The Celts (1987) s02e06 Episode Script
The Legacy
(Enya: The Celts) (Thunder crashing) If you go in search of a Celtic legacy today, of a glorious inheritance, you need to be wary.
You may be pursuing an illusion.
The ideas associated with the word Celt are elusive.
The very word Celtic is risky.
There's a danger in the notion, a danger of reconstructing something for the sake of being colourful and romantic.
The terms Celt and Celtic have to be questioned, for all too often, they are no more than manifestations of wishful thinking, recollections of former glory, a trip in a time warp.
It was 20 years ago today, generation past, a time of peace, love and flower power, that one of the very few real cults television has ever spawned came to life in this Welsh village.
Welsh village? Yes.
Portmeirion.
The series, The Prisoner.
"I am not a number, I am a free man," said Number Six, the prisoner, one Patrick McGoohan, good Celtic name.
Good Celtic principle too, unto each man himself.
The Prisoner was all about individual freedom, the struggle for individual liberty.
And a good Celtic paradox.
This Italianate collection of architectural quotations was established in Wales as a gesture of defiance against the advancing anonymities of international culture.
The idea of The Prisoner and the idea of Portmeirion harmonised memorably.
(Theme from The Prisoner) But Portmeirion and its Prisoner symbolise much of what I want to say about the Celts and their culture, what's left of it.
Here, along the shores of the Irish Sea, an exotic collection of cultural reminiscences, genuine, but fake because they're deliberate reconstructions.
And in the imaginations of all those who remember the television series in Portmeirion, there still lurks the spirit of the Prisoner trying to get free again.
Ditto for the Celts and their Celtic fringe, if not finally gone now, then how long more? You are now a number.
Be seeing you.
People don't want to be just a number in an organisation, to be just living in a sort of rabbit hutch.
In one of those big buildings.
And while they are getting more concentrated in one way, on the other hand, they are looking for rules, which means that they are they want to be different, you see.
They are getting together and keeping different, and I think in that way, the values we are fighting for are values of the future, and I will say that for the first time in history since a long time, the Celts are going the right way, forward.
(Frank) The right way forward.
A brave claim, but isn't this an example of wishful thinking, a harking back to the fabulous past when Celtic warriors rampaged across the plains of Europe? Isn't the European who calls himself a Celt simply trying to harness an ancient renown to enhance his identity? Throughout the ages, the horse has appeared in many cultures, not just the Celtic, but Ireland, in particular, is identified with the horse and horsemanship.
It has become part of the national image, a kind of Celtic emblem, comfortable, reassuring, stylish, a powerful connection with the mystical Celtic past.
There's a phrase used by archaeologists and cultural historians which has a special reference to the Celts.
The façade atlantique describes the once uncharted vastness of the Atlantic Ocean at whose edge all movement, all cultural change had to stop or turn backwards.
The façade atlantique summarises the Celts of the west.
Alone these foreshores, the remnant, the legacy clings, but out there, too, a mirage place, a mythical land, Atlantis, the Isle of the Blessed.
Now, given the pressures upon all cultures by our now communications intensive world, you could take the pessimistic view, that in a few generations' time, the Celts as we know them will disappear, forced out into the façade atlantique, to become as distant from us and as imaginary as that mythical isle, the lost tribes of the Celts.
The sad fact is that the culture of the Celts is now beached.
They're a marooned people, a curiosity whose original identity remains visible, but whose culture is no longer any practical use.
Pockets of language, music and lifestyle still survive on the western seaboard of the north Atlantic.
But they amount to little more than relics.
Those who would refloat Celtic culture meet at festivals regularly, like the large annual gathering at Laurient in Brittany.
At Laurient, Celts are where you find them, Breton, Welsh, Irish, Scots, and those who are uncertain.
The required credentials are, to some degree, sartorial, but essentially, they're musical.
This is the famous hat dance from Galicia in northern Spain.
The ingredients are classically Celtic, the music, the intricate steps, the costume, all manifestations of the desire to preserve.
The presence of the Galician dancers at Laurient raises a question central to Celtic identity and heritage.
Argument still arises as to whether the Galicians, despite ancient mentions by Greek and Roman writers, as to whether they were or are Celtic.
It doesn't matter.
The dancers are welcomed and acclaimed, because, above all, their contribution displays the traditional spirit of the Celts, and, in the Celtic heritage, feeling has as much significance as any historical or geographical fact.
Well, it means that, first of all, you feel that you are heirs to a very great past, and that you have very little present, and even that you are thinking seriously whether your country, your nation, will be alive in the next century.
So that makes a feeling for all the people, a common feeling for all the people who live in the Celtic countries, because they have to face the same questions, the same problems, the same dangers, and that will give them some reason to get together, in order to preserve their way of life and their culture and their existence.
(Frank) That way of life, that culture, that existence, has been storm bound for centuries.
Other civilisations have besieged and overwhelmed the Celts and their culture.
