by Dr Tim Clarkson
[adapted from a talk presented to Strathblane Heritage on 16 September 2024]
This essay takes a look at what was happening in the area around Strathblane in the early medieval period, a span of some 700 years from the beginning of the fifth century to the end of the eleventh. The main focus is on the Britons, the ancient Celtic inhabitants of the island of Britain, putting a spotlight on those who dwelt in what are now southern Scotland and the most northerly parts of England. These are the people commonly referred to by modern historians as ‘Northern Britons’.
Roman Britain
We pick up the story of the Northern Britons with a brief summary of how they fared in Roman times. The Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43 led to a rapid conquest of the entire southern half of the island. Attempts to conquer the northern half proved to be less successful and, in the following century, the frontier of Roman rule was consolidated along a massive stone wall erected between the Solway Firth and the mouth of the River Tyne. This imposing barrier was built during the reign of the emperor Hadrian and still bears his name today. North of the Wall lay lands that remained largely unconquered by Rome, except for a few brief interludes when imperial campaigns beyond the frontier brought short-lived territorial gains. Among the temporary successes was the construction of a second wall, built of turf rather than stone, between the firths of Clyde and Forth. Known today as the Antonine Wall, it was briefly garrisoned before being abandoned after less than ten years.
South of Hadrian’s Wall, the native Britons lived under Rome’s authority and were exposed to Romanising influences. In contrast, their northern compatriots remained more-or-less independent. Nevertheless, some of these folk – especially those dwelling nearest the imperial frontier – had friendly dealings with Rome from time to time. Their lands can be broadly defined as stretching from Hadrian’s Wall to the isthmus between the firths of Forth and Clyde.
The Britons who lived around the River Clyde were known to the Romans as Damnonii. This large grouping may have been a confederation of smaller groups or ‘tribes’ who joined together, perhaps for greater protection against the Romans to the south or against native peoples living further north. The latter, inhabiting lands beyond the River Forth, seem to have adopted an aggressive stance towards Rome. By the end of the third century, Roman writers were no longer describing them as Britons but as ‘Picts’ (Latin: Picti). This name meant something like ‘People of the Pictures’ or ‘Painted People’ and was most likely invented by Roman soldiers as a kind of army slang. It perhaps referred to tattoos or to the use of an alphabet of strange symbols. Whatever its origin, the new label set the Picts apart, eventually separating them politically and culturally from the Britons living south of them.
The population of the Blane Valley in Roman times was presumably part of the Damnonii tribal confederation. This is a reasonable deduction on geographical grounds, given the valley’s proximity to the Damnonian heartlands around the River Clyde. It is also supported by the possibility that the place-name Dowanhill near Milngavie might preserve the name of the confederation itself. The immediate northern neighbours of the Damnonii were the Maeatae, another largeconfederation of ‘tribes’ whose territory lay around the River Forth. The Maeatae may have regarded themselves as Britons rather than as Picts. However, we should keep in mind that cultural labels like ‘Picts’ and ‘Britons’ might have been adopted or discarded by different groups at different times. Perhaps this was especially true in a volatile borderland like the Forth Valley, situated at a cultural and political interface, where identities and affiliations may have shifted quite frequently.
By the early 400s, the Romans were losing control of the western half of their vast Empire. Even Italy, the ancient centre of their power, was under threat from war and political instability. Since the final decades of the previous century, the Empire’s hold on the southern half of Britain had been loosening. Military units had been withdrawn from Britain for redeployment elsewhere or to bolster the personal forces of ambitious Roman generals. In 410, a beleaguered emperor told the Britons to take responsibility for their own defence against their enemies, of whom the most threatening at that time were the Picts, the Irish and several groups of Germanic raiders. Prominent among the latter were the Angles, Saxons and Jutes whose homelands lay in northern Germany and southern Denmark. The suspension of Rome’s responsibility for Britain’s defence, although perhaps intended to be temporary, eventually became permanent, for the western half of the Empire collapsed before the end of the fifth century. By then, the political map of Europe was changing and the early medieval period was well under way.
Fifth Century Northern Britain
In Britain, the withdrawal of Roman authority in the early 400s led to social, political and economic upheavals. South of Hadrian’s Wall, the Britons who had been under imperial authority for more than 300 years were left to fend for themselves. Eventually they began to establish small, independent kingdoms. So too did the Northern Britons, among whom were the Damnonii of the Clyde.
