancient British or Pretani. The name ‘Bangor’ comes from medieval British or Cymric, which may mean ‘pointed arrangement’, possibly referring to the pointed sticks in the wattled fence which would have surrounded the settlement or simply “Blessed Place” in the older Pictish or British tongue. There have been several derivations over the years. It was Bangor which would give the largest number of great names to Irish religious history, figures such as Columbanus, Gall, Moluag (Molua), Maelrubha, Dungal and Malachy.

Originally a soldier and not a nobleman, Comgall,  was born at Magheramorne, County Antrim, in 517 of the People of the Dalaradian Pretani.  Having shown great promise in his early years of a vocation to the Christian ministry, Comgall was educated under St Fintan at Clonenagh among the Loigis Cruthin, and is also said to have studied under Finnian at Clonard and Mobhi Clairenach at Glasnevin. Following his ordination as a deacon and priest, Comgall was imbued with a great missionary zeal and founded many cells or monasteries before finally establishing Bangor on the coast of County Down under the patronage of Cantigern, Queen of Dalaradia, whose life he had saved. To distinguish it from the other Bangors in the British Isles it became known as Bangor Mór, ‘Bangor the Great’.

The monastic settlement consisted of a large number of huts made of wattles situated around the church or oratory with its refectory, school, scriptorium and hospice. The whole establishment was surrounded by a vallum which consisted of a rampart and ditch. Life at Bangor was very severe. The food was sparse and even milk was considered an indulgence. Only one meal per day was allowed and that not until evening. Confession was held in public before the whole community and severe acts of penance were observed. There was silence at meal times and at other times conversation was restricted to the minimum. Comgall himself was extremely pious and austere and it is said that he arose in the middle of the night to recite psalms and say prayers while immersed in the nearby stream.

The strength of the community lay in its form of worship. The choral services were based on the antiphonal singing from Gaul, introduced into the West by Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century. Bangor became famous for this type of choral psalmody and it spread from there throughout Europe once more. The glory of Bangor was the celebration of a perfected and refined Laus Perennis and in singing this the community of Bangor entered into a covenant of mutual love and service in the Church of Jesus Christ. Because of the great number of students and monks attached to Bangor and its outlying daughter churches, it was possible to have a continuous chorus of the Divine Praise sung by large choirs which were divided into groups, each of which took regular duty and sang with a refinement not possible when St Martin was organising the raw recruits of Gaul.

One of the most important religious works produced at Bangor was the Bangor Antiphonary, now housed in the Ambrosian Library of Milan. The creed found in this work differs in wording from all others known and is in substance the original Creed of Nicaea. For this reason alone the Bangor Antiphonary may be considered one of the most precious relics of Western civilisation. ‘Correct’ belief, the now standard orthodoxy of the Christian Church, was established chiefly at the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (now Iznik in Turkey) in May 325 AD. The resultant Nicene Creed was an enlarged and explanatory version of the Apostles’ Creed in which the doctrines of Christ’s divinity and of the Holy Trinity were defined.

In the Antiphonary, there is a celebration of Bangor’s contribution to church history:

The Holy, valiant deeds
Of sacred Fathers,
Based on the matchless
Church of Bangor;
The noble deeds of abbots,
Their number, times and names,
Of never-ending lustre,
Hear, brothers; great their deserts,
Whom the Lord hath gathered
To the mansions of his heavenly kingdom.
Christ loved Comgall,
Well, too, did he the Lord.

There is also a hymn to Comgall himself:

Let us remember the shining justice of our patron, St Comgall, glorious in deed, aided by the spirit of God and, by the holy and radiant light of the sublime Trinity, directing all things under his rule…
Listen, everyone, to the deeds of this champion of God, who has been introduced to the secrets of the angels. From the first flowering of his youth his uprightness, strengthened by his faith, was nourished on the pages of the Law and was introduced to the joys of God. The virtues which he showed in his great life were abundantly in keeping with his faith…
He set himself like a barrier of iron in front of the people to rout, to uproot and destroy all evil and to build and implant good for the benefit of all, like St Hieremia set on high…

Comgall, by all accounts, was a commanding personality. “Such was his reputation for piety and learning that multitudes flocked to his school from the most distant parts; it is well established that not less than 3,000 students and teachers were under his care at one time, including many of the most honourable in the land. The evangelistic zeal of Comgall was pre-eminent — down to the landing-place at the reef of rocks he led many a band of his disciples who were to embark on their frail coracles to spread the Gospel in European countries.”

At Bangor were compiled in all probability the original Chronicles of Ireland, and the beautiful poetry The Voyage of Bran. In this region too the old traditions of Ulster were preserved and these were moulded into the Gaelic masterpiece the Táin Bó Cuailgne (Cattle Raid of Cooley). The ancient ‘Ulster Chronicle’, from which it is believed the oldest entries in the Annals of Ulster were derived, has been attributed to Sinlan Moccu Min, who is described in the lists of abbots in the Bangor Antiphonary as the “famed teacher of the world” (famosus mundi magister).

Proinsias Mac Cana has summed up the rich cultural legacy of this region of Ulster: “In Ireland the seventh century was marked by two closely related developments: the rapid extension of the use of writing in the Irish language and an extraordinary quickening of intellectual and artistic activity which was to continue far beyond the limit of the century. The immediate sources of this artistic renewal were the scriptoria of certain of the more progressive monasteries and its direct agents, those monastic literati whom the Irish metrical tracts refer to by the significant title of nualitride, ‘new men of letters’.