(Thunderclap) So, in a suitably windswept castle in Scotland, I met with four Celtic scholars to hear their opinions as to whether a body of Celtic culture still lives, or whether we're simply attending the funeral.
A legacy is is not an epitaph.
It's a thing given.
I mean, I'm not going to leave you anything in my will.
I mean, it's not that I dislike you.
I'm going to leave my kindred, my family, something.
And this is what the Celts have left us.
In the words that express their, if you like, their concept of nationality, which is nothing to do with race.
It's not to do with inheritance through blood, it's ideas of kinship, which you get in Gwynedd "Fenia" The Veneti, which the Romans had trouble with, from Brittany, which is "Vannes" And ideas of territory which are also ideas of being us, rather than them.
That is something specially and specifically Celtic, which carries on, and is the envy, I would say, of the English.
(Frank) Us and them, a sense of being different.
(Speaking Welsh) Emphasized by language.
Speakers of Welsh must feel a certain superiority over strangers, a feeling of keeping at least something of themselves to themselves.
Hello.
That's four star, is it? Four star, yeah.
- Nice today.
- Lovely.
- You on holiday? - Sort of busman's holiday.
Yeah? Very nice.
So you know your way around here? I came through a place I can neither spell nor pronounce.
It's P-W-L.
Pwll Pwll - Pwll heli - Pwllheli.
- Pwllheli.
- Pwllheli.
Pwllheli.
What's it mean? Well, they say there's something in the water there.
And they say the wat the tide came in one night, you know, and drowned half Pwllheli.
- But there's a lot of history about it.
- Mm-hm.
And they say there's some bells ringing under the sea here.
- Suppose - If it's true, I don't know.
- I suppose it depends how late at night.
- Yes, I suppose so.
- And which pub you're in at the time.
- Yes, you're right, there.
Now, that's the real Welsh border.
The speaking of the Welsh language, whatever the cultural or patriotic dimensions, essentially keeps out all non-Welsh speakers, and thereby an exclusivity is created.
(Woman narrating in Welsh) (Frank) It begins early in Wales, almost in the cradle.
One of the most popular children's programmes on the Welsh channel S4C is a Welsh-speaking duck called Wil Cwac Cwac.
(Speaking Welsh) cwac! My fanwy, sorry (Speaks Welsh) (Frank) He can only be enjoyed fully and understood by those children who speak Welsh.
Wil Cwac Cwac is an unlikely but effective representative of a reconstituted Welsh inheritance.
Also, I don't know if they taste anything here? - That was just a quacking.
- Just a quack here? You have an inheritance.
What counts is what you make of that inheritance.
I think that, whatever the origins of Welshness, clearly, the Celtic language was central, they speak about Celtic literature, Celtic mythology, Celtic art.
We don't really know how far those were Celtic, or whether they were just transmitted through the Celtic tongue.
I mean, no inhabitant of Ireland and Britain was ever called Celts by anybody in Europe, and nobody in Ireland and Britain call themselves Celts, they call themselves by their proper name.
The proper name in Britain was Britons.
I do believe, you see, I do think this, that this quest for ultimate origin is probably deceptive.
(Frank) But the deception doesn't seem to matter.
The more romantic these Celtic origins seem to be, the more they are believed.
This, you realise, is the cottage birthplace of President Reagan, and President Kennedy, and President Nixon, and President Woodrow Wilson.
And John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in that cute film The Quiet Man.
If it's Tuesday, folks, this must be Connemara.
Did you know that every stitch on an Aran sweater tells a little local story? Did you know that Irish soda bread is good for the complexion? Did you know that if you catch a leprechaun, you must never take your eyes off it, because he will lead you to the end of the rainbow, and there you will find a pot of gold.
And for many it is, literally, a pot of gold.
Celtic tradition has been manipulated and distorted into a souvenir culture.
Ancient legends and heroic deeds, romantic tales, all of these get turned into tourist attractions.
Take Tintagel in Cornwall, for instance, associated with Merlin and Arthur.
Tintagel has all the ingredients.
An ancient castle, a rugged shore, a perfect stop for the tourist bandwagon.
Roots can mean money.
On the Isle of Skye, the Clan Donald Centre was set up by wealthy members of the McDonald clan as an exhibition centre to cut through the clichés.
For them, the word Scots has a more dignified significance than the usual images of caber tossing and haggis and bagpipes.
We think that that part of the culture has been a bit overplayed, and tends to be a problem with the Celtic culture, in that some of the things are really taken way out of focus.
We're trying to build something here that is factual, and tell the story that's one that we're very proud of.
We were not the the hairy monsters who come running out of the heather with no shoes and bearded faces.
We had a very sophisticated culture, a series of government.
We had courts, we had lawyers, and this part of the culture was literally stamped out after the '45.
And what we're trying to say is, "Well, we're not dead.
We're going to tell the truth.
" And what we're showing in our exhibition is, in fact, the history of the Gael, and the proud part of Gaeldom.
(Frank) But there are, however, powerful prejudices at work.
To some people, the very word Celt suggests a comic cuts race, red-faced and red-headed, wild and devious.