What do we know of the Northern Britons in the fifth century? A simple answer is that we know quite a lot but not as much as we would like. They spoke a form of Brittonic (or Brythonic), a language common to all groups of Britons in the Roman and post-Roman periods. As the early medieval period progressed, this northern variant of Brittonic – now usually referred to as ‘Cumbric’ – became more distinct. Cumbric differed somewhat from more southerly variants of Brittonic such as the ancestral languages of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. It also differed from Pictish, another northern variant. Neither Pictish nor Cumbric survive today as living spoken languages, unlike modern versions of Welsh, Cornish and Breton.
By the end of the fifth century and the beginning of the sixth, two additional groups emerge onto the political and cultural landscapes of North Britain. Out in the west, in present-day Argyll, our map now shows the Scots, a people ruled by kings who may have originally come from Ireland. The Scots spoke Gaelic, the language of the Irish, rather than a Brittonic language such as Cumbric or Pictish. Away to the east, on the coast of what is now Northumberland, was a kingdom of Anglo-Saxons. These were a people whose ancestry lay among the Germanic raiders of Roman times. Groups of Angles, Saxons and Jutes had colonised southern and eastern Britain in the fifth century, setting up kingdoms of their own in the wake of Rome’s withdrawal. We often refer to them collectively as Anglo-Saxons. They were not a Celtic people like the Britons, Picts or Scots but spoke a Germanic language, the ancestor of modern English. Indeed, the terms ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Early English’ can be regarded as synonymous.
Sixth Century Northern Britain
The sixth century was a dangerous time for all the inhabitants of Britain. Kings and warlords were launching frequent raids, carrying off anything portable and valuable – including livestock and people. Large raids often became campaigns of conquest in which ambitious kings strove to dominate territories far beyond their own domains. The most successful of these royal warlords became ‘overkings’ holding lesser kings in subservience as vassals.
Aside from endemic warfare, the sixth century also witnessed a huge expansion of Christianity and a corresponding retreat of ancient pagan beliefs. Christianity was the religion of the last Roman emperors in the West and, despite the end of the Western Empire in the late 400s, it had continued to flourish. By c.500 it was well-established among the Britons, in both South and North. It was also making progress among the Scots of Argyll and their fellow-Gaels in Ireland. However, it had yet to gain ground among the Picts and the English.
Most Britons in the region around the River Clyde seem to have switched from paganism to Christianity before the middle of the sixth century. By then, some high-status local families may have been Christian for several generations, worshipping at small churches or chapels and burying rather than cremating their dead. Priests and monks from the Clyde area are likely to have become missionaries in regions where paganism was still practiced, such as the lands of the Picts.
Saints Kessog & Blane
One early missionary with a connection to Strathblane is Saint Kessog, who has an old well in Blanefield named after him. The well is next to the Roman Catholic church which was given a Kessog dedication in Late Victorian times. Although a fairly obscure saint he is said to have been an Irish prince who journeyed to Loch Lomond, using an island in the loch as a missionary base. Whether he visited the Blane Valley is uncertain, but it remains a possibility.
A saint with a more tenuous local connection is Saint Blane, who is said to have been born on the Isle of Bute and to have died in 590. Although Strathblane is sometimes assumed to mean ‘St Blane’s Valley’, this is an etymological red herring. Rivers did not tend to be named after saints. It is far more likely that the Blane Water gets its name from a descriptive term of either Brittonic or Gaelic origin. One possibility is that the element ‘blane’ referred to warmth and that the Water was originally known as ‘the warm river’. Regarding Saint Blane, we may note that his stronger connections are with the old monastery of Kingarth on Bute and with Dunblane Cathedral in Perthshire.
Alt Clut
One of the problems with early medieval history is that we rarely see a complete picture. Although we possess texts written in the period – such as chronicles and annals, hagiography (biographical stories about saints) and poems – these tend to give little more than scraps of information. Reconstructing a coherent narrative usually requires guesswork to fill the gaps, an exercise inevitably fraught with challenges and pitfalls. Wherever the gaps are wide, no amount of guesswork is able to bridge them. To illustrate this point we can observe that only two kingdoms of the sixth-century Northern Britons can be located with any measure of certainty: Gododdin and Alt Clut. Gododdin’s heartland lay in Lothian and included Edinburgh where a major centre of royal power was established. The kingdom’s name suggests continuity with the Votadini, one of the large tribal confederations of Roman times and an eastern counterpart to the Damnonii of the Clyde. Although no similar political continuity preserved the name of the Damnonii, their territory emerged into the sixth century under the rule of the kings of Alt Clut. The chief centre of power of these kings lay 14 miles to the west of Glasgow, on Dumbarton Rock, a towering volcanic ‘plug’ dominating the estuary where the River Clyde flows into its firth.
