The Celts (1987) s02e02 Episode Script
The Birth of Nations
Ironic that this, one of the most famous flags in the world, should summarise the political violation of the Celts.
The crosses that make up the Union Jack say it all.
1603, the blue of Saint Andrew, union of Scotland and the Crown.
1800, the hated Irish Act of Union, the red and white diagonal, cross of Saint Patrick, dominated always by the cross of Saint George.
No Wales.
Dragons don't fit, and anyway, the Welsh had been long conquered.
People write letters to the newspapers if the Union Jack appears the wrong way up.
From a Celt's point of view, it always has been.
But once this symbol came to power, the Celts represented within it, who fought under it, who died for it, were no longer offered to the world as Irish or Scots, they were for England and Saint George.
(Enya: The Celts) It began with the Caesars.
Every Roman ruin in western Europe, every column, every archway, can be seen as a Celtic cemetery.
The grandeur that was Rome entombed the Celts.
In its ruthless methodical spread, the Roman Empire planted France and much of Britain with cities and supplanted the Celtic chieftains with officials.
Thus were the Celts eclipsed.
One famous exception was Boadicea's rebellion.
For a brief moment, this queen of the Iceni shook the invaders of Britain, but lost out to Roman discipline.
Her statue was raised on Westminster Bridge in London to inspire Parliament and people in the defence of their country.
Her campaign in 60 AD was ferocious and bloody, but she was finally more lurid than effective.
A warlike queen, Britain's last Celtic warrior, she captured the imagination forever.
Boadicea's most dramatic achievement was the destruction of Roman Colchester.
Here, the Romans had built a city and a famous temple on the site of a Celtic settlement named after a Celtic god, Camulos.
Colchester typified how Celtic Britain was overthrown politically, undermined culturally.
Boadicea laid siege.
She burned Colchester to the ground and demolished the hated temple to its foundations.
She slaughtered men, women and children.
Recent excavations of ancient Colchester uncovered a black stripe running through the earthworks like a code.
It confirmed the extent of Boadicea's burning rage.
It has since been buried under a new shopping centre, submerged like the tribes whose defiance it once affirmed.
"We are receiving reports which suggest "that all may not be well with our legions.
"In the west and north, we are facing battles, surprise attacks on our flanks, "and hordes of shrieking druids and black-robed, white faced women "are trying to intimidate our commanders.
" The Roman advance defines the embryonic demography of Great Britain.
In the south and southeast, no problem.
In the west, and in the far north, territory of, among others, the fierce Caledonii, ferocious and continuous opposition.
Later invaders the Anglo-Saxons had a not dissimilar experience, and in the overrunning of Great Britain, lines of demarcation were drawn which separated and identified the eventual Celtic nations.
England, or rather the south of it, had been softened and diluted by successive invasions, whereas the west and the north remained intensively Celtic, so that in fact, the national divisions which we see to this very day began by contrast with those Britons who didn't remain Celtic.
Over the heather, the wet wind blows I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose The rain comes patterning out of the sky I'm a wall soldier I don't know why The mist creeps over the hard grey stone My girl's in Tungria, I sleep alone When I'm a veteran with only one eye I shall do nothing but look at the sky And to the west, Hadrian's Wall was as far as the Roman Empire went.
Their most uncomfortable outpost, cold, grey, wet, and the barbarians always coming over the hills.
Perhaps not on the same scale as the Great Wall of China, it was, nonetheless, their most flamboyant imperial gesture.
And it betrayed them, because here, they had to declare their limits.
Once they had divided Britain in this fashion, by this huge wall, they acknowledged that their empire had come to a full stop.
Whither now? I suppose every empire carries within itself the seeds of its own downfall.
They came, they saw and they conquered, And they left.
As abruptly as they had arrived, the Romans departed.
Urgent business elsewhere was the reason.
Civil wars at home, all frontiers threatened, and in a town like this one, Glanum in Provence, the last Roman leaving turned off the water, so to speak.
And all Gaul, once divided into three parts, all Gaul was left with was handfuls of Roman remains, the ruins of a system.
It had lasted some 400 years, it had imposed its authority, its organisation, its bureaucracy.
It had destroyed the ancient Celtic society, forced the Celtic tribes to conform.
And then, when the Roman Empire collapsed, and so suddenly, vacuum.
The people who lived where the Romans had ruled were still technically citizens of Rome.
Now, they had no substance, no real identity of their own.
Rome had at least given protection and order and stability.
After the Roman withdrawal, a large area of western Europe became a shell, a political, cultural husk.
The collapse of Roman Britain must have been absolutely devastating.
It was the end of civilisation, certainly, in Britain, as they understood it.
The soldiers were withdrawn very abruptly in order to defend Rome, and there must have been a period of very prolonged chaos which Gildas tells us about in the next century.
There were the Picts coming down from north of the Wall, which was now abandoned.
There were Scots coming from Ireland over the sea, there were Angles, Jutes, Saxons crossing the northern sea, and also, there must have been plenty of Angles and Saxons actually serving as mercenaries in the forts of the Saxon shore.
And it's anyone's guess, more or less, what followed.
We know that towns were ruined and so forth.
The most interesting thing is what stepped into that power vacuum.
The English were coming to make their own Angle-land.
Their presence was to become permanent.
The Angles, the Saxons, these were the new contenders for the ungoverned but wealthy territories of post-Roman Britain.
It wasn't, of course, as clear-cut as an international touring side beating the hell out of the local opposition.
For a start, some of them were here already, they were soldiers in the Roman army.
But from about the year 430 AD onwards, they came tearing in.
Some of them were even here by invitation.
A local king, Vortigern, was having a few problems, so he invited in a team of mercenaries, and from that moment onwards, the newcomers changed the rules, so to speak.
And the eventual result for the Celts - All out.
- (Applause) All out except for one man.
Arthur, whose sword was the mighty Excalibur, whose spirit sprang out of the wild cliffs of Cornwall.
Arthur of Tintagel, he and his kingdom of Camelot have long since been turned to historical romance.
His legends are cornerstones of European literature.
His fabled tomb in Glastonbury Abbey still excites controversy.
Arthurian mythology probably had some foundations in fact.
I would suspect that he was a great king, and the great kings, as we know from other examples, like Charlemagne and so forth, do attract legends of this sort.
And it was a particularly critical and significant time in the sixth century, it was a time of enormous upheavals, it was a heroic age, when kings when whole kingdoms could be overthrown and upset, when the whole world was in a state of flux.
And that great man could set out, and, in a way, put themselves on a level with the gods, which is what one suspects Arthur was believed to have done.
Certainly, by the time by most of the early Welsh records, Arthur has already gained supernatural qualities.
These are more in evidence than any traces of a real historical general.
Leaders with supernatural qualities were associated with supernatural places, such as the hill fort of Dunadd in western Scotland, an ancient citadel with mystic resonances.
The magic that is always associated with the Celts, that wizardry and ritual, it's so often stimulated by the way in which myth and fact interchange.
Take this place, for instance.
We know from the archaeologists that Dunadd was an important Iron Age Celtic hill fort, and we know from the historians that Dunadd was one of the four great strongholds of the Dál Riata government.
But today, what is it famous for? A footprint.
A legendary footprint here in the stone.
It was part of the inauguration of the kings here.
Sort of "if the footprint fits".