The Celts are argumentative, aren't they? And feckless? And yes, they have a certain rough charm, but aren't they always fighting among themselves, especially when they've been drinking? (Laughing) May the road rise with you and may the wind at your back (Hiccoughs) never be your own.
This, now, is the moment you have been waiting for, isn't it? Proof proof of identity.
(Chuckles) The Celtic stereotype, ah, yes.
The Irish and the Scots, even the Welsh, boozers and bosom friends of John Barleycorn.
No point even in trying to correct the impression, so long ingrained, has been the cliché.
Pointless, for example, to point out that the Irish, despite their reputation, are further down on the league table of drinkers in the European Community than most people would even begin to imagine.
Oh, to be sure, there's boozing and brawling, singing and "Have youse no homes to go to? Drink up, lads!" But it was the Romans turned it into a racial prejudice.
It's not a vice.
It was no more than wild, imaginative, colourful conviviality.
Much more a case of, "Do you drink much?" "No.
Spill most of it.
" Sláinte.
I think that the myth of the Celtic legacy is something that's really been created, largely in the 20th century to support us in our 20th-century world.
Youth It's great ground mass of roots, comfortable roots that we can retreat to when we've got a need.
Think of the drunkard from Alice Springs, for example, the third generation Irishman who can suddenly explain his alcoholism when he learns of the Celts' love of alcohol, he can relax.
Or the man from Detroit, alienated by modern cities, coming across here to the Highlands to buy himself a tartan so he can feel part of the landscape.
This is the sort of the sort of myth that is created around the Celts, so, on the one hand, I'm sceptical.
On the other, I do think that that is a legacy, but it's not a small world legacy, it's not our little community legacy, it's quite the opposite.
The Celts were a European people, they spread across Europe and they created a gene pool which is with us, from which we have grown, and whenever we travel across Europe, whether we go to Ireland and hear Gaelic, whether we go to Scotland and buy our tartans, whether we listen to the bagpipes of Galicia or Brittany, or indeed, eat charcuterie in France, we're enjoying some aspect of our Celtic tradition coming through.
It is a European tradition, and I think that is where the Celts are important in our world today.
They were a European people, and they're a reminder to us that we are a European people as well.
(Marching) (Frank) Some of these Celtic reminders have been powerful and distinguished, especially on the field of battle.
Here the romance of the Celts became a measurable reality.
The legendary prowess and tenacity of the Celtic fighting man has been renowned for centuries.
The attack on the French-held fort Ticonderoga in Canada in 1758 by the Black Watch is a superb example of Celtic bravery.
The British force attacked without adequate artillery preparation and went straight for the thickest part of the hedge.
The Black Watch lost officers and men on almost a First World War level, it lost prodigiously heavily and kept on coming to try to get to hand strokes with the French.
And it was ground down by superior French firepower, and there are other examples and there's the great example of Fontenoy, where in fact it was the Wild Geese, Irish regiments in the French service that were responsible for defeating the British on that particular occasion.
Later on, for example, in the First World War, the poet Robert Graves, rather unkindly, I think, said of the Scots that the Scots charge like hell both ways, but he was pointing to a characteristic, which was that Celtic regiments are very good in the offensive but perhaps haven't got staying power.
Field Marshal Montgomery believed that certain types of regiment were good at certain sorts of job, that some regiments had got more dash than others, and some were good at what he called the solid killing match in close country.
And I think it's true to say that Celtic regiments are certainly perceived as having lots of offensive élan, lots of dash, and perhaps not being as good at this solid, static pounding match.
- OK, let's go for it! - (Yelling) (Frank) The Celtic warriors, we're told, were an elite core, chosen only after tests of great rigour.
In the Irish mythological cycles, many tales occur of the Fianna, the legendary band of warriors led by the mighty Fionn mac Cumhaill.
In order to become a member of the Fianna, a young man had to undergo several extraordinarily rigorous trials.
He had to jump a spar the height of his forehead.
He had to run helter-skelter through a wood without disturbing a leaf or a branch.
While running at top speed, he should pluck a thorn from his foot, even though being pursued by other warriors, and yet never interrupt his stride.
He had to stand in a pit the height of his forehead and, armed with only a light shield, defend himself against the spears of the Fianna standing above and around him.
And if he passed all these trials, if he surmounted all these tests, he became a rare and admired figure, a champion.
The point about the cult of the champion wasn't just the physical heroism, it was the attitude.
Of course these test, these trials constituted a pathway towards acceptance into an elite corps, but it was how you completed the course that was important.
With humour, with style, with panache.
And the reason why the trials of the Fianna are so prominent in the Celtic mythology is that they were also a lesson for life.
The road is hard, they said, it is demanding, it is often dangerous, but your approach to it determines your success, ultimately your salvation.
- (Thumping) - Stand forward.
Box! The Celts admired fine physique and physical courage.
They applauded endurance and the capacity to suffer without complaint.
The terms of championship were similar to those in many of the western mythologies.