In the Brittonic language, Alt Clut means ‘Rock of Clyde’. Today’s name Dumbarton is a corruption of a Gaelic name coined by the Scots: Dun Breatainn, ‘Fortress of the Britons’. The kings who lived on the Rock’s distinctive double summit controlled the estuary of the River Clyde and the lower valley of the River Leven. It is likely that they also controlled substantial territories to north and south. On the northern side, their power probably reached as far as Loch Lomond. A distinctive feature known as Clach nam Breatainn (Gaelic: ‘Stone of the Britons’) stands on a hillside in Glen Falloch at the top end of the Loch and may have marked the northern frontier of the kingdom of Alt Clut. The valley of the Blane Water is also likely to have lain within the kingdom.
The Battle of Loch Ardinning ??
Unfortunately we have no authentic data relating to the history of the Blane Valley in the sixth century. What we do have are the musings of John Guthrie Smith, a nineteenth-century antiquarian who lived in the area. His book on the history of Strathblane, first published in 1886, is a fine example of Victorian scholarship and continues to be a useful starting-point for today’s historians. Guthrie Smith suggested that a great battle was fought c.570 near Loch Ardinning, a mile or so from Strathblane village. He described the protagonists as Britons on one side and Anglo-Saxons (English) on the other. The suggestion had originated with another Scottish antiquary, William Forbes Skene, who had seen the name of an obscure battle in an old Welsh poem supposedly composed somewhere in North Britain in the sixth century. In the poem, the battle’s location is given as Arddunion, a name that seemed to Skene an ancient form of Ardinning. Guthrie-Smith picked up on this idea and went further by presenting a dramatic account of the battle. Nevertheless, neither his imaginative reconstruction nor Skene’s original identification were derived from authentic historical data, being based on nothing more than a slight similarity between two otherwise unconnected place-names.
King Arthur ?
Many people today are fascinated by tales of King Arthur, the legendary ruler of Camelot. Some believe that he was based on a real historical figure, a mighty hero who led the Britons to victory against Pictish and English foes in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. Others are more sceptical, preferring to answer ‘No’ to the question ‘Did Arthur really exist?’ Around this question a long-running debate has grown, with no definitive answer emerging. Sceptics point to an absence of reliable, verifiable data from the few texts that refer to Arthur in his ‘historical’ fifth- and sixth-century guise. Believers counter such doubts with a case for seeing the scattered references not as snippets of legend but as a fragmentary record of real events. A third position takes a middle path, keeping an open mind while considering the arguments put forward by both sides. In his book on the history of Strathblane, John Guthrie Smith saw the ‘real’ Arthur as a warlord of the Clyde Britons, fighting several battles in the Lennox. He suggested that a large boulder on a hill at the head of the Blane Valley, which he called Clach Arthur (Gaelic: ‘Arthur’s Stone’), marked the site of one of these battles. This stone seems to be the feature shown on modern maps as Clachachter.
Quite a few places in Britain have names associated with Arthur – we only need to think of Arthur’s Seat at Edinburgh – but the likelihood is that they reflect not genuine fifth- or sixth-century history but the later popularity of the Arthurian legend. Much of this popularity was due to a version of the legend written by the Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century and widely disseminated thereafter. The broad geographical distribution of Arthur place-names, in almost every part of Britain, is usually seen as reflecting the fame of Geoffrey’s ‘medieval bestseller’ rather than that of a historical warlord who supposedly lived 600 years earlier.
The Maeatae
Mention has already been made of the Maeatae whose territory lay around the River Forth in Roman times. By c.700, the name of this people appears to have fallen out of the historical record. We encounter it for the last time in a late seventh-century ‘Life’ of Saint Columba of Iona, in the context of a sixth-century battle between Miathi and Scots. It is generally agreed that the names Miathi and Maeatae refer to the same people. Although their descendants presumably continued to inhabit the ancestral lands, the erstwhile unity of the Maeatae may have been disrupted by a north-south cultural split between those who identified as Picts and those who identified as Britons. In early medieval times, Maeatae territory seems to be coterminous with a region called Manau which included the Forth Valley and some adjacent areas. Place-names such as Clackmannan (Gaelic: ‘Stone of Manau’) and Slamannan (Gaelic: ‘Moor of Manau’) indicate this region’s location and extent. To the north it may have stretched as far as the River Earn while southward its name might survive in the modern place-name Dalmeny near Edinburgh. How far Manau extended westward is uncertain but there is a possibility that it came close to the valley of the Blane Water: the place-name Cremannan near Balfron may mean ‘boundary of Manau’. Notwithstanding the apparent disappearance of the Maeatae before the eighth century, it is intriguing to note that their name continued to have relevance in a topographical sense, even if it no longer conveyed a political meaning. Two Stirlingshire place names – Dumyat and Myot Hill – still preserve it.