A cross between the man who would fill the king's shoes and Cinderella.
And it was in the line of the succession to kingship, the sword in the stone, the footprint in the stone.
Obviously what we call the Divine Right of Kings began as something magical.
It was, of course, no more than a ritualised means of establishing that the person who became ruler had to be something of a phenomenon.
See what I mean? Kingship, at a somewhat earlier period, had many pagan associations.
The king was a sacral figure, he was a kind of lightning conductor to draw off the powers of the other world.
He acted as an intermediary between his tribe or his people and the whole outside world, both the other world and the foreign, external world of people and of nature.
But by the eighth century, the idea of Christian kingship was being promulgated.
This too was, in part, a response to invasion.
In Ireland, the arrival of Christianity threatened the very place which invoked the deepest pagan Celtic responses, the Hill of Tara.
For the feast of Bealtaine, it was customary for the king to decree that the night would remain dark.
But one Bealtaine, early in the fifth century, the king and his Druids, here at Tara, were astonished to find on a hillside six miles away across the countryside a huge bonfire blazing through the night.
The Druids turned to the king and said, "If this fire is not put out tonight, "it will never be put out.
" The hill was the hill of Sláine.
The stranger who lit the bonfire was a man called Patrick.
This was more than just a fire.
This was a new light, this was a challenge.
This was a challenge to the old ways, this was the light of Christianity.
After that fire had been lit, the magical power of the Druids was gone, and the old order was to change forever.
(Enya: Deireadh An Tuath) The new order inspired powerful devotion.
Monks in the sixth century exiled themselves to the Atlantic outpost of Skellig Michael.
Hardship, prayer, fasting, the hermits of the Skellig represented the extreme end of a conquest more profound than Roman or Anglo-Saxon.
This invasion captivated the spirit of the Celts.
In patientia vestra Possidebitis animas vestras In convertendo Dominum captivitatem.
As it grew in stature, it developed political connections.
Celtic Christianity had visible and powerful symbols to call upon.
Where the holy men gathered in great number, they established power bases.
The monasteries and the abbeys became centres of influence and patronage whose occupants had stature and property.
Cluain Mhic Nóis, for instance, on the banks of the River Shannon, had a reputation which reached far beyond central Ireland.
The abbots had the primacy of kings and princes.
Their monasteries attracted the sons of the Celtic aristocracy, and their prerogative extended over both the spiritual and the temporal.
Their power is exemplified in the figure of Columba, who crossed from Ireland to the island of Iona.
He wielded as much influence in Scotland and the north of England as any local chieftain.
Iona became a kind of ecclesiastical kingdom where Columba held sway, a living legend.
During his rule, the cloisters of Iona became corridors of power in which the princes of the early Scots took advice and counsel.
The abbot of Iona was a powerful grey eminence behind Celtic Scotland.
From here, too, widespread evangelisation of northern Britain went forth, and before long, the Celtic Church had a power in these territories to rival that of the very seat of Christianity, both in ecclesiastical politics and in doctrine.
If I'm not disturbing you too much, could I have perhaps ten percent of your attention? Thank you.
Now, who can tell me anything about Iona? Nobody? Iona is where Saint Columba landed when he introduced Christianity into Scotland.
Can anybody tell me where Saint Columba came from? Saint Columba and his monks came across the sea from Ireland.
They were what is known as Celtic monks.
Now, the Celtic form of Christianity differed in many ways from that which was prevalent throughout the rest of western Europe.
We can call the rest Roman, because they looked for leadership to Rome.
Now, the Celtic monks celebrated Easter at a different time.
They wore their hair or tonsure in a different way, and they really looked to Ireland for leadership, rather than Rome.
Just after Columba had come to Iona, Saint Augustine and his monks came to Canterbury from Rome.
Their mission was to convert the peoples of what we now call England to Christianity, and gradually, as time went on, the Roman Christians moved further north.
Meanwhile, the Celtic monks were converting the peoples of southern Scotland and even moving in to northern England.
So in Northumbria, some people were following Roman Christianity, and some people were following Celtic Christianity.
In fact, on one ridiculous occasion, the king of Northumbria was celebrating Easter at a different time to his wife.
To sort out all these confusions, a great religious meeting or synod was held in Whitby in 664 AD.
That synod decided that the authority of Saint Peter, represented by the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, should the preferred to that of the Columban church, with its special veneration for the Apostle John.
And the abbot of Iona, Adomnán, descendant of Columba and his biographer, came to Lindisfarne, where he met Saint Bede, the great scholar there, and he agreed to the Roman usage.
And finally, the entire Columban church conformed.
One of the difficulties was that the Columban church on the whole based its authority on abbeys, which belonged to the tribal kindred, and the abbot was the kind of top person of that kindred, as opposed to bishops of dioceses.
You have to remember that after conforming to Rome, the Irish church, the Celtic church, continued to be one of the lights of Dark Age Europe.
Its scholars were at the court of Charlemagne, and as late as 850, John Scotus Eriugena, John the Irish Scot, was considered the greatest Greek scholar in Europe.
And it wasn't really until Princess Margaret, the Saxon princess, came to Scotland and married Malcolm Canmore and they set up the abbey of Dunfermline as a daughter of Canterbury that an alternative link with mainstream Christendom was established, and the Columban church's authority ebbed away fast after that.
(Frank) A century on, other new and violent factors interrupted the golden age of the Celtic church.
Raiders in long boats from across northern seas.
(Screaming) (Yelling) This is the Viking stereotype.
Wild men in peculiarly shaped helmets, rebarbative guttural thugs hacking the hell out of the tranquil natives.
It's a tabloid version of history, there for a lurid imperative and therefore not the whole truth.
Because the real, the lasting result of Celts v.
Vikings was commerce, coinage, the opening up of ports on the Irish Sea, intermarriage, red-haired children, the importation of hens and chickens.
In many ways, the Vikings were latter-day Romans, in that they too traded and they too established dominant settlements, York in England, Waterford, Wexford and Dublin in Ireland, a presiding influence on the Isle of Man.
Never as freely called a civilisation, they were also no less vicious than the Romans.
It's just that the Roman image-makers were more upmarket.
(Yelling) There'll always be an England While there's a country lane Wherever there's a cottage small Beside a field of grain.
Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Christians, Vikings, wave after wave of invasion poured over the Celts of the west.
Over a thousand years of erosion destroying ancient tribal identities, paving the way for the ones we acknowledge today.
A million marching feet Red, white and blue What does it mean to you? Surely you're proud, shout it aloud "Britons, awake!" The Empire too We can depend on you Freedom remains, these are the chains nothing can break There'll always be an England Where there's a country lane What is this England, anyway? It is the Hay Wain, that place of pasture and peace, which one brought a tear to the innocent eye.
John Constable epitomised it, this green and pleasant land.
Roll out the clichés.
But the sad fact is, I'm afraid, that God wasn't an Englishman.
He was a lot of other things too.
Scratch an Englishmen and what do you find? In his painting, Constable represented what we have now come to know as the very essence of Englishness.
But that's not the full, that's not the deeper picture.
By all means, for England, read the Hay Wain and for English, read the term Anglo-Saxon.
But what about the term Anglo-Celt? (Brass band playing) The term Anglo-Celt still has a certain validity, even if for ritual purposes only.
Tradition rather than power.