While there is no reason to suppose that these individuals were confined to any one part of the country, nevertheless the evidence strongly suggests that it was only in the east, or more precisely the south-east, of Ulster that their activities assumed something of the impetus and cohesiveness of a cultural movement. Here conservation and creativity went hand in hand: the relatively new skill of writing in the vernacular began to be vigorously exploited not only for the direct recording of secular oral tradition– heroic, mythological and the more strictly didactic — but also at the same time as a vehicle for the imaginative re-creation of certain segments of that tradition, so that one may with due reservations speak of this region of south-east Ulster as the cradle of written Irish literature… Bangor seems to have been the intellectual centre whence the cultural dynamic of the east Ulster region emanated.”

in 603 Comgall of the Pretani , died here at his monastery in Bangor, in the ninety-first year of his age, in the fiftieth year and third month and tenth day of his presidency, on the sixth of the Ides of May… And of Comgall they wrote in the Bangor Antiphonary:

Amavit Christus Comgillum, Christ loved Comgall
Bene et ipse Dominum, Well, too, did he the Lord.

As a worthy successor of Comgall, we may also say of Robert, Christ loves Robert Adair, Well, too, does he the Lord.

Thank you very much…

Set as Ulster is at the North Eastern corner of Ireland, facing Britain across a narrow sea and separated from the rest of Ireland by a zone of little hills known as Drumlins, the characteristics of her language and people have been moulded by movements, large and small, between the two islands since the dawn of human history. P.L.Henry has described the difference between Ulster and the rest of Ireland as: “One of the most deeply rooted, ancient, and from a literary point of view, most productive facts of early Irish History.” Furthermore, “Ulster’s bond with Scotland counterbalances her lax tie with the rest of Ireland. To say, once more, that this applies only to modern times and to dialects of English would be to miscalculate grossly. Here too the mould was fixed in ancient times and modern developments continue ancient associations. We need but think of the Pictish (ancient British Pretani or Cruthin) Kingdoms in both areas, of the Ulster-Scottish Kingdom of Dalriada from the last quarter of the 5th to the close of the 8th century, of the Scottish Kingdom founded under Gaelic leadership in 842, of Irish relations with the Kingdom of the Hebrides and Argyll from the 12th century, particularly the immigration of Hebridean soldiers (gallowglasses) from the 13th to the 16th century. The Gaelic or Erse form of this word, Galloglaigh, (i.e. Gallagher) occurs as a family name in Northern Ireland. There was a constant coming and going between North East Ireland and Western Scotland. The Glens of Antrim were in the hands of Scottish Macdonalds by1400, and for the next two hundred years Gaelic-speaking Scots came in large numbers. The 17th century immigration of a numerous Scots element need not to be considered outside the preceding series. It has brought for example Presbyterian Scots with names as familiar on this side as McMenemin and Kennedy, who must be considered rather in the light of homing birds.”

The original language or languages of Ulster have long been subsumed but elements of an old British or Brittonic tongue, now known as Cymric, Cornish and Breton, may be traced in the personal names of the oldest inhabitants, the Cruthin and Ulidians whose political influence declined following defeat by the Gaelic “Ui Neill” at the Battle of Moira (637) and Crew Hill (1004). Placenames also retain such elements, especially in East Ulster(Ulidia), for example, Lambeg, Glenavy, Tullycarnet, Braniel, Bangor, Ballymiscaw, Knockbreda and Castlereagh as well as in personal names like Patrick and Brendan. But there are also Brittonic elements throughout Ireland, for example, the term Gaoth which occurs in Gaoth Barra and Gaoth Dobhair (Gweedore) in Donegal, as well as Gaoth Sáile in Mayo. Although no literature has survived of the old British language in Ulster, the Goddodin of Aneirin and the Odes of Taliesin, who wrote in praise of the war-like deeds of his Lord, Urien of Rheged in South-West Scotland, have survived. The oldest Irish sagas were composed in a language that suggests that they were first written down in the 7th and 8th centuries from an oral tradition. The most outstanding cycle in the early Irish literature was the Ulster Cycle. The longest tale of this is the Cattle-Raid of Cooley (Táin Bó Cuailgne),dealing with the conflict between “the men of Ulster” and “the men of Ireland” (i.e. the rest of Ireland). The chief hero was Cuchulainn, whose real name was Setanta which is the same as that of an ancient British tribe who have been also recorded as living in present day Lancashire.

Old British or Brittonic was displaced in Ireland by Gaelic just as English later displaced Gaelic, so that the Gaelic name Cuchulainn (The Hound of Cullen) is remembered and Setanta became merely his “boyhood name”. When Gaelic was planted on the British mainland, however, its verbal system was remoulded on the lines of the Brittonic language, which originally had no future tense. Scottish Gaelic was also to preserve archaic features now lost in Irish Gaelic. Having worked for more than twenty years on a linguistic atlas of Gaelic dialects, Heinrich Wagner has found that: “each major dialect and each minor subdialect of Gaelic is dependent on its geographical position, all the dialects forming a chain in which two neighbouring dialects always have certain features in common not shared by more distant dialects. The dialect of North Clare, for example, correctly defined as a Munster or southern dialect, has strong features in common with the dialects of South Galway, although Galway Irish on the whole belongs to the central Connaught dialect. The dialects of the old province of Ulster in the north are almost as close to the dialects of Southern Scotland (Arran, Kintyre, and also Rathlin Island) as they are to other Irish dialects.”

The earliest extant Scottish document which contained Gaelic matter is the Book of Deer in which Latin Gospels were accompanied by marginalia in Gaelic and Latin, the Gaelic being if the 12th century. Many other manuscripts however, of a later date belonged to the common Scots-Irish tradition and the most important of these was the Book of the Dean of Lismore, an anthology of verse compiled between 1512 and 1526 by Sir James McGregor in Argyllshire. This is thought to be the earliest extant anthology of heroic Gaelic ballads in either Scotland or Ireland. Later Gaelic prose concerned the hero Finn McCool and his war band, becoming part of the popular tales if the West Highlands and Islands although such stories are as much part of the heritage of those who returned to Ulster from Galloway and Carrick.