The Anglo-Saxons
The seventh and early eighth centuries witnessed a huge territorial expansion by the northern Anglo-Saxons, the northern English. By 700, their lands comprised a large kingdom called Northumbria. Although the name refers to territory lying north of the Humber Estuary, the kingdom at its greatest extent encompassed a huge area. The authority of its rulers was acknowledged on both sides of the Solway Firth and as far north as Stirling. Northumbrian ambitions beyond the Firth of Forth led to conflict with the Picts and several wars were fought. Further west, on the Clyde, the kingdom of Alt Clut entered the eighth century as the last remaining realm of the Northern Britons. All the rest had been assimilated into Northumbria. As far as the Blane Valley is concerned, we find little information on what was happening in the period around 700. If, as seems likely, the valley had been ruled from Alt Clut in the sixth century, the same situation may have prevailed during the seventh and on into the eighth. This idea of a continuing close connection with the kingdom of the Clyde Britons is strengthened by an event that occurred in the middle of the eighth century, when the Blane Valley was the setting for a great battle.
The Battle of Mugdock, AD 750
One of the most powerful kings in Pictish history was Onuist, son of Urgust, sometimes known by a Gaelic version of his name: Óengus. He had clawed his way to the top in Pictland after defeating various rivals and, by the early 730s, he was the undisputed ‘overking’ of the Picts. He then turned his attention to the Scots, launching a westward invasion into their territory. After defeating them in a series of battles he conquered their lands, forcing their kings to submit to his overlordship. By 740, he was the most powerful ruler in North Britain and had a fearsome military reputation.
Onuist’s ambition then turned to the Clyde Britons and to their kingdom of Alt Clut. In 744, he fought them in a battle for which neither the location nor the result is recorded. Perhaps it ended in stalemate, with neither side claiming outright victory? Six years later, in 750, there was another battle. This was widely reported in contemporary texts and both the location and the outcome were noted. Two Irish chronicles – the Annals of Tigernach and the Annals of Ulster – leave us in no doubt that it was an event of profound significance:
‘A battle between Picts and Britons, and in it perished Talorcan, son of Urgust, and his brother; and there slaughter was made of the Picts along with him.’ (Annals of Tigernach)
‘The battle of Catohic between Picts and Britons, and in it fell Talorcan, son of Urgust, the brother of Onuist.’ (Annals of Ulster)
The name ‘Catohic’ is very obscure and appears in no other text. It is usually regarded as a mis-spelling, an early medieval typo. Indeed, we find a more correct spelling in Annales Cambriae, the Welsh Annals:
‘A battle between the Picts and the Britons; that is, the battle of Mocetauc, and their king Talorcan was slain by the Britons.’
Taken together, the Irish and Welsh annalists tell us that a major battle was fought in 750, at a place called Mocetauc. It was a huge setback for the Pictish king Onuist, whose own brother Talorcan lay among the casualties. Where, then, was it fought?
To answer this question, we turn to the writings of the nineteenth-century antiquarian William Forbes Skene. He believed that Mocetauc was an old name for Mugdock, an identification accepted by today’s place-name experts. The victors can be identified as the Britons of Alt Clut, theirs being the only kingdom of the Northern Britons still surviving at that time. Analysis of the name Mugdock shows it to be of Brittonic origin, a relic of a period when this ancient language was spoken in all lands around the River Clyde. A glance at a modern map shows Mugdock to be only 10 miles from Dumbarton Rock, the chief centre of power in the kingdom of Alt Clut. No source tells us who led the Britons to victory, but we can assume that their leader was a king. Chronicle references provide two candidates: Teudubr (Tewdwr), who ruled Alt Clut from 722 until 750, and his son Dyfnwal who succeeded him.