This Christian ceremony in Derbyshire dresses a well, commemorates the Celtic goddess of water.
Similar gentle observances happen all over England, garland festivals or humorous fertility dances, little ancient Celtic practices poking through the fabric of modern England.
It's still enormously Celtic, apart from the actual Celtic speaking, once Celtic areas.
I think that the Celtic substratum in Britain comes right through, it has never gone, and I think it has done an enormous amount to make us, the British people, what we are today.
(Enya: Boadicea) Today, England is very specifically a non-Celtic country, defined by its longtime political separation from the Welsh, the Irish, the Scots.
The state of play in the year 1000 AD meant England versus the rest.
This hybrid of Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Viking was moving towards supremacy over the Celt.
It's ironic that England, the country which at first lost its own Celtic identity, then went on to subdue its Celtic neighbours.
Then came the Normans.
Bowmen and knights in armour from the rich fields of France.
At Hastings, William the Conqueror may have stumbled.
By winning the battle he made his point.
If you'll forgive me After which, in a highly efficient and mobile fashion, the Normans headed, as all anxious arrivals do, for the capital city, London.
And thereafter, the Normans and their merry men shot off in all directions at once.
By the time the Norman Conquests were complete, the subjugation of Wales was well underway.
Castles were built by rival English and Welsh princes.
Long campaigns were fought, long sieges were withstood.
But soon, the drawbridges of Wales came down with surprising ease.
There has to be a psychological reason why Celtic Wales capitulated so early, long before any of the other Celtic territories, and so completely.
The reason, I think, is this.
The Welsh were conquered from within.
What's in a name? The name Tudor, a Welsh name.
Henry Tudor became King of England in 1485, after the Battle of Bosworth Field, and Henry was a Welshman from a landowning family in North Wales.
Thousands of Welsh men fought, crucially, in his armies.
But when Henry acceded to the throne, the aspirations of the Welsh nobility now lay at the court in England.
They sent their sons to England to be educated.
Those boys never spoke Welsh again.
When a psychological conquest becomes political, it becomes complete.
Caernarfon Castle here, by its very existence, represents the fact that the Welsh were always difficult to subdue.
How many castles like this did Edward I have to build? And how long in his own castles did the Welsh chieftain Owen Glendower hold out against the English? But nowadays, when a Prince of Wales strides Caernarfon Castle, the implications are very different, politically and psychologically.
(Man) The symbol of sovereignty (Announcement in Welsh) (Fanfare) The ceremony which makes the future King of England Prince of Wales pays lip service, gestures to a Celtic heritage.
But behind the ceremonial face of Caernarfon Castle, centuries of domination.
England became the absolute ruler of Wales.
Under such utter control, how does a people assert any sense of nationality? Language? Custom? Religion? What is true is that in the nineteenth century, dissent, Methodism, dissent old and new, became almost a Welsh national church in the way that Catholicism became an Irish national church.
But what does this mean if this is a Celtic commitment to religion shared by other peoples, why do one bunch of Celts go for Catholicism and the other lot go for Calvinism? I put it to you that the real route here is disaffection from the establishment, which is English.
I am standing in the grounds of one of the oldest Breton families extant.
This place represents in miniature a capsule of the history of Brittany.
For a start, it was built on the site of a Roman camp, but in the grounds, you will find many carvings with ancient Celtic influences.
Now, look at the architecture.
Despite its pretences and pretensions, this place wasn't built as a fortification.
It was built as a place of leisure, pleasure and country pursuits.
In other words, a château.
That word, château.
How French can you get? And their influence pervaded absolutely.
The irony is that a place like this might never have been built in Brittany without the French.
Of course, the Bretons continued to try to remain non-French, even to the point to fighting on both sides in wars between France and England.
But then the inevitable happened.
French families and Breton families intermarried.
And once the French got into the households of Brittany, that was it.
It was, of course, a matter of power.
These ruling families decided that Brittany would become less Celtic, more French.
Then, successive medieval governments effectively outlawed Celtic nationalism.
An opportunity to break out of the stranglehold should have presented itself in the French Revolution.
Power to the people, the toppling of the aristocracy, something which hadn't happened in the other Celtic countries.
In Brittany, the story is one of suppression and paradox.
For century after century, the rulers of France had kept the independent-minded Bretons down.
Then came the French Revolution with its three splendid ideals, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.
Would the First Republic grant these famous principles to a people who had espoused them for so long? The first thing a country requires after revolution is stability, central authority, and in the case of France, this meant, of course, Paris, hence the paradox.
This building here in Rennes used to house the Breton Parlement.
Its last sitting was in 1789, the very year of the Revolution.
Will it ever sit again? This is how the map of Scotland looked around 800 AD.
You had the Britons in the southwest, equivalent to modern-day Strathclyde, the Scots, who were in the west, the Picts in the north and east, and the Angles who were pushing into southeast Scotland from northern England.
Now, three of these peoples were Celtic people, the Britons, the Scots and the Picts, but the strange thing is that it was the non-Celts, the Angles, who were eventually going to triumph over the other three, but that is another story.
The first people to dominate the Picts were the Scots, who pushed into Scotland from where? Whitmore.
- Anybody? - Ireland, sir.
Thank you, Professor Lawson.
Ireland.
- Now, then, MacLeod.
- Glover, sir.
Now, then, Glover, can you suggest to me a reason why the Scots should want to move into the lands of their Celtic cousins, the Picts? Because they wanted better land, sir.
Because then needed better land.
Not bad, Glover.
Now, very little is known about the Picts.
The name Picti was given to them by the Romans.
It means "the painted people".
Because the Picts' warriors liked to tattoo their bodies before going into battle.
Now, the Angles were also pushing from the south into the lands of the Picts, so that we can see that the poor Picts were having a pretty rough time.
In fact they were surrounded by enemies.
See me afterwards, Glover.
Sir.
Gradually, the language of the Lowland Scots, which was a form of Northern Middle English, prevailed as the language of commerce and administration and the language of the court, which was mostly in the Lowlands, although the Gaelic language continued to be spoken throughout over half the land mass until the end of the 18th century.
And the Gaels of the Highlands, although they lost all these institutions, enjoyed a certain immunity, like the Irish, as long as the English speakers of Scotland were scrapping with the English speakers of England.
But then, in 1603, King James VI, who was pathologically anti-Celtic, became King of England as well as Scotland, and strife ceased between the two lots of English speakers and they could both turn on the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland.
And in the end of the day, when the Stewarts had fallen out with their English-speaking subjects, they fell back on their Gaelic-speaking subjects and it was the kiss of death for both of them.
And the actual armageddon occurred in Scotland on the battlefield of Culloden.
(Bagpipes playing) (Frank) The Battle of Culloden in 1746.
That ghastly and poignant moment was the watershed in the history of Celtic Scotland.
Here, the clans gathered for what turned out to be one last stand.
The '45 rebellion brought most of Gaelic Scotland to the side of a prince who might have restored the old dreams of Celtic glory.
Whether he would or not became irrelevant.
Culloden is now almost more an idea than a place, and the saddest and most savage thing about this moor is how it suits the Celtic temperament.
If they had won here, what would they have done with it? Whereas, on the other hand, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite cause spawned a thousand songs, a million dreams.
Ah, only for Culloden.
And that's the viciousness of the Celtic paradox.