The 1961 census showed that there were still 80,978 Gaelic speakers in Scotland. In addition 3,702 Scottish Gaelic speakers were recorded in the 1961 Canadian census. The survival of Scottish Gaelic is therefore in many ways less in doubt than that of Gaelic in Ireland. This stems from the remarkable fact that the majority of Scottish Gaelic speakers are Protestants, who are accustomed to read the Bible and use it as a vernacular in their religious services. Indeed the first book to be printed in Irish Gaelic was a translation of the Calvinist Book of Common Order, commonly called John Knox’s Liturgy, published in Edinburgh in 1567 for the use of Presbyterians. Scottish Gaelic was not to become a literary language until the early 17th century.

The division between Ulster Gaelic and that of the rest of Ireland developed well before the arrival of English from the 17th century. T.F.O’Rahilly (1932) outlined a number of features which distinguished the two major Irish Gaelic languages and regarded the position of word stress as one of the most important of these. He believed that the Southern language reached south Co. Meath in the east. The boundary then ran west through Westmeath and Longford to South Galway. The Southern language was more homogenous than that of Ulster and more widespread, occupying at least three-quarters of the island. Ulster Gaelic was characterised by an increasing influence of Scottish Gaelic as one proceeded north and east, though some Scots influence was evident everywhere in Ulster. English was to take over the distribution patterns of the Gaelic language during and after the 17th century, thus perpetrating that ancient frontier between Ulster and the rest of Ireland evidenced also in the structure known as the Black Pig’s Dyke.

At the beginning of the 20th century in that area which now constitutes Northern Ireland there were eight districts in which dialects of Ulster Gaelic survived among 5% or more of the total population. As well as the Red Bay Gaeltacht of the Glens of Antrim and Rathlin Island, the Mid-Ulster Gaeltacht centring on the Sperrins lay entirely within what was to become Northern Ireland. There were also three areas along the border which were extensions of localities in which Gaelic was spoken by a higher percentage of people. These were South Armagh Gaelic, which was part of the old Oriel Gaelic spoken also in Louth and Monaghan, west Tyrone Gaelic, which was an extension of Donegal Gaelic, and south-west Fermanagh Gaelic which was an outlier of the Gaelic of Cavan and Leitrim. Perhaps the most literary of these was the Gaelic of Old Oriel. A fourth border area was Strabane, which was formed by immigration from Mid-Ulster and Donegal. The eighth area was around Trillick in southwest Tyrone. The Gaelic heritage survives in Ulster in place and personal names, i.e. Shankill and Craig. In fact, there are more of these names of Gaelic derivation in Ulster than anywhere else in Ireland. Ulster Gaelic however has seriously declined as a living language. By the early nineteen eighties there were only two small Gaelic-speaking areas in Donegal of 8,400 and 2,000 souls, with a further 15,500 in the remainder of the island (Desmond Fennell). This was due firstly to the effects of the industrial revolution taking people from the land and concentrating them in the major cities which were English-speaking, secondly to the early antagonism of both Church and State and more recently to feelings that Gaelic-speaking had become the weekend sport of the urban elite, with subsequent rejection by the people. Recently however the language has re-established itself in West Tyrone and Belfast, where it has become a badge of national identity.

Yet the decline of Ulster Gaelic also owes much to Irish Nationalism itself. The main problem for the early Gaelic nationalist was that there was no single “caint na ndoine” or language of the people to promote as the “Irish Language”, but an extensive range of local idioms and grammatical forms. Most scholars agreed with T.F.O’Rahilly that “in the case of Irish it is especially necessary that a standard language be left to evolve itself …the pressing problem of the hour is to keep alive and vigorous every one of the last few dialects of Irish that have survived. Little good would a manufactured ‘literary’ language be if once the stream of living Irish … is allowed to dry up” (Studies, 1923). In the early 1940’s with the development of the Gaelic nationalist urban elite, de Valera requested the translation department of the Eire parliament (since there was no central Academy to direct language reform) to produce a standard reformed spelling. This they did in 1945, followed by a proposed standard grammar in 1953, which was composed mainly of forms selected from Munster and Connaught Gaelic, and largely ignored the Ulster Gaelic of Donegal. This standard grammar has now been generally adopted as the “Irish Grammar”, An Caighdeán Oifigiúil (the official written standard) but the name of the language remains  Gaeilge. One of the most influential essays prior to its development was Forbairt na Gaeilge by Niall O Domhnaill, ironically of Donegal Gaeltacht origin. O Domhnaill’s work was vigorously nationalistic, strongly advocating the artificial development of a standard language as the “mental tool for a new national life” and he declared that the standard would be created in Dublin. For O Domhnaill the main goal of Gaelic revivalism was “to give Irish a national character”. This was bound engender hostility towards Gaelic among the Unionist population of Ulster, who could have acted to preserve more of their ancient heritage.

The history of the English language starts with the settlement in Britain of Jutes, Saxons and Angles in the 5th and 6th centuries and these population groupings came from respectively Jutland, Schleswig and Halstein. The Jutes settled mainly in Kent, Southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, while Saxons occupied the rest of England south of the Thames as well as modern Middlesex and Essex. The Angles, who also settled in what is now modern Friesland in the Netherlands, eventually took the remainder of England as far north as the Firth of Forth, including the area of the future Edinburgh, and the Anglian speaking region developed into two speech groups.  To the north of the river, Northumbrian was spoken and to the south, Southumbrian or Mercian. There were thus four dialects, Northumbria, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish. One result of the Norman Conquest of 1066 was the placing of all four old English dialects on a more or less equal level. The Old Northumbrian dialect became divided into Scots and Northern by the end of the 13th century. In its roots and origins Scots was closet perhaps to Frisian and thus is grouped today together with Received Pronunciation or standard English along with Frisian in the language grouping known as Coastal Germanic. This forms with the Dutch and German or land Germanic the group known as West Germanic. In fact, the Anglo-Saxon Boniface was so well understood in Friesland in 754 that it became dangerous for him to stay there. The Frisian heritage is also apparent in the name of Dumfries, which is thought to mean “The Fort of the Frisians.”