King Onuist was evidently not present in the battle, instead sending his brother Talorcan to command the Pictish army. Talorcan was an experienced warlord in his own right, having previously fought the Scots. Yet he was slain, together with a large number of his warriors. The crushing defeat dealt a bitter blow to Onuist’s reputation, stalling the seemingly inexorable juggernaut of his ambitions. It also demonstrated that the Clyde Britons were no easy prey. Indeed, their victory at Mugdock can be seen as their greatest military achievement. They had beaten the army of the mighty Onuist. They had killed his brother. But where did the fighting take place?
The antiquarian scholar John Guthrie Smith, who lived on the site of Mugdock Castle, offered a reconstruction of the battle. He imagined the Britons positioning their forces on high ground at Craigallian and waiting for the Picts to arrive. He thought it likely that the Picts came up the Blane Valley from the north, via Killearn, and this makes geographical sense. The Pictish army presumably crossed the River Forth at an ancient fording point – perhaps at Frew near Kippen or downstream at Drip near Stirling – before turning south-west.
Guthrie Smith pinpointed two local place names – Blair’s Hill and Alreoch – that he thought might be associated with the battle. He suggested that Blair’s Hill got its name from blar, a Gaelic word meaning ‘field’, noting that blar can sometimes be used in the sense of ‘field of battle.’ But in most cases the word simply refers to a field, any type of field. There seems little need to associate Blair’s Hill with the battlefield of 750 without additional clues. Likewise, Guthrie Smith interpreted ‘Alreoch’ as Gaelic for ‘King’s Rock’, wondering if this was the place where the Pictish commander Talorcan was killed. Again, alternative explanations can be put forward: the name might simply mean ‘SpeckledRock’ from Gaelic ail + riabhach.
Above the west bank of the Blane Water, the Dumgoyach or Duntreath standing stones were seen by Guthrie Smith as perhaps being memorials to warriors who had died in the eighth-century battle. This kind of thinking around enigmatic ancient monuments was common in Victorian times and is frequently encountered in antiquarian texts from that era. With the benefits of modern archaeological study we now know that the Dumgoyach stones have adorned the landscape not for 1400 years but for more than 4000.
Guthrie Smith highlighted a craggy feature called Catcraig, a name which he interpreted as ‘Battle Rock’ (cad or cat can mean ‘battle’ in both Gaelic and Brittonic). He suggested that the name commemorates the Battle of Mugdock. However, other meanings are possible and one of these is ‘Cat Rock’, in the sense of a place frequented by wildcats. Several rocky places in Scotland are named Catcraig and may have less connection with human warfare than with feline activity. Like the other minor place-names highlighted by Guthrie Smith this one should probably be set aside in our study of the eighth-century battle. The stark truth is that there is simply not enough information from the annals to enable a detailed reconstruction of where the fighting occurred.
The sources report that the Pictish king Onuist eventually recovered his military strength. Six years after the disaster at Mugdock he was ready to avenge it. A key element in his plans was an alliance with Northumbria whose king Eadberht was a man cut from the same cloth. Both were warlords of ruthless ambition, eager to acquire more territory to extend their respective domains. In 756, the Picts and Northumbrians attacked the kingdom of Alt Clut, either separately or as a combined force. The king of the Britons at that time was Dyfnwal, son of Teudubr. He was either defeated in battle by the Anglo-Pictish alliance or, faced with overwhelming odds, decided to surrender before what would surely have been a terrible slaughter. His act of submission to Onuist and Eadberht may have occurred at Govan, an important ceremonial and religious site for the Clyde Britons. With its name Latinised as Ovania, Govan is mentioned by a later English chronicler in the context of the Northumbrian army’s homeward march.
The Vikings
We can assume that Alt Clut thereafter lay under the overlordship of Onuist and Eadberht or – if the Pictish king was the senior partner in the alliance – under Onuist’s overlordship alone. Further west, the territory of the Scots remained under the Pictish yoke not only in the years up to Onuist’s death in 761 but also during the reigns of his successors. How long Alt Clut would have stayed subordinate to Pictish rulers is hard to say. It is indeed frustrating that the kingdom’s history goes almost blank at this point, the sources seemingly ignoring it for the next 100 years. A royal genealogy preserved in an old Welsh text does, at least, imply that the line of kings continued to the end of the eighth century and on into the ninth. By then, however, the Vikings had appeared on the scene, their arrival heralding an era of change and upheaval for every kingdom in Britain.