They were beaten here and butchered afterwards, but they built their future glory, such as it was to be, on bad memories like Culloden.
Scotland too was to be dominated and garrisoned by ordered, disciplined, imperial forces.
The English establishment would become reinforced.
The bastions of Scotland would never again be assailed by Celts.
Just as the Romans built triumphal arches and temples, the military ramparts of Scotland's new fortresses, like Fort George, would remind the conquered natives to stay in their place, whatever that place was.
Bonnie Prince Charlie went back to France.
The dreams of Celtic Scotland went with him or, realistically, retreated to the Highlands and Islands under the watchful, implacable eye of the conqueror in the citadel.
In 30 seconds' time that gun will boom out and tell the city of Edinburgh that it is one o'clock, time for lunch, so here's a 30-second history of Scotland.
The 1745 rebellion, Bonnie Prince Charlie Culloden, the Highland clearances, Mary Queen of Scots, Robert the Bruce, Queen Margaret and King Malcolm, Macbeth and the Celtic chieftains who lived on this hill fort but were now so long gone and so far away that even though this 25-pounder gun is pointing towards where the last lingering vestiges of the Scottish Celts are, the cartridge is blank, because militarily, politically and culturally the Celts are no longer any threat.
(Woman yells) (Crow cawing) Scotland, Wales, Brittany, all conquered, all gone.
And Ireland? The expression "beyond the pale" summarises the way in which Ireland wasn't conquered.
The Normans threw a pale, a fence around the immediate area of Dublin and stayed behind it.
They had to, because outside were the fierce, warlike Irish tribesmen, raiders and rustlers.
But bit by bit, the Normans extended the area of the pale into adjoining counties, until, eventually, a substantial lozenge of eastern Ireland came under Norman control.
And all along the pale, they executed the classic ploy of the conqueror.
Huge, highly-visible installations, heavily fortified, like Trim Castle, in County Meath on the river Boyne, a habitation and a garrison all at once.
The pale is the most significant, most important point in Irish history.
It is the first recorded colonisation of the island, the first military and political European presence on a systematic basis.
The Vikings had been sporadic, prehistoric invaders quasi-mythological, but these foreign gentlemen in their limestone keeps, they started something which never really stopped.
Across all the Celtic countries, the pale remains an oddity, a kind of historical curio, with its castles, its orderly gardens and its Anglo-lrish lords.
The pale was a ring of towers from roughly, Dún Laoghaire round to Bré.
And that was the inner pale.
And that was the first Norman bridgehead.
And then, there was the outer pale, which was further out.
And then an outer pale again.
And then roads went from the centre to the periphery.
Interesting thing about the pale is it was the first bridgehead in what eventually became the British Empire.
The whole series of Tudor monarchs, including Elizabeth, conducted a prolonged conquest of Ireland, piece by piece, section by section, earldom by earldom.
They never put quite enough effort into it to get the job done properly, and it became, partly because of that, very nasty and very bitter in the later stages.
And this was exacerbated by the religious change, the Reformation, the attempt to force the Reformation on Ireland.
So in the end of the 16th century, we have a war of conquest which becomes virtually a genocide.
Some of the Tudor commanders induced famine, for example, as a way of clearing the country.
They tried various variants on the notion of replacing the Irish by imported people, whether English or otherwise - mostly English at that stage.
Occasionally, they tried to Anglicise the Irish, to turn them into Englishmen.
They half tried all of these things.
But in the last decade of the 16th century, we have a long, bitter, destructive war in which a great many people were killed, a great deal of devastation was done.
It was a bit like the Americans in Vietnam.
They tried to get rid of the people by destroying the crops, destroying the woods, their shelter, and so on.
And in the long run, it didn't really work.
This worked.
Where genocide had failed, plantation succeeded.
These Loyalist marches in northern Ireland commemorate and celebrate a particular event.
At the Battle of the Boyne, July the 12th, 1690, native Irish aspirations were crushed by the Protestant army of King William.
But the marches also represent, and in the main are descended from, the people brought in from Lowland Scotland and England to occupy the lands of the dispossessed native Irish.
Now, many of these marches find themselves in a predicament not dissimilar to that of the people among whom they were originally settled.
They too feel that their identity is under threat and that their political and cultural inheritance is being challenged.
Virtually all of Celtic Ireland was thoroughly colonised.
Some of the best land was simply annexed by landlords from across the water.
English manners, English customs, English pastimes.
- (Horn blows) - Come on! Come on! Oscar Wilde called the English hunting gentleman "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable".
In Ireland, the hunting gentry were seen as the unspeakable in full pursuit of the untenable.
The landowners who formed the upper layer of Irish society were dispossessed and, in due course, largely exiled or broken down, and they were replaced by a completely new ascendancy, or aristocracy and gentry.
Now, this had very interesting effects, because the imported upper layer of society was English or Scottish, mainly English.
It spoke English, it was Protestant.
And these were imposed on a people who spoke Irish, were Roman Catholic, and had completely different traditions.
So you don't have they traditional bonding or even the traditional animosities between the gentry and the peasantry, or the continuity that you have in other parts of Europe.
There is a kind of a fault running right through the social structure at a certain level.
And the peasantry despised the new gentry, they had no blood, they had no ancestry, they were boors, as they regularly call them in Irish verse.
Skinheads, people of no consequence coming from nowhere.
With the political eclipse came the cultural domination.
All cultural was now imposed or imported.
Occasionally the son or daughter of a great house would dabble, from the drawing-room, in Celtic lore, and get it wrong.
How quaint were the ways of the folk in the huts down there, with their long tales and their wild, unkempt music.
But had they paid the rent? In the final analysis, the political identity of the Celts isn't much more than a sense of kinship.
The Bretons personify it, with good reason.
Brittany reinforced its Celtic nature in a series of huge migrations from Cornwall and Wales during the period following the Roman conquest.
The Cornish and Welsh migrations mean that Brittany is twice Celtic, but does that still mean anything? Here in Rennes, as in any other Celtic capital, it means elitism without political clout.
It means a shrinkage in the use of the language.
The census figures prove this, despite the protests of true Bretons.
It means small groups of academics and nationalists fighting to keep the scholarship and the spirit alive.
It means government grants handed down patronisingly and parsimoniously.
And at the bottom line, it means an excuse for a few jars in a few bars in the bon mar with Celtic friends from Ireland or Scotland or Wales.
But the bitter truth is that from the moment we are born, we begin to die.
The birth of nations has meant the slow lingering death of the Celts.
For many of the Celts of the west, the failure to establish political nationhood meant a revival of a most ancient pattern, migration.
As their ancestors had done in ancient Europe, the Irish, the Welsh, the Scots left the homeland, heartbroken.
Once again, they turned to the west.
They took the boat in search of New World's new hopes.
I do not know, nor do I know anybody who knows any Irish person who doesn't have a relative in North America.
Everybody has because they left in droves.
All through the latter part of the 18th century, all through the 19th century, especially, and right up into the middle of the 20th century, a huge haemorrhage, perhaps the biggest ever recorded peacetime migration.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
" And the descendants of the Celts of western Europe, Scotland and Wales included, took the Statue of Liberty at her word.
There used to be a tradition in the west of Ireland called an American wake, the same mixture of sadness and merriment for an emigrant as for a corpse.