The champion was the man who took on all comers.
In the Celtic tradition, the champion is a dominant figure in countless stories.
It's another legacy, the heroic fighting Celt.
- Box! - Round one, and out of the red corner comes the champion of Ulster, Cú Chulainn, very much the grizzled veteran now, but goodness, what an impressive list of bouts he has behind him.
He took 12 heads in his last fight, four in the fight before that.
Out of the blue corner, Ferdiad, very much the unknown contender, and what a daunting task he faces tonight.
Still, he has behind him the masked ranks of his supporters, on his home ground.
Three-minute rounds, the bout will last a year and a day.
I've only twisted the facts a little.
The principle remains the same.
Celtic warriors fought naked, open, single, hand-to-hand combat.
I believe it was Jack Dempsey who said, "the only good fighter is a hungry fighter".
Hungry, he meant, for prestige, for fame, for glory for the honour of his tribe.
Their champion.
The Celtic Warrior was the representative of his tribe, their white hope.
In defeat, he became the receptacle of their shame.
But if he won, they treated him like a god.
Today the gods are more down to earth.
In Ireland, somebody who represents his county at the ancient game of hurling, he has instant stature.
Look at the tradition he comes from.
When the mighty hero Cú Chulainn was a boy, he carried a silver hurling stick and a golden ball.
In order to make his journey from Tara to Navan Fort less tedious, he would strike the ball with the hurley, then throw the hurley after the ball, connecting with it in mid-air.
And then Cú Chulainn would run so fast that he caught both before they touched the ground.
In France there's a huge modern cult of a Celtic champion.
Asterix the Gaul, a cartoon character who keeps outwitting and infuriating the Romans.
Asterix the little villager and his big friend Obelix are right in the tradition of the warriors who take on the Roman legions single-handed.
Even the great Vercingetorix puts in an appearance.
Other historical accuracies recall the intimidation brought about by the sheer noise of the roaring, battle-hungry Celt.
There's a very interesting suggestion that one of the characteristics of the Celtic warrior, which was this terrible shrieking that he produced - Caesar, I think, called it a horrible and diverse yelling - that this shrieking emigrated from Europe and in fact went to the southern states of America.
And that in the rebel yell, that spine-tingling yell that characterises the Confederate soldier, we have in fact a late survival of the Celtic yell.
Moreover, I know there are some American historians who believe that the tactics of the Confederate Army were very heavily influenced by the Celtic charge.
That the Confederates tended to go straight forward, they were particularly good in offensive battles, that their officers needed to lead from the front.
Discipline was less formally structured than it was in the Union Army.
Some Americans I know believe that this is a Celtic legacy reappearing in the 1860s in America.
Oh, my lassie waits for me Over the sea Here is where I seem to be Over the sea Winds will howl and seas will roar Calling to me Fate has blown he frae her shore.
A different kind of Celtic noise in America, the Scottish singer Jesse Rae.
Over the sea Love and laughter there'll be Over the sea.
Jesse Rae aims his songs at the American rock music market.
In the videos accompanying his records, he has taken images which Americans associate with the Celtic past and given them the celluloid treatment.
Then wipe the tears from your blues and from me I'll be back, just like the claymore flying free For my bonnie lass who got your love for me.
Long before Jesse Rae wielded his claymore, popular culture found in the Celts a rich source of entertainment.
In many ways, they were born to be film stars.
The stories, the characters, the colour, the romance.
This is the Brigadoon syndrome, a mixture of Walt Disney, Rob Roy, Lassie, Bonnie Prince Charlie and Whisky Galore! The Celts go to Hollywood.
But in fact, there were more suitable reasons as to why the Celts should receive the star treatment.
Whoo! So smile and bang a drum, Bridget Over the sea.
The morality in the Celtic legends is quite shocking, especially those that deal with sexual love.
There's infidelity, hypocrisy, duplicitousness, and all dressed up in a glossy widescreen way.
And the courtly love, the chivalry between knight and comely maiden, the sort that echoed along rocky coasts in the mediaeval romances, much of that can be traced directly back to Celtic legend.
Take, for instance, the old story of Midir and Éta ín, in which the queen is seduced away from her king by a shining knight.
That's much the same as the story of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot.
Projected forward, the morality of such triangles, their description and their resolution, that's what Hollywood always used to call "box office".
Distant castles, enchanted and dramatic, alchemies and magic potions and sorcerers to stir them, the storybook connotations of the word Celtic might have been specifically created for the cinema.
The French writer who wrote about these subjects, I think it's probably about 30 years ago, Denis de Rougemont, he argued that, of course, the whole concept, the whole concept of romantic love which you get in modern novels, the whole of modern literature and in Hollywood, that these all derive from the Arthurian cycle.
And, through the Arthurian cycle, from Celtic literature.
Insular Celtic literature.
Now, one could quibble, one could argue with this judgement, but there is a certain amount of validity, I think, in it.
Because, if you take, for example, one particular point One of the motifs that crop up throughout insular Celtic literature is the conflict, conflict between love and duty.