It must be stated that Received Pronunciation English is not intrinsically superior to other varieties of English but has for purely historical reasons achieved more extensive usage than the others. This may have been fostered by the establishment of public schools such as Winchester, Eton, Harrow and Rugby and its use as the standard English in ancient universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, and Trinity College, Dublin. Irish pronunciation generally has been conservative and is clearer and more easily intelligible than many other dialects. Ulster English in fact preserves many older words than have since gone out of use in England. It has been stated that more of Shakespeare’s words are used at the present time in Armagh than in Warwickshire itself. Overall there has been a widespread generalisation of Ulster English (Northern Hiberno-English) throughout Ulster including Belfast. The source of this Ulster language is a mixture of English dialects in the narrower sense and of Lallans. John Braidwood in his classical study Ulster and Elizabethan English has pointed out that the English contribution, historical and linguistic, should not be minimised. Brendan Adams (1977) delineated a border between Ulster English and the Southern speech as running between two parallel lines from Bundoran to Dundalk and from Sligo to Drogheda. As with Gaelic, south of a similar line dialects are quite homogeneous while north of it Scottish influences have led to more complex regional variations.

There remains however an area in which among the rural population an Ulster Scots language is still spoken. This may be indeed a purer form of Lallans than that spoken in Scotland itself. The language area begins at Whitehead and its borders run south-westwards, approximately a mile distant from the shoreline north of Glengormley down to Dundrod. The line then runs north to the east of Antrim and swings round north of Antrim town to the Long Mountain, progressing then to just south of Rasharkin and then swinging north-west across the Lower Bann nearer Kilrea to continue in a more or less straight line to the shores of Lough Foyle. On the other side of the Belfast Lough it begins at Groomsport running along the Holywood Hills through the Dundonald gap to Gilnahirk and south-westwards through Carryduff and Boardmills to gradually turn round to run eastwards to Strangford Lough, north of Killyleagh. It then commences again at the Saltwater Bridge north of Ardkeen in the Ards Peninsula and runs along this to Cloughey. As well as this large area in Northern Ireland there id the Laggan area of Donegal, the boundary of which begins a mile or two north of Muff and runs across to Lough Swilly then across the Fanad Peninsula through Carrowkeel, Milford, Termon amd round to the Foyle near Clonleigh.

From approximately 1770 onwards, Ulster Scots was cultivated by local poets known as the “Rhyming Weavers”, who flourished mainly in Mid Antrim, East Antrim and North Down. Educated in both Latin and Greek, they achieved a higher level of culture than any section of the peasantry in Western Europe. They were not merely writing an imitation of Robert Burns but belonged to a tradition which went back to Allen Ramsey and beyond in Scotland. The greatest period of their activity was roughly the century between 1770 and 1870 but the tradition continues even until today in Co. Antrim. Unfortunately the literature of the people has not been fully developed by the urban elite, although an Ulster Dialect Archive has been established at Cultra Manor, the headquarters of the Ulster Folk Museum.

Brendan Adams exemplified the two different types of Northern speech by reproducing a few lines of the well known poem by W.F.Marshall entitled Me and Me Da. Part of the original poem in the Ulster English Language spoken in Co. Tyrone is as follows:

I mind the day she went away,
I hid wan Struken hour,
An cursed the wasp from Cullentra
That made me da so sour.
But cryin cures no trouble,
To Bridget I went back
An faced hor for it that night week,
Beside hor own toarf-staack.

Transposed into the Ulster Lallans language of Co. Antrim this reads:

A mine the day she went awaa,
A hud yin stricken oor,
An cursed the wasp fae Cullentraa
Thaat made ma daa sae soor.
But craayin cures nae trabble,
Tae Bradget A went beck
An Faced harr for it that nicht week,
Beside harr ain turf-steck.

There are many parts of Ulster, therefore, where people are still bilingual in two varieties of the English language. They use Ulster Scots (Ullans) while speaking among themselves and the approximation of the regional standard of Ulster English, in talking to strangers. (Adams, 1977). Neither Ulster Scots nor Ulster English are “foreign” since the original dialects were modified in the mouths of the local Gaelic speakers who acquired them and eventually, after a bilingual period, lost their native tongue. These modified dialects were then gradually adopted by the Scottish and English settlers themselves, since the Irish constituted the majority population. The dialect of Belfast is a variety of Ulster English, so that the people of the Shankill Road speak English which is almost a literal translation of Gaelic. In rural areas Ulster Scots is learned through day by day conversation and communication by a process of natural bilingualism, but is then treated as an inferior dialect by the urban elite. R.J. Gregg included in Scotch-Irish Urban Speech in Ulster that local Scotch-Irish urban versions of modified standard English “are spoken nowadays not only by the townsfolk, but by educated country dwellers as well. For this very reason they are obviously destined to expand, for with uninterrupted recession of the rural dialects, the regional modified standard language is spreading out from the towns and rapidly encroaching upon the surrounding countryside.”