Same difference, too, because once you took the boat, your family never saw you again.
(Woman singing in Gaelic)
The crosses that make up the Union Jack say it all.
1603, the blue of Saint Andrew, union of Scotland and the Crown.
1800, the hated Irish Act of Union, the red and white diagonal, cross of Saint Patrick, dominated always by the cross of Saint George.
No Wales.
Dragons don't fit, and anyway, the Welsh had been long conquered.
People write letters to the newspapers if the Union Jack appears the wrong way up.
From a Celt's point of view, it always has been.
But once this symbol came to power, the Celts represented within it, who fought under it, who died for it, were no longer offered to the world as Irish or Scots, they were for England and Saint George.
(Enya: The Celts) It began with the Caesars.
Every Roman ruin in western Europe, every column, every archway, can be seen as a Celtic cemetery.
The grandeur that was Rome entombed the Celts.
In its ruthless methodical spread, the Roman Empire planted France and much of Britain with cities and supplanted the Celtic chieftains with officials.
Thus were the Celts eclipsed.
One famous exception was Boadicea's rebellion.
For a brief moment, this queen of the Iceni shook the invaders of Britain, but lost out to Roman discipline.
Her statue was raised on Westminster Bridge in London to inspire Parliament and people in the defence of their country.
Her campaign in 60 AD was ferocious and bloody, but she was finally more lurid than effective.
A warlike queen, Britain's last Celtic warrior, she captured the imagination forever.
Boadicea's most dramatic achievement was the destruction of Roman Colchester.
Here, the Romans had built a city and a famous temple on the site of a Celtic settlement named after a Celtic god, Camulos.
Colchester typified how Celtic Britain was overthrown politically, undermined culturally.
Boadicea laid siege.
She burned Colchester to the ground and demolished the hated temple to its foundations.
She slaughtered men, women and children.
Recent excavations of ancient Colchester uncovered a black stripe running through the earthworks like a code.
It confirmed the extent of Boadicea's burning rage.
It has since been buried under a new shopping centre, submerged like the tribes whose defiance it once affirmed.
"We are receiving reports which suggest "that all may not be well with our legions.
"In the west and north, we are facing battles, surprise attacks on our flanks, "and hordes of shrieking druids and black-robed, white faced women "are trying to intimidate our commanders.
" The Roman advance defines the embryonic demography of Great Britain.
In the south and southeast, no problem.
In the west, and in the far north, territory of, among others, the fierce Caledonii, ferocious and continuous opposition.
Later invaders the Anglo-Saxons had a not dissimilar experience, and in the overrunning of Great Britain, lines of demarcation were drawn which separated and identified the eventual Celtic nations.
England, or rather the south of it, had been softened and diluted by successive invasions, whereas the west and the north remained intensively Celtic, so that in fact, the national divisions which we see to this very day began by contrast with those Britons who didn't remain Celtic.
Over the heather, the wet wind blows I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose The rain comes patterning out of the sky I'm a wall soldier I don't know why The mist creeps over the hard grey stone My girl's in Tungria, I sleep alone When I'm a veteran with only one eye I shall do nothing but look at the sky And to the west, Hadrian's Wall was as far as the Roman Empire went.
Their most uncomfortable outpost, cold, grey, wet, and the barbarians always coming over the hills.
Perhaps not on the same scale as the Great Wall of China, it was, nonetheless, their most flamboyant imperial gesture.
And it betrayed them, because here, they had to declare their limits.
Once they had divided Britain in this fashion, by this huge wall, they acknowledged that their empire had come to a full stop.
Whither now? I suppose every empire carries within itself the seeds of its own downfall.
They came, they saw and they conquered, And they left.
As abruptly as they had arrived, the Romans departed.
Urgent business elsewhere was the reason.
Civil wars at home, all frontiers threatened, and in a town like this one, Glanum in Provence, the last Roman leaving turned off the water, so to speak.
And all Gaul, once divided into three parts, all Gaul was left with was handfuls of Roman remains, the ruins of a system.
It had lasted some 400 years, it had imposed its authority, its organisation, its bureaucracy.
It had destroyed the ancient Celtic society, forced the Celtic tribes to conform.
And then, when the Roman Empire collapsed, and so suddenly, vacuum.
The people who lived where the Romans had ruled were still technically citizens of Rome.
Now, they had no substance, no real identity of their own.
Rome had at least given protection and order and stability.
After the Roman withdrawal, a large area of western Europe became a shell, a political, cultural husk.
The collapse of Roman Britain must have been absolutely devastating.
It was the end of civilisation, certainly, in Britain, as they understood it.
The soldiers were withdrawn very abruptly in order to defend Rome, and there must have been a period of very prolonged chaos which Gildas tells us about in the next century.
There were the Picts coming down from north of the Wall, which was now abandoned.
There were Scots coming from Ireland over the sea, there were Angles, Jutes, Saxons crossing the northern sea, and also, there must have been plenty of Angles and Saxons actually serving as mercenaries in the forts of the Saxon shore.
And it's anyone's guess, more or less, what followed.
We know that towns were ruined and so forth.
The most interesting thing is what stepped into that power vacuum.
The English were coming to make their own Angle-land.
Their presence was to become permanent.
The Angles, the Saxons, these were the new contenders for the ungoverned but wealthy territories of post-Roman Britain.
It wasn't, of course, as clear-cut as an international touring side beating the hell out of the local opposition.
For a start, some of them were here already, they were soldiers in the Roman army.
But from about the year 430 AD onwards, they came tearing in.
Some of them were even here by invitation.
A local king, Vortigern, was having a few problems, so he invited in a team of mercenaries, and from that moment onwards, the newcomers changed the rules, so to speak.
And the eventual result for the Celts - All out.
- (Applause) All out except for one man.
Arthur, whose sword was the mighty Excalibur, whose spirit sprang out of the wild cliffs of Cornwall.
Arthur of Tintagel, he and his kingdom of Camelot have long since been turned to historical romance.
His legends are cornerstones of European literature.
His fabled tomb in Glastonbury Abbey still excites controversy.
Arthurian mythology probably had some foundations in fact.
I would suspect that he was a great king, and the great kings, as we know from other examples, like Charlemagne and so forth, do attract legends of this sort.
And it was a particularly critical and significant time in the sixth century, it was a time of enormous upheavals, it was a heroic age, when kings when whole kingdoms could be overthrown and upset, when the whole world was in a state of flux.
And that great man could set out, and, in a way, put themselves on a level with the gods, which is what one suspects Arthur was believed to have done.
Certainly, by the time by most of the early Welsh records, Arthur has already gained supernatural qualities.
These are more in evidence than any traces of a real historical general.
Leaders with supernatural qualities were associated with supernatural places, such as the hill fort of Dunadd in western Scotland, an ancient citadel with mystic resonances.
The magic that is always associated with the Celts, that wizardry and ritual, it's so often stimulated by the way in which myth and fact interchange.
Take this place, for instance.
We know from the archaeologists that Dunadd was an important Iron Age Celtic hill fort, and we know from the historians that Dunadd was one of the four great strongholds of the Dál Riata government.
But today, what is it famous for? A footprint.
A legendary footprint here in the stone.
It was part of the inauguration of the kings here.
Sort of "if the footprint fits".
A cross between the man who would fill the king's shoes and Cinderella.