Say, the duty of loyalty of the hero to his prince, his ruler, his lord, and, of course, his love for a woman who he comes across.
Now, this is a motif that crops up constantly, and it's one that always ends with the hero being obliged to violate one or other of these conventions, these restraints.
And this crops up in the Tristan saga, it crops up in many of the Arthurian tales as well.
And there, it's given a veneer of sophistication, of course, and is rationalised in rather a different way, but this is one of the, I'd say, one of the basic plots, one of the basic motifs of the whole of romantic literature, from the Middle Ages down until the present day.
And one could argue that this is a Celtic motif, a Celtic structure.
(Frank) There is another Celtic structure which is simpler.
It's basic, and it's a true and continuous legacy.
The Celts of western Europe still have the tradition of expressing their own way of life, feeding off the land and the sea, in their songs and in their stories.
(Singing in Breton) This is a Breton song called "Three Sailors From Brest".
The group singing it are entertainers, a professional folk group, the sort of strolling players who might as easily have been singing a similar song, traditional and colloquial, at the court of a Celtic chieftain centuries before the birth of Christ.
Along another Atlantic shoreline, an event on Tory Island off the coast of Donegal bridges another gap in time.
They had a bull on Tory who had become too strong and excitable to be housed safely in their small community.
They trussed the bull up in nets and they loaded him on a fishing boat and took him to the mainland.
And thus, they provided, unconsciously, a powerful image of what has happened to the Celts.
The bull was one of the most significant symbols of the ancient European Celts.
Useful agriculturally, potent mythologically, now, here, he's blindfolded and tied, commanded and humiliated by the will of others, a helpless hostage to fortune, powerless, pathetic, even.
But he remains a part of the legacy.
His presence, and the presence of all animals in Celtic art, in Celtic metalworking, in Celtic expression, evokes the vital connection between the Celts and the natural world.
The mystical relationship between the Celts and their environment was always a dominant feature of their culture.
There is something there that gives a distinctive character to the western peoples, but I do wonder how much of this is necessarily Celtic.
That's the problem, it's not so easy, for example, to link it up to the material heritage left to us in central Europe, which is the central place of the Celts.
The other day, I was near a place called Fenit on the Dingle Peninsula, the most westerly promontory of Europe, listening to a traditional storyteller reciting a story in Irish about a barren woman who went swimming in a cove and came back and became pregnant, as a man a merman swam beside her.
I've this feeling that these stories were probably being told before there was ant Celtic language spoken in Ireland.
I think we are dealing, in part at any rate, with the heritage of people who were there before the Celts, of Atlantic barbarians whose heritages is distributed along the western coasts of Europe.
One of the things that does seem to run into the continental Celts from this western area, mentioned by Caesar and by other writers, is a passion for freedom.
Individual freedom and freedom from a certain kind of order, a certain kind of order is rejected.
It's a kind of order that the Romans imposed, order laid out in squares, and that for some reason the other barbarians, the Germans, took to like fish to water.
The western peoples did not.
And so part of the heritage of the Celts as I would see it is a certain kind of terrorism, a certain way of driving cars badly, and the custom of filling gaps in ditches with old bed frames.
(Frank) In this intimate domestic world, another legacy lingers on.
In the houses of the countryside, they still delight in colourful talk.
I like vernacular, I like a lovely phrase.
There's something in the poem which says you'll find "A phrase as in wild earth a Grecian vase".
So I hit upon the idea of saying, "What way are you?" to different country people, at the variety of answers I got was really something lovely.
It was poetic to me.
I said to an old man, "What way are you, Tom?" And he said, "Perpendicular, no more.
" Then another man, I said, "What way are you, Jack?" "Keeping the best side out, like a broken bowl in the dresser, that's the bowl.
" "What way are you?" "Good without being great.
" "What way are you?" "Fit to fall.
" "What way are you?" "I'll be shortly making a load for four.
" "What way are you, Jim?" "Shovin' close up to the timber.
" The I get a surrealistic one, you know? "What way are you?" "Pass on, friend, I'm slightly oiled.
" "What way are you?" "Well, never mind what way am I, "but my mind keeps turning on the doings of my mad uncle, "who spent his days figuring out "how long it would take him to set an acre of oats "if he dibbled in each individual oat "with the point of a cobbler's needle.
" Now, where that led me, I don't know.
But the best one I got was beautiful.
After a whole string of these, maybe a hundred of them.
I said to a man, well, I said to an old man and his wife, I said to him, "What way are you, Mick?" And before the man could answer, the wife said, "There's a deal of fear in that fella.
" And I said to her, "And what way are you, Josie?" And she said, "What way would you think I am?" But the one that staggered me was this.
I said to an old fella, "What way are you?" And he said, "I'm stumbling along between the immensities.
" And I said, "What immensities?" He said, "The immensities of birth and death.
" (Frank) It was through their celebration of the immensity of death that we first witnessed the Celtic legacy.