Strathclyde
Present-day writers frequently refer to the kingdom of Alt Clut as ‘Strathclyde’. This is not historically accurate, for the latter name does not appear in contemporary sources until the late 800s. Alt Clut refers to ‘The Rock of Clyde’ but Strathclyde refers to the ‘strath’ or lower valley of the river. The two names are, in fact, distinct in both a historical and a geographical context. We can draw a firm line between them at the year 870. This was when Alt Clut was overwhelmed by a huge fleet and army from Dublin, the principal Viking colony in Ireland. The Dublin Vikings were mostly of ‘Norse’ (Norwegian) ancestry. Since its foundation as a Norse colony in 841, the city had grown in size and influence to become a major power in the seaways between Ireland and Britain. In 870, its rulers led a raiding-fleet of 200 ships into the Firth of Clyde to attack the ancient fortress of the Britons on Dumbarton Rock. A siege began, continuing for a remarkably long four months until the defenders ran out of water and capitulated. Then the Vikings unleashed a rampage of slaughter and destruction, wrecking the fortress and taking its surviving inhabitants as captives to be enslaved. So ended the kingdom of Alt Clut. Yet the old royal dynasty survived, emerging from the catastrophe to establish a new centre of power 12 miles upstream. Here, around a ford which crossed the River Clyde between Partick and Govan, a new kingdom arose. Its rulers no longer resided on Alt Cut, the Rock of Clyde, but in Strat Clut, the Strath of Clyde, hence the name of their new realm.
Strathclyde developed into a great power. Although it can be seen to some extent as the successor of Alt Clut, it became more powerful and much bigger. Its kings evidently reached an arrangement with the Dublin Norse, for the previously hostile relationship between the two began to thaw. Archaeological evidence from lands around the Clyde suggests that the new kingdom contained a number of Norse settlements and was open to Scandinavian cultural influences. It nevertheless remained a kingdom of the Britons, ruled by kings whose names echoed the names of their Alt Clut predecessors. Led by this dynasty, Strathclyde played a significant role in politics and warfare for the next 200 years. During this period, it seems likely that the Blane Valley lay under the authority of these kings, the inhabitants of the valley identifying as Britons and speaking the Brittonic (Cumbric) language.
Whether Vikings were ever seen in the Blane Valley is unknown, but it is certainly possible. Any such folk would perhaps have come to trade rather than raid, interacting with local inhabitants in peaceful ways. We know of a family or small community of Vikings – including women and children – who settled beside Loch Lomond. Their graves have been found. Others whose presence has yet to be discovered may have settled elsewhere in the Lennox, perhaps in places closer to the Blane Valley.
Alba
Sometime between 1050 and 1070, Strathclyde was conquered by the king of Alba. Alba was a large kingdom formed by a union of the Picts and Scots, a merger that heralded the birth of what was to become the medieval kingdom of Scotland. Unification led to the disappearance of the Pictish language and its replacement by Gaelic, the language of the Scots. By c.1000, most people in Alba were identifying as ‘Scots’ even if they had Pictish ancestry. Alba’s conquest of Strathclyde later in the same century led to similar changes there, with Cumbric speech fading away and Gaelic swiftly replacing it as the language of power and status.
Lands of Lennox
The end of the eleventh century brought the curtain down on the early medieval period. How the Blane Valley fared in the ensuing years is unrecorded but, by the late 1100s, it was part of the province of Lennox whose lord was an earl answerable to the Scottish kings of Alba. By 1200, it is likely that everyone in the Blane Valley was speaking Gaelic. The old Cumbric language of the Northern Britons died out, remembered only in a small number of local place-names that were not replaced by Gaelic ones. As the centuries passed, the collective memory of the kingdom of Strathclyde – the history and folklore of the Clyde Britons – faded away until only fragments remained. This is why the Battle of Mugdock, so famous in its own time, was almost completely forgotten in the lands where it had been fought. The battle did not reappear as part of the history of the Strathblane area until the nineteenth century, when antiquarian scholars like William Forbes Skene and John Guthrie Smith found the obscure name Mocetauc in an ancient chronicle and realised that it referred to Mugdock.
In the twenty-first century the Britons of the Clyde, Scotland’s forgotten people, are starting to attract more attention and interest. This is partly because of what has been happening at Govan, where a collection of more than 30 carved stones from the Viking-Age kingdom of Strathclyde is becoming a popular tourist attraction. These monuments, produced in the ninth to eleventh centuries, form one of the most impressive collections of early medieval sculpture in Scotland. They give us a tangible link to a long-vanished people who once inhabited the lands around the River Clyde, a people whose king won a great victory in the Blane Valley thirteen centuries ago.
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