And it was in the line of the succession to kingship, the sword in the stone, the footprint in the stone.
Obviously what we call the Divine Right of Kings began as something magical.
It was, of course, no more than a ritualised means of establishing that the person who became ruler had to be something of a phenomenon.
See what I mean? Kingship, at a somewhat earlier period, had many pagan associations.
The king was a sacral figure, he was a kind of lightning conductor to draw off the powers of the other world.
He acted as an intermediary between his tribe or his people and the whole outside world, both the other world and the foreign, external world of people and of nature.
But by the eighth century, the idea of Christian kingship was being promulgated.
This too was, in part, a response to invasion.
In Ireland, the arrival of Christianity threatened the very place which invoked the deepest pagan Celtic responses, the Hill of Tara.
For the feast of Bealtaine, it was customary for the king to decree that the night would remain dark.
But one Bealtaine, early in the fifth century, the king and his Druids, here at Tara, were astonished to find on a hillside six miles away across the countryside a huge bonfire blazing through the night.
The Druids turned to the king and said, "If this fire is not put out tonight, "it will never be put out.
" The hill was the hill of Sláine.
The stranger who lit the bonfire was a man called Patrick.
This was more than just a fire.
This was a new light, this was a challenge.
This was a challenge to the old ways, this was the light of Christianity.
After that fire had been lit, the magical power of the Druids was gone, and the old order was to change forever.
(Enya: Deireadh An Tuath) The new order inspired powerful devotion.
Monks in the sixth century exiled themselves to the Atlantic outpost of Skellig Michael.
Hardship, prayer, fasting, the hermits of the Skellig represented the extreme end of a conquest more profound than Roman or Anglo-Saxon.
This invasion captivated the spirit of the Celts.
In patientia vestra Possidebitis animas vestras In convertendo Dominum captivitatem.
As it grew in stature, it developed political connections.
Celtic Christianity had visible and powerful symbols to call upon.
Where the holy men gathered in great number, they established power bases.
The monasteries and the abbeys became centres of influence and patronage whose occupants had stature and property.
Cluain Mhic Nóis, for instance, on the banks of the River Shannon, had a reputation which reached far beyond central Ireland.
The abbots had the primacy of kings and princes.
Their monasteries attracted the sons of the Celtic aristocracy, and their prerogative extended over both the spiritual and the temporal.
Their power is exemplified in the figure of Columba, who crossed from Ireland to the island of Iona.
He wielded as much influence in Scotland and the north of England as any local chieftain.
Iona became a kind of ecclesiastical kingdom where Columba held sway, a living legend.
During his rule, the cloisters of Iona became corridors of power in which the princes of the early Scots took advice and counsel.
The abbot of Iona was a powerful grey eminence behind Celtic Scotland.
From here, too, widespread evangelisation of northern Britain went forth, and before long, the Celtic Church had a power in these territories to rival that of the very seat of Christianity, both in ecclesiastical politics and in doctrine.
If I'm not disturbing you too much, could I have perhaps ten percent of your attention? Thank you.
Now, who can tell me anything about Iona? Nobody? Iona is where Saint Columba landed when he introduced Christianity into Scotland.
Can anybody tell me where Saint Columba came from? Saint Columba and his monks came across the sea from Ireland.
They were what is known as Celtic monks.
Now, the Celtic form of Christianity differed in many ways from that which was prevalent throughout the rest of western Europe.
We can call the rest Roman, because they looked for leadership to Rome.
Now, the Celtic monks celebrated Easter at a different time.
They wore their hair or tonsure in a different way, and they really looked to Ireland for leadership, rather than Rome.
Just after Columba had come to Iona, Saint Augustine and his monks came to Canterbury from Rome.
Their mission was to convert the peoples of what we now call England to Christianity, and gradually, as time went on, the Roman Christians moved further north.
Meanwhile, the Celtic monks were converting the peoples of southern Scotland and even moving in to northern England.
So in Northumbria, some people were following Roman Christianity, and some people were following Celtic Christianity.
In fact, on one ridiculous occasion, the king of Northumbria was celebrating Easter at a different time to his wife.
To sort out all these confusions, a great religious meeting or synod was held in Whitby in 664 AD.
That synod decided that the authority of Saint Peter, represented by the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, should the preferred to that of the Columban church, with its special veneration for the Apostle John.
And the abbot of Iona, Adomnán, descendant of Columba and his biographer, came to Lindisfarne, where he met Saint Bede, the great scholar there, and he agreed to the Roman usage.
And finally, the entire Columban church conformed.
One of the difficulties was that the Columban church on the whole based its authority on abbeys, which belonged to the tribal kindred, and the abbot was the kind of top person of that kindred, as opposed to bishops of dioceses.
You have to remember that after conforming to Rome, the Irish church, the Celtic church, continued to be one of the lights of Dark Age Europe.
Its scholars were at the court of Charlemagne, and as late as 850, John Scotus Eriugena, John the Irish Scot, was considered the greatest Greek scholar in Europe.
And it wasn't really until Princess Margaret, the Saxon princess, came to Scotland and married Malcolm Canmore and they set up the abbey of Dunfermline as a daughter of Canterbury that an alternative link with mainstream Christendom was established, and the Columban church's authority ebbed away fast after that.
(Frank) A century on, other new and violent factors interrupted the golden age of the Celtic church.
Raiders in long boats from across northern seas.
(Screaming) (Yelling) This is the Viking stereotype.
Wild men in peculiarly shaped helmets, rebarbative guttural thugs hacking the hell out of the tranquil natives.
It's a tabloid version of history, there for a lurid imperative and therefore not the whole truth.
Because the real, the lasting result of Celts v.
Vikings was commerce, coinage, the opening up of ports on the Irish Sea, intermarriage, red-haired children, the importation of hens and chickens.
In many ways, the Vikings were latter-day Romans, in that they too traded and they too established dominant settlements, York in England, Waterford, Wexford and Dublin in Ireland, a presiding influence on the Isle of Man.
Never as freely called a civilisation, they were also no less vicious than the Romans.
It's just that the Roman image-makers were more upmarket.
(Yelling) There'll always be an England While there's a country lane Wherever there's a cottage small Beside a field of grain.
Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Christians, Vikings, wave after wave of invasion poured over the Celts of the west.
Over a thousand years of erosion destroying ancient tribal identities, paving the way for the ones we acknowledge today.
A million marching feet Red, white and blue What does it mean to you? Surely you're proud, shout it aloud "Britons, awake!" The Empire too We can depend on you Freedom remains, these are the chains nothing can break There'll always be an England Where there's a country lane What is this England, anyway? It is the Hay Wain, that place of pasture and peace, which one brought a tear to the innocent eye.
John Constable epitomised it, this green and pleasant land.
Roll out the clichés.
But the sad fact is, I'm afraid, that God wasn't an Englishman.
He was a lot of other things too.
Scratch an Englishmen and what do you find? In his painting, Constable represented what we have now come to know as the very essence of Englishness.
But that's not the full, that's not the deeper picture.
By all means, for England, read the Hay Wain and for English, read the term Anglo-Saxon.
But what about the term Anglo-Celt? (Brass band playing) The term Anglo-Celt still has a certain validity, even if for ritual purposes only.
Tradition rather than power.
This Christian ceremony in Derbyshire dresses a well, commemorates the Celtic goddess of water.