The ritual of the Celtic funeral bequeathed us there glorious graves at Hallstatt, at Hochdorf.
The Celts believed that death was a journey to the legacy of the next world.
And they furnished death wonderfully.
The elaborate ceremony of the aristocratic Celtic funeral, ornate, but social, involved the entire community as well as the family.
And this idea of giving the dead person a good send-off created an attitude towards death which we now, perhaps, regard as bizarre.
At one point I was reading histories of how villages would go into rivalry with each other.
And one of the rivalries which existed was that if somebody died in a village, the young of the other village would try and steal the corpse and hide it.
So therefore, the people in the first village couldn't have the wake.
Because you couldn't have the wake, so you couldn't have a good feed, or good music, you couldn't have dancing or drinking, if the corpse wasn't there.
And the idea was to keep the corpse as long as possible.
And you'd have all these people running around the countryside, looking for the corpse so they could have the wake.
The story I was reading about was where they'd they'd actually hidden the corpse as a scarecrow.
They'd dressed him up as a scarecrow, stuck him on a stick and put him on the top of a hill.
And they didn't find him I mean, whether he was ever found, I don't really know! But it was one of those things that never existed, in that sense that they couldn't have the wake, the wake was never done, the man was never buried because he was never found.
(Owl hooting) Nothing, that's what's different about this grave.
There's nothing in it.
Some bones, some timber, nothing else.
The burial cult called Christianity says you can't take it with you.
Culture shock for the Celts.
Remember the grave of the chieftain at Hochdorf? The man was measured by the lavishness of his burial, and yet the civilisation called Christianity says that in death, all are equal.
But we know the Celts today by what they buried.
Their style, their splendour, their civilization.
And if we are to be buried in graves like this, how will we yet be known? The material legacy of the Celts continues to be pieced together in the restoration laboratories of Europe's museums.
Fragment by fragment, we glimpse the Celtic civilisation at its highest, and therefore we have a tangible legacy.
But even though the piecing together of these fragments improves our picture of their ancient lives, do these museum pieces necessarily have any meaning for the people who today call themselves Celts? This is, after all, Celtic archaeology, 2,000 years and more old.
Isn't the gap in time and in culture between their ancient, tribal lives and the Celts of today, isn't it too wide to be bridged? I'm not at all sure that the Celtic world actually survives today.
The thing that troubles me more than anything else is the way in which the so-called Celtic fringe demands a survival through language, through literature, through whatever you might say.
These are all fascinating and absolutely worthy of study, but the Celtic world for me is the prehistoric world, the idea of a pan-European exercise, something which spans, for argument's sake, the far East to the far West.
This is really what the Celtic world was about, the idea of freedom of movement, the idea, which I think is embodied in their art style When we look at the prehistoric Celtic art forms, it depends to a very much to a very large extent upon that open-ended curve.
Now, dare we suggest that the open-ended curve really indicates free will? Can we use art as an indication of a philosophy? So that this open-ended curve, this beautiful swell, does this argue that the Celtic world is all about freedom, all about a determination to be real people as opposed to what we find with the Romans, anyway, a bureaucracy? We find rectangular versions, their pictures are all blocked in.
Everything is organised and layered.
The Celtic world is full, for me anyway, of freedom.
And in a sense, if only the Celtic heritage were here today, I rather fancy the world would be a better place.
(Frank) Let us enjoy, then, the small material legacy of the Celts a bequest made by a people who found joy in the fact that nature had no straight lines.
These beautiful pieces are the concrete, the solid proof of such a legacy.
If their legacy has an abstract dimension, then that may be found in a certain mentality, a spirit, a certain inherited attitude to the natural world.
I have seen men christen their fields with female names.
And I have seen them enclosed within the whitethorn confines of that field as if they were confined in a study, although this field might be of several acres.
I have seen them in the springtime, the late springtime go on their knees preparatory to discovering whether or not a meadow was ready for cutting.
I have seen them on their knees feeling the fleecy bottom grass of the meadow the very same way another man might part the hair on his the head of his love.
I have seen them rub their fingers up and down through the grass as if they were massaging the nape of the neck of a beautiful woman.
This affection is not an evil thing and it's not an animal thing.
It's a beautiful thing because it means that man, the man in question, understands his land, and he loves his land.
(Frank) The land sustained their culture, their heroes strode the mountains, their gods were countryside gods, who dwelt in wood and in water.
In their land, they found their art, their legends, their beliefs.
Now long dispossessed, there was only one direction in which the Celts could go, to another world, the world of the imagination, where their most enduring legacy will be found.
(Enya: Aldebaran) (Singing in Irish) But finally, what is unique about the Celts is not their love of horses or their love of nature, their passion for poetry or for wild music, it's the way in which they think.
Opposing facts can be equally right, a conclusion can be arrived at from any number of different directions.
Now, to the Anglo-Saxon or the classical mind, this may seem ambivalent, but it isn't.
All it means, that in there there's a sense of freedom, a sense of adventure which says the world isn't all black and white.