A similar situation existed for Frisian, the sister language of Lallans. In the 19th century teaching aids for Frisian as a subject were non-existent. In 1907, however, the Provincial Council of Friesland granted subsidies thus enabling the first courses in Frisian for children to be started. These classes, which were run outside normal school hours, did not attract many pupils. In 1924 the Frisian Education Board assumed responsibility for these and other courses and in 1937 it became legally possible for Frisian to be taught as an optional subject. Thanks to the wording of Section 2 of the 1920 Primary Education Act “in those cases where besides Dutch a regional dialect is in active use the subject’s reading in Dutch may include some knowledge of that regional dialect.” Caution precluded Frisian being mentioned by name but all this was changed by the Amendment to the Act in 1955 when the following sentence was included, “In those cases where besides Dutch the Frisian language or a regional dialect is in active use, the curriculum may stipulate that up to the third school year at most the Frisian language or that regional dialect shall also be used as a language medium in schools.” In 1959 the Fryske Akademy established the first educational advisory service in the Netherlands to be fully subsidised by the state. This centre developed a system and paved the way for the production of teaching aids and gave advice to schools which became affiliated to it. In 1974 a further Act of Amendment to the Primary Education Act in Friesland promoted an increase in the use of Frisian as a language medium in all classes. Finally on 1st August, 1980 Frisian was made a compulsory subject. Therefore today while 100% of Frisians are Dutch-speaking, albeit at varying levels, 97% understand Frisian, 83% speak it, 71% speak it at home, 69% can read Frisian, 41%occasionally read a Frisian book, 23% occasionally buy a Frisian book and 31% can write Frisian, 11% well and 20% reasonably well.

In Policies to support Radio and Television broadcasting in the lesser used languages of the European Community (New University of Ulster). Antony Alcock and Terence O’Brien summarised the work of the Fryske Akademy as follows: “(a) linguistic research to prepare a course for the teaching of Frisian in primary school, (b) the provision of materials for teachers and pupils, (c) the design of this programme with a view to its use in utilising a novel low cost form of telecommunications, i.e. teleboard, (d) follow-up studies to test the results and indicate where improvements might be made.” There is therefore much to learn from the Frisian-Dutch Bilingual Primary School system as well as the education system in Wales. There are three types of school in Wales, the first of these is the traditional modern language type of rural Wales, the second Ysgol Gynraeg which originated as a mother language type for small groups of Welsh-speakers in urban areas and the third a bilingual educational project, the Welsh Language School for English-Speaking Children.

The preservation of both Ulster Scots and the Ulster Gaelic must be considered a priority by those who wish to maintain the Ulster identity. Only by the collective will of the Ulster people will either survive. Neither language belongs solely to one or other religious or political “tradition”. Both are indeed under threat by the combined influences of English and Irish nationalisms. Ulster should therefore continue to develop as a centre for both conservation and rediffusion. Co. Antrim is particularly well placed with its continuing Lallans literary tradition. The Gaelic of Co. Antrim has fortunately also been completely described by the Swedish dialectologist Nils H. Holmer in 1942, based on fieldwork undertaken in the thirties. This East Ulster Gaelic shares features with the Gaelic of Fanad, Glenvar, Urris, and other parts of Donegal as well as that of Western Scotland, where the ancient traditions of Ulster were so long preserved.

The people of Rathlin or “Ragheries” interestingly referred to Rathlin as “an tir seo” or “this country” while the mainland was called “Eirinn” or “Ireland”. They were therefore conscious of an older autonomy. Of their language itself Holmer has written: “According to Prof. O’Rahilly (Irish Dialects, p.191), the dialect is ‘essentially a Scottish dialect.’ This will, no doubt, be the opinion of any reader who peruses the preceding pages, especially those dealing with the accidence. If it be admitted that this is a characteristic specimen of Gaelic of the Scottish type, it must not, however, be thought that the difference between the Rathlin dialect and, for instance, that of Kintyre or Arran is approximately the same as between the latter and that of Islay or Skye. Though the distance between Rathlin and the Mull of Kintyre is only about one tenth of the distance between the latter and Skye, the differences are far greater. And, though historically the Rathlin dialect shows closer affinities with Scottish than with Irish Gaelic, the external similarities with the neighbouring Irish dialects are more prominent. This means that a person from Tirconnel (Donegal) would not have very great difficulty in understanding a Rathlin man, while a native speaker from the opposite part of Antrim speaks practically the same language.

The apparent contradiction can be explained in several ways. First of all, the fact that relations with Scotland have been interrupted for over a century must have left its traces in the language. Further, it must be taken into consideration about the Gaelic or Erse spoken in opposite parts of Scotland about three hundred years ago (when according to popular tradition the first Scottish settlers arrived) was very different from the present-day dialects of Islay, Kintyre and Arran, and that the Rathlin dialect might be expected to show a number of archaisms. A third very interesting point is whether the Scottish settlers actually came from any of the places mentioned here. There may be some truth in the tradition that the Rathlin people came by the Glens of Antrim. This would mean that the colonization of Rathlin might have been part of the migration westward from Ayrshire and Galloway (which also reached the Isle of Man, cf. O’Rahilly, Irish Dialects, p.117). Some facts which actually point to Ayrshire were mentioned above. In addition, the great difference between the Rathlin dialect and the living Gaelic dialects in Scotland might be more easily explained if it could be assumed that the colonists spoke the Ayrshire dialect of Gaelic, which is now extinct.”

Phonetic texts of East Ulster Gaelic have been published in Heinrich Wagner’s Linguistic Atlas and Survey of Irish Dialects (Dublin 1969) from material selected from 65 texts which he edited as an M.A. thesis, presented at Queen’s University, Belfast in 1962. generous grants towards the work had been made by the Ministry of Education for Northern Ireland and by Queen’s University. The source of his texts was the series of recordings made in 1931 by Professor Wilhelm Dögen in East Ulster or Ulidia (including Irishowen, Co. Donegal and Omeath, Co. Louth). Dögen was then Director of the Lautabteilung of he Preussische Staastsbibliothek in Berlin so that copies of his Ulster recordings are now held in both Queen’s University, Belfast and at the Institute fur Phonetik of the Homboldt University in East Berlin. McAdam’s 19th century manuscript dictionary based on Ulster Gaelic (Ulidian) is also held for posterity in Queen’s University Belfast.