Similar gentle observances happen all over England, garland festivals or humorous fertility dances, little ancient Celtic practices poking through the fabric of modern England.
It's still enormously Celtic, apart from the actual Celtic speaking, once Celtic areas.
I think that the Celtic substratum in Britain comes right through, it has never gone, and I think it has done an enormous amount to make us, the British people, what we are today.
(Enya: Boadicea) Today, England is very specifically a non-Celtic country, defined by its longtime political separation from the Welsh, the Irish, the Scots.
The state of play in the year 1000 AD meant England versus the rest.
This hybrid of Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Viking was moving towards supremacy over the Celt.
It's ironic that England, the country which at first lost its own Celtic identity, then went on to subdue its Celtic neighbours.
Then came the Normans.
Bowmen and knights in armour from the rich fields of France.
At Hastings, William the Conqueror may have stumbled.
By winning the battle he made his point.
If you'll forgive me After which, in a highly efficient and mobile fashion, the Normans headed, as all anxious arrivals do, for the capital city, London.
And thereafter, the Normans and their merry men shot off in all directions at once.
By the time the Norman Conquests were complete, the subjugation of Wales was well underway.
Castles were built by rival English and Welsh princes.
Long campaigns were fought, long sieges were withstood.
But soon, the drawbridges of Wales came down with surprising ease.
There has to be a psychological reason why Celtic Wales capitulated so early, long before any of the other Celtic territories, and so completely.
The reason, I think, is this.
The Welsh were conquered from within.
What's in a name? The name Tudor, a Welsh name.
Henry Tudor became King of England in 1485, after the Battle of Bosworth Field, and Henry was a Welshman from a landowning family in North Wales.
Thousands of Welsh men fought, crucially, in his armies.
But when Henry acceded to the throne, the aspirations of the Welsh nobility now lay at the court in England.
They sent their sons to England to be educated.
Those boys never spoke Welsh again.
When a psychological conquest becomes political, it becomes complete.
Caernarfon Castle here, by its very existence, represents the fact that the Welsh were always difficult to subdue.
How many castles like this did Edward I have to build? And how long in his own castles did the Welsh chieftain Owen Glendower hold out against the English? But nowadays, when a Prince of Wales strides Caernarfon Castle, the implications are very different, politically and psychologically.
(Man) The symbol of sovereignty (Announcement in Welsh) (Fanfare) The ceremony which makes the future King of England Prince of Wales pays lip service, gestures to a Celtic heritage.
But behind the ceremonial face of Caernarfon Castle, centuries of domination.
England became the absolute ruler of Wales.
Under such utter control, how does a people assert any sense of nationality? Language? Custom? Religion? What is true is that in the nineteenth century, dissent, Methodism, dissent old and new, became almost a Welsh national church in the way that Catholicism became an Irish national church.
But what does this mean if this is a Celtic commitment to religion shared by other peoples, why do one bunch of Celts go for Catholicism and the other lot go for Calvinism? I put it to you that the real route here is disaffection from the establishment, which is English.
I am standing in the grounds of one of the oldest Breton families extant.
This place represents in miniature a capsule of the history of Brittany.
For a start, it was built on the site of a Roman camp, but in the grounds, you will find many carvings with ancient Celtic influences.
Now, look at the architecture.
Despite its pretences and pretensions, this place wasn't built as a fortification.
It was built as a place of leisure, pleasure and country pursuits.
In other words, a château.
That word, château.
How French can you get? And their influence pervaded absolutely.
The irony is that a place like this might never have been built in Brittany without the French.
Of course, the Bretons continued to try to remain non-French, even to the point to fighting on both sides in wars between France and England.
But then the inevitable happened.
French families and Breton families intermarried.
And once the French got into the households of Brittany, that was it.
It was, of course, a matter of power.
These ruling families decided that Brittany would become less Celtic, more French.
Then, successive medieval governments effectively outlawed Celtic nationalism.
An opportunity to break out of the stranglehold should have presented itself in the French Revolution.
Power to the people, the toppling of the aristocracy, something which hadn't happened in the other Celtic countries.
In Brittany, the story is one of suppression and paradox.
For century after century, the rulers of France had kept the independent-minded Bretons down.
Then came the French Revolution with its three splendid ideals, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.
Would the First Republic grant these famous principles to a people who had espoused them for so long? The first thing a country requires after revolution is stability, central authority, and in the case of France, this meant, of course, Paris, hence the paradox.
This building here in Rennes used to house the Breton Parlement.
Its last sitting was in 1789, the very year of the Revolution.
Will it ever sit again? This is how the map of Scotland looked around 800 AD.
You had the Britons in the southwest, equivalent to modern-day Strathclyde, the Scots, who were in the west, the Picts in the north and east, and the Angles who were pushing into southeast Scotland from northern England.
Now, three of these peoples were Celtic people, the Britons, the Scots and the Picts, but the strange thing is that it was the non-Celts, the Angles, who were eventually going to triumph over the other three, but that is another story.
The first people to dominate the Picts were the Scots, who pushed into Scotland from where? Whitmore.
- Anybody? - Ireland, sir.
Thank you, Professor Lawson.
Ireland.
- Now, then, MacLeod.
- Glover, sir.
Now, then, Glover, can you suggest to me a reason why the Scots should want to move into the lands of their Celtic cousins, the Picts? Because they wanted better land, sir.
Because then needed better land.
Not bad, Glover.
Now, very little is known about the Picts.
The name Picti was given to them by the Romans.
It means "the painted people".
Because the Picts' warriors liked to tattoo their bodies before going into battle.
Now, the Angles were also pushing from the south into the lands of the Picts, so that we can see that the poor Picts were having a pretty rough time.
In fact they were surrounded by enemies.
See me afterwards, Glover.
Sir.
Gradually, the language of the Lowland Scots, which was a form of Northern Middle English, prevailed as the language of commerce and administration and the language of the court, which was mostly in the Lowlands, although the Gaelic language continued to be spoken throughout over half the land mass until the end of the 18th century.
And the Gaels of the Highlands, although they lost all these institutions, enjoyed a certain immunity, like the Irish, as long as the English speakers of Scotland were scrapping with the English speakers of England.
But then, in 1603, King James VI, who was pathologically anti-Celtic, became King of England as well as Scotland, and strife ceased between the two lots of English speakers and they could both turn on the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland.
And in the end of the day, when the Stewarts had fallen out with their English-speaking subjects, they fell back on their Gaelic-speaking subjects and it was the kiss of death for both of them.
And the actual armageddon occurred in Scotland on the battlefield of Culloden.
(Bagpipes playing) (Frank) The Battle of Culloden in 1746.
That ghastly and poignant moment was the watershed in the history of Celtic Scotland.
Here, the clans gathered for what turned out to be one last stand.
The '45 rebellion brought most of Gaelic Scotland to the side of a prince who might have restored the old dreams of Celtic glory.
Whether he would or not became irrelevant.
Culloden is now almost more an idea than a place, and the saddest and most savage thing about this moor is how it suits the Celtic temperament.
If they had won here, what would they have done with it? Whereas, on the other hand, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite cause spawned a thousand songs, a million dreams.
Ah, only for Culloden.
And that's the viciousness of the Celtic paradox.
They were beaten here and butchered afterwards, but they built their future glory, such as it was to be, on bad memories like Culloden.