This mentality may be frustrating or fey or amusing or duplicitous, depending upon whom it strikes, but all it means, that in the Celtic mind, the world is full of possibility.
(Enya: Portrait)
You may be pursuing an illusion.
The ideas associated with the word Celt are elusive.
The very word Celtic is risky.
There's a danger in the notion, a danger of reconstructing something for the sake of being colourful and romantic.
The terms Celt and Celtic have to be questioned, for all too often, they are no more than manifestations of wishful thinking, recollections of former glory, a trip in a time warp.
It was 20 years ago today, generation past, a time of peace, love and flower power, that one of the very few real cults television has ever spawned came to life in this Welsh village.
Welsh village? Yes.
Portmeirion.
The series, The Prisoner.
"I am not a number, I am a free man," said Number Six, the prisoner, one Patrick McGoohan, good Celtic name.
Good Celtic principle too, unto each man himself.
The Prisoner was all about individual freedom, the struggle for individual liberty.
And a good Celtic paradox.
This Italianate collection of architectural quotations was established in Wales as a gesture of defiance against the advancing anonymities of international culture.
The idea of The Prisoner and the idea of Portmeirion harmonised memorably.
(Theme from The Prisoner) But Portmeirion and its Prisoner symbolise much of what I want to say about the Celts and their culture, what's left of it.
Here, along the shores of the Irish Sea, an exotic collection of cultural reminiscences, genuine, but fake because they're deliberate reconstructions.
And in the imaginations of all those who remember the television series in Portmeirion, there still lurks the spirit of the Prisoner trying to get free again.
Ditto for the Celts and their Celtic fringe, if not finally gone now, then how long more? You are now a number.
Be seeing you.
People don't want to be just a number in an organisation, to be just living in a sort of rabbit hutch.
In one of those big buildings.
And while they are getting more concentrated in one way, on the other hand, they are looking for rules, which means that they are they want to be different, you see.
They are getting together and keeping different, and I think in that way, the values we are fighting for are values of the future, and I will say that for the first time in history since a long time, the Celts are going the right way, forward.
(Frank) The right way forward.
A brave claim, but isn't this an example of wishful thinking, a harking back to the fabulous past when Celtic warriors rampaged across the plains of Europe? Isn't the European who calls himself a Celt simply trying to harness an ancient renown to enhance his identity? Throughout the ages, the horse has appeared in many cultures, not just the Celtic, but Ireland, in particular, is identified with the horse and horsemanship.
It has become part of the national image, a kind of Celtic emblem, comfortable, reassuring, stylish, a powerful connection with the mystical Celtic past.
There's a phrase used by archaeologists and cultural historians which has a special reference to the Celts.
The façade atlantique describes the once uncharted vastness of the Atlantic Ocean at whose edge all movement, all cultural change had to stop or turn backwards.
The façade atlantique summarises the Celts of the west.
Alone these foreshores, the remnant, the legacy clings, but out there, too, a mirage place, a mythical land, Atlantis, the Isle of the Blessed.
Now, given the pressures upon all cultures by our now communications intensive world, you could take the pessimistic view, that in a few generations' time, the Celts as we know them will disappear, forced out into the façade atlantique, to become as distant from us and as imaginary as that mythical isle, the lost tribes of the Celts.
The sad fact is that the culture of the Celts is now beached.
They're a marooned people, a curiosity whose original identity remains visible, but whose culture is no longer any practical use.
Pockets of language, music and lifestyle still survive on the western seaboard of the north Atlantic.
But they amount to little more than relics.
Those who would refloat Celtic culture meet at festivals regularly, like the large annual gathering at Laurient in Brittany.
At Laurient, Celts are where you find them, Breton, Welsh, Irish, Scots, and those who are uncertain.
The required credentials are, to some degree, sartorial, but essentially, they're musical.
This is the famous hat dance from Galicia in northern Spain.
The ingredients are classically Celtic, the music, the intricate steps, the costume, all manifestations of the desire to preserve.
The presence of the Galician dancers at Laurient raises a question central to Celtic identity and heritage.
Argument still arises as to whether the Galicians, despite ancient mentions by Greek and Roman writers, as to whether they were or are Celtic.
It doesn't matter.
The dancers are welcomed and acclaimed, because, above all, their contribution displays the traditional spirit of the Celts, and, in the Celtic heritage, feeling has as much significance as any historical or geographical fact.
Well, it means that, first of all, you feel that you are heirs to a very great past, and that you have very little present, and even that you are thinking seriously whether your country, your nation, will be alive in the next century.
So that makes a feeling for all the people, a common feeling for all the people who live in the Celtic countries, because they have to face the same questions, the same problems, the same dangers, and that will give them some reason to get together, in order to preserve their way of life and their culture and their existence.
(Frank) That way of life, that culture, that existence, has been storm bound for centuries.
Other civilisations have besieged and overwhelmed the Celts and their culture.
(Thunderclap) So, in a suitably windswept castle in Scotland, I met with four Celtic scholars to hear their opinions as to whether a body of Celtic culture still lives, or whether we're simply attending the funeral.