It has proven highly advantageous to the Ulster people that in Working Documents drawn up between 1979 and 1980 the European Parliament, “Noting that in various regions of Europe movements of ethnic and linguistic minorities are emerging which at times assume forms of frustrated protest and set themselves goals of separation from the national community to which they belong; convinced that such movements reflect legitimate concern for the defences of the heritage, cultural traditions and values which are an integral part of European civilisation,” considered that it was time to draw up a Charter of Rights of Ethnic Minorities which within the European context would satisfy the demands for autonomy which inspire such movements and invited the governments to take appropriate action. The recognition of Ulster-Scots as a language in its own right, and its promotion by the Ullans (Ulster-Scots) Academy has allowed a more complete access to all information regarding our language, history and culture. This will encourage the development of that sense of belonging to Ulster which will help us to cross the religious divide.

As Pannu Petteri Höglund of Åbo Academi University, the only exclusively Swedish Language university in Finland, has written, another important question is that of specifically East Ulster (Ulidian) words. Ciarán Ó Duibhin has collected a list of them which can presently be browsed on his web pages. The work of the language movement is not only about preservation, it is also about reanimation and restoration; and although cynical observers might scorn this, it should be noted that the need to understand the work of the old regional poets, such as Art Mac Cumhthaigh, remains a major source of interest in Gaelic among the people of Northern Ireland, including Protestants. There is thus a certain necessity to study and teach their language and its specific words to learners who take an interest in their native district’s Gaelic past; and it is quite possible that features of the language of these poets could find their way into written, maybe even spoken Gaelic as it is cultivated in Northern Ireland. However, such a development should not impede the other important goal of the language movement in Ulster, that of keeping the West Ulster language (Northern Irish) alive in Donegal; on the other hand, many East Ulster (Ulidian) words are shared in Islay and Argyll and could thus make that language more accessible to Ulster Gaeilgeoirí.

To summarise: Ulster Gaelic is the variety of the Gaelic or Erse Language spoken in the northern part of Ireland and the southern part of Scotland (ancient Dalriada). It occupies a central position in the Gaelic-speaking world made up of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. Ulster Gaelic thus has more in common with Scottish Gaelic and Manx than other varieties of the language. In our Ullans Academy, which promotes Common Identity, we call it Northern Irish or Ulidian.  Within Ulster there has historically been two main varities: West Ulster Gaelic and East Ulster Gaelic. The Western variety was spoken in County Donegal and parts of neighbouring counties, hence the name Donegal Gaelic. The Eastern dialect was spoken in most of the rest of Ulster and northern parts of counties Louth and Meath, where it is now extinct, as well Islay (a pre-Celtic or Pretanic word), and Argyll in Scotland, where it has survived in a modified form, as well as Arran (a Brittonic word), Ayrshire (also a Brittonic word) and Galloway, where it has not. What is known as Scottish Gaelic today seems to have evolved from the Gaelic spoken in The Outer Hebrides and on Skye. Generally speaking, the Gaelic spoken across The Western Isles (with the exception to the Ulidian of Islay and Argyll) is similar enough to be classed as one major language group of dialects. Ullans or Ulster Scots is also spoken in South Argyll and western Galloway, where it is known as Galloway Irish.

Gaelic was the main language spoken in Ulster from the earliest recorded times until the advent over the centuries of English and Scots speakers. Ulster Gaelic was thus steadily replaced by English and Scots. The Eastern dialect died out in Ulster itself in the 20th century, to survive in Islay and Argyll, but the Western lives on in the Gaeltacht region of County Donegal. In 1808, County Down natives William Neilson and Patrick Lynch (Pádraig Ó Loingsigh) published a detailed study on Ulster Gaelic called An Introduction to the Irish Language. Both Neilson and his father were Gaelic-speaking Presbyterian ministers. When the recommendations of the first Comisiún na Gaeltachta were drawn up in 1926, there were regions qualifying for Gaeltacht recognition in the Sperrin mountains and the northern Glens of Antrim and Rathlin Island. The report also makes note of small pockets of Gaelic speakers in northwest County Cavan, southeast County Monaghan, and the far south of County Armagh. However, these small pockets vanished early in the 20th century while Gaelic in the Sperrins survived until the 1950s and in the Glens of Antrim until the 1970s. The last native speaker of Rathlin Gaelic died in 1985.

In the 1960s, six families in Belfast formed the Shaw’s Road ‘Gaeltacht’, which has since grown. The Gaelic-speaking area of the Falls Road in West Belfast has recently been designated the ‘Gaeltacht Quarter” In 2010 the Ultach Trust, of which I was a founder member, published Ulster Gaelic Voices, based upon recordings made by the linguist Wilhelm Dögen in the 1930s. These include examples of Antrim, Armagh, Londonderry, Donegal, and Tyrone Gaelic, and the recordings have been digitally re-mastered to appear on accompanying CDs. Presbyterians and the Irish Language by our esteemed Academy member Ruairi O Bleine (Roger Blaney), originally published in 1996, is the first to establish the rightful place of the Gaelic language in the Presbyterian heritage in Ireland. It traces the Presbyterian Gaelic-speaking tradition from its early roots in Gaelic Scotland, where 80% of Gaelic speakers are Protestants, through the Plantation and Williamite War periods to its successive revivals in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

An Caighdeán Oifigiúil (“The Official Standard”), often shortened to An Caighdeán, is a standardised nationalist “Irish” , which is taught in most schools in Ireland, though with strong influences from local varieties. It was published by the translators in Dáil Éireann in the 1950s. Its development in the 1950s and 1960s had two purposes. One was to simplify “Irish” spelling, which had retained its Classical spelling, by removing many silent letters, and to give a standard written form that was mutually intelligible by speakers with different dialects.Though many aspects of the Caighdeán are essentially those of Connacht Irish, this was simply because this is the central dialect which forms a “bridge”, as it were, between the North and South of Ireland. In reality, dialect speakers pronounce words as in their own dialect, as the spelling simply reflects the pronunciation of Classical Irish. On the other hand, in some cases the Caighdeán retained classical spellings even when none of the dialects had retained the corresponding pronunciation.