Scotland too was to be dominated and garrisoned by ordered, disciplined, imperial forces.
The English establishment would become reinforced.
The bastions of Scotland would never again be assailed by Celts.
Just as the Romans built triumphal arches and temples, the military ramparts of Scotland's new fortresses, like Fort George, would remind the conquered natives to stay in their place, whatever that place was.
Bonnie Prince Charlie went back to France.
The dreams of Celtic Scotland went with him or, realistically, retreated to the Highlands and Islands under the watchful, implacable eye of the conqueror in the citadel.
In 30 seconds' time that gun will boom out and tell the city of Edinburgh that it is one o'clock, time for lunch, so here's a 30-second history of Scotland.
The 1745 rebellion, Bonnie Prince Charlie Culloden, the Highland clearances, Mary Queen of Scots, Robert the Bruce, Queen Margaret and King Malcolm, Macbeth and the Celtic chieftains who lived on this hill fort but were now so long gone and so far away that even though this 25-pounder gun is pointing towards where the last lingering vestiges of the Scottish Celts are, the cartridge is blank, because militarily, politically and culturally the Celts are no longer any threat.
(Woman yells) (Crow cawing) Scotland, Wales, Brittany, all conquered, all gone.
And Ireland? The expression "beyond the pale" summarises the way in which Ireland wasn't conquered.
The Normans threw a pale, a fence around the immediate area of Dublin and stayed behind it.
They had to, because outside were the fierce, warlike Irish tribesmen, raiders and rustlers.
But bit by bit, the Normans extended the area of the pale into adjoining counties, until, eventually, a substantial lozenge of eastern Ireland came under Norman control.
And all along the pale, they executed the classic ploy of the conqueror.
Huge, highly-visible installations, heavily fortified, like Trim Castle, in County Meath on the river Boyne, a habitation and a garrison all at once.
The pale is the most significant, most important point in Irish history.
It is the first recorded colonisation of the island, the first military and political European presence on a systematic basis.
The Vikings had been sporadic, prehistoric invaders quasi-mythological, but these foreign gentlemen in their limestone keeps, they started something which never really stopped.
Across all the Celtic countries, the pale remains an oddity, a kind of historical curio, with its castles, its orderly gardens and its Anglo-lrish lords.
The pale was a ring of towers from roughly, Dún Laoghaire round to Bré.
And that was the inner pale.
And that was the first Norman bridgehead.
And then, there was the outer pale, which was further out.
And then an outer pale again.
And then roads went from the centre to the periphery.
Interesting thing about the pale is it was the first bridgehead in what eventually became the British Empire.
The whole series of Tudor monarchs, including Elizabeth, conducted a prolonged conquest of Ireland, piece by piece, section by section, earldom by earldom.
They never put quite enough effort into it to get the job done properly, and it became, partly because of that, very nasty and very bitter in the later stages.
And this was exacerbated by the religious change, the Reformation, the attempt to force the Reformation on Ireland.
So in the end of the 16th century, we have a war of conquest which becomes virtually a genocide.
Some of the Tudor commanders induced famine, for example, as a way of clearing the country.
They tried various variants on the notion of replacing the Irish by imported people, whether English or otherwise - mostly English at that stage.
Occasionally, they tried to Anglicise the Irish, to turn them into Englishmen.
They half tried all of these things.
But in the last decade of the 16th century, we have a long, bitter, destructive war in which a great many people were killed, a great deal of devastation was done.
It was a bit like the Americans in Vietnam.
They tried to get rid of the people by destroying the crops, destroying the woods, their shelter, and so on.
And in the long run, it didn't really work.
This worked.
Where genocide had failed, plantation succeeded.
These Loyalist marches in northern Ireland commemorate and celebrate a particular event.
At the Battle of the Boyne, July the 12th, 1690, native Irish aspirations were crushed by the Protestant army of King William.
But the marches also represent, and in the main are descended from, the people brought in from Lowland Scotland and England to occupy the lands of the dispossessed native Irish.
Now, many of these marches find themselves in a predicament not dissimilar to that of the people among whom they were originally settled.
They too feel that their identity is under threat and that their political and cultural inheritance is being challenged.
Virtually all of Celtic Ireland was thoroughly colonised.
Some of the best land was simply annexed by landlords from across the water.
English manners, English customs, English pastimes.
- (Horn blows) - Come on! Come on! Oscar Wilde called the English hunting gentleman "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable".
In Ireland, the hunting gentry were seen as the unspeakable in full pursuit of the untenable.
The landowners who formed the upper layer of Irish society were dispossessed and, in due course, largely exiled or broken down, and they were replaced by a completely new ascendancy, or aristocracy and gentry.
Now, this had very interesting effects, because the imported upper layer of society was English or Scottish, mainly English.
It spoke English, it was Protestant.
And these were imposed on a people who spoke Irish, were Roman Catholic, and had completely different traditions.
So you don't have they traditional bonding or even the traditional animosities between the gentry and the peasantry, or the continuity that you have in other parts of Europe.
There is a kind of a fault running right through the social structure at a certain level.
And the peasantry despised the new gentry, they had no blood, they had no ancestry, they were boors, as they regularly call them in Irish verse.
Skinheads, people of no consequence coming from nowhere.
With the political eclipse came the cultural domination.
All cultural was now imposed or imported.
Occasionally the son or daughter of a great house would dabble, from the drawing-room, in Celtic lore, and get it wrong.
How quaint were the ways of the folk in the huts down there, with their long tales and their wild, unkempt music.
But had they paid the rent? In the final analysis, the political identity of the Celts isn't much more than a sense of kinship.
The Bretons personify it, with good reason.
Brittany reinforced its Celtic nature in a series of huge migrations from Cornwall and Wales during the period following the Roman conquest.
The Cornish and Welsh migrations mean that Brittany is twice Celtic, but does that still mean anything? Here in Rennes, as in any other Celtic capital, it means elitism without political clout.
It means a shrinkage in the use of the language.
The census figures prove this, despite the protests of true Bretons.
It means small groups of academics and nationalists fighting to keep the scholarship and the spirit alive.
It means government grants handed down patronisingly and parsimoniously.
And at the bottom line, it means an excuse for a few jars in a few bars in the bon mar with Celtic friends from Ireland or Scotland or Wales.
But the bitter truth is that from the moment we are born, we begin to die.
The birth of nations has meant the slow lingering death of the Celts.
For many of the Celts of the west, the failure to establish political nationhood meant a revival of a most ancient pattern, migration.
As their ancestors had done in ancient Europe, the Irish, the Welsh, the Scots left the homeland, heartbroken.
Once again, they turned to the west.
They took the boat in search of New World's new hopes.
I do not know, nor do I know anybody who knows any Irish person who doesn't have a relative in North America.
Everybody has because they left in droves.
All through the latter part of the 18th century, all through the 19th century, especially, and right up into the middle of the 20th century, a huge haemorrhage, perhaps the biggest ever recorded peacetime migration.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
" And the descendants of the Celts of western Europe, Scotland and Wales included, took the Statue of Liberty at her word.
There used to be a tradition in the west of Ireland called an American wake, the same mixture of sadness and merriment for an emigrant as for a corpse.
Same difference, too, because once you took the boat, your family never saw you again.
(Woman singing in Gaelic)