Another purpose was to create a grammatically regularised or “simplified” standard “Irish” which would make the language more accessible for the majority English speaking school population. In part this is why the Caighdeán is not universally respected by native speakers, in that it makes simplified language an ideal, rather than the ideal that native speakers traditionally had of their dialects (or of the Classical dialect if they had knowledge of that). Of course, this may not have been the original aim of the developers, who rather saw the “school-version” Caighdeán as a means of easing second-language learners into the task of learning “full” “Irish”. The Caighdeán, in general is used by non-native speakers, frequently from the  capital of the Irish Republic, so it is sometimes also called “Dublin Irish” or “Urban Irish”. As it is taught in many “Irish-Language” schools, actually Gaelscoil, (where “Irish”, actually Gaelic, is the main, or sometimes only, medium of instruction), it is also sometimes called ” Gaelscoil Irish”. The so-called “Belfast Irish”, spoken in our city’s Gaeltacht Quarter, and one of its off-shoots in Turas, East Belfast, is the Caighdeán heavily influenced by Ulster Gaelic and Belfast English. But what we really need is a standardised version of Ulster Gaelic which is true to its native origins. The learning of “Belfast Irish” is but one stage in its development.

An all-encompassing Ulster Language Act is now needed to sort out the present  Language issue once and for all…Rann na Feirste in Donegal is home to an extensive body of literature and is known for the purity of its speech. Gordon Mc Coy of Turas and Róise Ní Bhaoill  of the Ultach Trust are well-aquainted with this true Ulster Gaelic, which is that of Róise, and have written a book of stories in it. Gaeil Uladh publish children’s schoolbooks in Donegal Gaelic, Breacadh produce schoolbooks in Ulster, Munster and Connemara Gaelic and the Aisionad in St Mary’s produce material for “Irish-medium” schools in Ulster Gaelic as well….All these sources are non-political and can be relied on to promote a genuine Ultacht area, free from political interference. The primacy of English must, of course, remain, with its unique world literature…But Ulster Gaelic and Scots are an important part of our heritage and should be preserved. Furthermore Cymric or British in Ulster, our oldest Celtic language here, should be actively promoted, through the Cymric Project, as a unifying principle throughout the British Isles, the Isles of the Pretani.

RMS Cymric at Liverpool with tender SS Magnetic

The Cymric Project is an initiative which aims to incease knowledge of the oldest languages of Britain and Ireland focusing on such prominent Ulster people of Welsh descent such as E Estyn Evans and C.S Lewis, such Ulster families as Welsh, Walsh, Wallace, Price, Rice, Hughes and Meredith and of RMS Cymric .

Welsh (Cymraeg or y Gymraeg) is a member of the Old British or Brittonic branch of the Celtic languages still spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa (the Welsh colony in Chubut Province, Argentina). Historically it has also been known in English as “the British tongue”, “Cambrian”, “Cambric” and “Cymric”.  The Brittonic (also Brythonic or British Celtic) languages (Welsh: ieithoedd Brythonaidd/Prydeinig, Cornish: yethow brythonek/predennek, Breton: yezhoù predenek were formerly spoken throughout the British Isles, the Isles of the Pretani, by the native Britons of both islands. So they are now represented not only by Cymric, but by Cornish and Breton as well. Notice that in the native speech they are also called Pretanic. In our British passport Britain is Prydain or Pretania.

Brittonic was also originally spoken in the British Middle Kingdoms straddling the Borders between  modern England and Scotland, many of whose inhabitants, known as the Border Reivers, were forced into Ulster by James 1. These kingdoms were Strathclyde (Areclut) or modern Glasgow, Goddodin or modern Edinburgh, Aeron or modern Ayrshire, Rheged or modern Galloway,  Dumfries and probably Cumbria, Elmet or modern Yorkshire, Bryneich , later Northumbria, Deifr or Dewr , a region between the River Tees and the Humber. Brittonic was also spoken in Ireland before Gaelic or Erse and elements are still present in placenames particularly in Antrim and Down (Old Ulster or Ulidia) but also throughout the island. Prominent are Bangor, Lambeg, Glenavy, Tullycarnet, Ballymiscaw (Stormont), Castlereagh and Knockbreda.

A greeting in Cymric is one of 55 languages included on the Voyager Golden Record chosen to be representative of Earth in NASA’s Voyager program launched in 1977. The greetings are unique to each language, with the Cymric or Welsh greeting being Iechyd da i chwi yn awr ac yn oesoedd which translates into English as “Good health to you now and forever”. The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 Act gave the Welsh language official status in Wales, making it the only language that is de jure official in any part of the United Kingdom.

RMS Cymric was a steamship of the White Star Line, a precursor to the Titanic, built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast and launched on 12 October 1897. She had originally been designed as a combination passenger liner and livestock carrier, with accommodations for only First Class passengers. During the stages of her design layout, it became clearer to the designers at Harland and Wolff that combining passengers and livestock had become rather unpopular, so the spaces designated for cattle were reconfigured into Third Class accommodations. She departed Liverpool on her maiden voyage on 29 April 1898, arriving in New York City on 9 May 1898. She spent the first five years of her career on the White Star Line’s main passenger service route between Liverpool and New York, until 1903 when she was transferred to the less traveled Liverpool-Boston route, which she sailed on for nine years before being returned to the Liverpool route in 1912.

During both the Boer War and the Great War she was pressed into service as a troop transport. On 8 May 1916 she was torpedoed three times by Walter Schwieger’s U-20, which had sunk RMS Lucitania  a year earlier. Cymric sank the next day with the loss of five lives, 140 miles northwest of Fastnet. While the general location of the wreck of the Cymric is known, the wreck has not been found. The Titanic, of course, has famously been found and one of her tenders, the brave little troop carrier the SS Nomadic has been retored in Belfast, where she was built, but the tender SS Magnetic is lost forever. She was sold to ship breakers on 20 October 1935 and was scrapped at  Port Glasgow.

The first writer to use a form of our name was the Greek explorer and geographer Pytheas in the 4th century BC. Pytheas referred to Prettanike nesoi, Πρετανικαι νησοι, a group of islands off the coast of North-Western Europe. In the 1st century BC Diodorus Siculus referred to Pretania, a rendering of the indigenous name for the Pretani people whom the Greeks knew inhabited our British Isles. Following the Greek usage, the Romans referred to the Insulae Britannicae in the plural, consisting of Albion (Great Britain), Hibernia (Ireland), Thule (Iceland),”six days’ sail north of Britain, and […] near the frozen sea”, and many smaller islands.

The classical writer, Ptolemy, referred to the larger island as great Britain (megale Brettania) and to Ireland as little Britain (mikra Brettania) in his work, Almagest (147–148 AD). In his later work, Geography (c. 150 AD), he gave these islands the names Alwion , Iwernia, and Mona (the Isle of Man), suggesting these may have been native names of the individual islands not known to him at the time of writing Almagest. The name Albion appears to have fallen out of use sometime after the Roman Conquest of Great Britain, after which Britain became the more common-place name for the island called Great Britain.

So, over time, Albion specifically came to be known as Britannia, and the name for the group was subsequently dropped. That island was first invaded by Julius Caesar in 55 BC, and the Roman conquest of the island began in AD 43, leading to the establishment of the Roman province  known as Britannia. The Romans never successfully conquered the whole island, building Hadrian’s Wall as a boundary with Caledonia, which covered roughly the territory of modern Scotland, although in fact the whole of the boundary marked by Hadrian’s Wall lies within modern-day northern England. A southern part of what is now Scotland was occupied by the Romans for about 20 years in the mid-2nd century AD, keeping in place the Pretani or Cruthin to the north of the Antonine Wall. People living in the Roman province of Britannia were called Britanni, or Britons.

An As coin from the reign of Antoninus Pius struck in 154 AD showing Britannia on the reverse

The Emperor Claudius visited Britain while it was being conquered and was honoured with the agnomen Britannicus as if he were the conqueror; a frieze discovered at Aphrodisias in 1980 shows a bare breasted and helmeted female warrior labelled BRITANNIA, writhing in agony under the heel of the emperor. She appeared on coins issued under Hadrian, as a more regal-looking female figure. Britannia was soon personified as a goddess, looking fairly similar to the goddess Minerva. Early portraits of the goddess depict Britannia as a beautiful young woman, wearing the helmet of a centurian, and wrapped in a white garment with her right breast exposed. She is usually shown seated on a rock, holding a spear, and with a spiked shield propped beside her. Sometimes she holds a standard and leans on the shield. On another range of coinage, she is seated on a globe above waves: Britain at the edge of the (known) world. Similar coin types were also issued under Antoninus Pius.

In the Medieval period it had still been common to refer only to the Britonnic speaking inhabitants of Britain as the “Britons”, as opposed to the “English”. However, increasingly the English were included within the category of the Britons. This gained new symbolic meaning with the rise of British influence, and later the British Empire, which at its height ruled over a third of the world’s population and landmass.

In the Renaissance tradition, Britannia came to be viewed as the personification of Britain, in imagery which was developed during the reign of Elizabeth I. With the death of Elizabeth in 1603 her Scottish cousin, James VI, King of Scots, succeeded to the English throne. He became James I of England, and so brought under his personal rule the Kingdoms of England (and the dominion of Wales), Ireland and Scotland. On 20 October 1604, James VI and I proclaimed himself as “King of Great Brittaine, France and Ireland”, a title that continued to be used by many of his successors. When James came to the English throne, some elaborate pageants were staged. One pageant performed on the streets of London in 1605 was described in Anthony  Munday’s Triumphs of Reunited Britannia:

On a mount triangular, as the island of Britain itself is described to be, we seat in the supreme place, under the shape of a fair and beautiful nymph, Britannia herself…

During the reign of Charles II, Britannia made her first appearance on English coins on a farthing of 1672 .With the constitutional unification of England with Scotland in 1707 and then with Ireland in 1800, Britannia became an increasingly important symbol and a strong rallying point among Britons.

Britannia Triumphant, poster celebrating the Battle of Trafalgar.

British power, which depended on a uniquely democratic political system and the supremacy of the navy, lent these attributes to the image of Britannia. By the time of Queen Victoria, Britannia had been renewed. Still depicted as a young woman with brown or golden hair, she kept her Corinthian helmet and her white robes, but now she held Poseidon’s three-pronged trident and often sat or stood before the ocean and tall-masted ships representing British naval power. She also usually held or stood beside a Greek hoplite shield, which sported the Union Flag: also at her feet was often the British Lion, found on the arms of England, Scotland and the Prince of Wales.

The term British Isles remains controversial in Ireland, where there are objections to its usage due to the modern association of the word British. The Government of Ireland, trapped as it is in retrogressive and reactionary nationalist ideologies, which have been promoted by partisan academics, does not recognise or use the term and its embassy in London discourages its use, As a result, Britain and Ireland is used as an alternative description. Atlantic Archipelago has had limited use among a minority in academia although British Isles is still commonly employed among the more intelligent. Within them, they are also sometimes referred to as “these islands”, and this is a convention in the Queen’s University of Belfast. Such Britophobia can also be demonstrated throughout the  Liberal Leftist Press and the Mediacracy in general.