A legacy is is not an epitaph.
It's a thing given.
I mean, I'm not going to leave you anything in my will.
I mean, it's not that I dislike you.
I'm going to leave my kindred, my family, something.
And this is what the Celts have left us.
In the words that express their, if you like, their concept of nationality, which is nothing to do with race.
It's not to do with inheritance through blood, it's ideas of kinship, which you get in Gwynedd "Fenia" The Veneti, which the Romans had trouble with, from Brittany, which is "Vannes" And ideas of territory which are also ideas of being us, rather than them.
That is something specially and specifically Celtic, which carries on, and is the envy, I would say, of the English.
(Frank) Us and them, a sense of being different.
(Speaking Welsh) Emphasized by language.
Speakers of Welsh must feel a certain superiority over strangers, a feeling of keeping at least something of themselves to themselves.
Hello.
That's four star, is it? Four star, yeah.
- Nice today.
- Lovely.
- You on holiday? - Sort of busman's holiday.
Yeah? Very nice.
So you know your way around here? I came through a place I can neither spell nor pronounce.
It's P-W-L.
Pwll Pwll - Pwll heli - Pwllheli.
- Pwllheli.
- Pwllheli.
Pwllheli.
What's it mean? Well, they say there's something in the water there.
And they say the wat the tide came in one night, you know, and drowned half Pwllheli.
- But there's a lot of history about it.
- Mm-hm.
And they say there's some bells ringing under the sea here.
- Suppose - If it's true, I don't know.
- I suppose it depends how late at night.
- Yes, I suppose so.
- And which pub you're in at the time.
- Yes, you're right, there.
Now, that's the real Welsh border.
The speaking of the Welsh language, whatever the cultural or patriotic dimensions, essentially keeps out all non-Welsh speakers, and thereby an exclusivity is created.
(Woman narrating in Welsh) (Frank) It begins early in Wales, almost in the cradle.
One of the most popular children's programmes on the Welsh channel S4C is a Welsh-speaking duck called Wil Cwac Cwac.
(Speaking Welsh) cwac! My fanwy, sorry (Speaks Welsh) (Frank) He can only be enjoyed fully and understood by those children who speak Welsh.
Wil Cwac Cwac is an unlikely but effective representative of a reconstituted Welsh inheritance.
Also, I don't know if they taste anything here? - That was just a quacking.
- Just a quack here? You have an inheritance.
What counts is what you make of that inheritance.
I think that, whatever the origins of Welshness, clearly, the Celtic language was central, they speak about Celtic literature, Celtic mythology, Celtic art.
We don't really know how far those were Celtic, or whether they were just transmitted through the Celtic tongue.
I mean, no inhabitant of Ireland and Britain was ever called Celts by anybody in Europe, and nobody in Ireland and Britain call themselves Celts, they call themselves by their proper name.
The proper name in Britain was Britons.
I do believe, you see, I do think this, that this quest for ultimate origin is probably deceptive.
(Frank) But the deception doesn't seem to matter.
The more romantic these Celtic origins seem to be, the more they are believed.
This, you realise, is the cottage birthplace of President Reagan, and President Kennedy, and President Nixon, and President Woodrow Wilson.
And John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in that cute film The Quiet Man.
If it's Tuesday, folks, this must be Connemara.
Did you know that every stitch on an Aran sweater tells a little local story? Did you know that Irish soda bread is good for the complexion? Did you know that if you catch a leprechaun, you must never take your eyes off it, because he will lead you to the end of the rainbow, and there you will find a pot of gold.
And for many it is, literally, a pot of gold.
Celtic tradition has been manipulated and distorted into a souvenir culture.
Ancient legends and heroic deeds, romantic tales, all of these get turned into tourist attractions.
Take Tintagel in Cornwall, for instance, associated with Merlin and Arthur.
Tintagel has all the ingredients.
An ancient castle, a rugged shore, a perfect stop for the tourist bandwagon.
Roots can mean money.
On the Isle of Skye, the Clan Donald Centre was set up by wealthy members of the McDonald clan as an exhibition centre to cut through the clichés.
For them, the word Scots has a more dignified significance than the usual images of caber tossing and haggis and bagpipes.
We think that that part of the culture has been a bit overplayed, and tends to be a problem with the Celtic culture, in that some of the things are really taken way out of focus.
We're trying to build something here that is factual, and tell the story that's one that we're very proud of.
We were not the the hairy monsters who come running out of the heather with no shoes and bearded faces.
We had a very sophisticated culture, a series of government.
We had courts, we had lawyers, and this part of the culture was literally stamped out after the '45.
And what we're trying to say is, "Well, we're not dead.
We're going to tell the truth.
" And what we're showing in our exhibition is, in fact, the history of the Gael, and the proud part of Gaeldom.
(Frank) But there are, however, powerful prejudices at work.
To some people, the very word Celt suggests a comic cuts race, red-faced and red-headed, wild and devious.
The Celts are argumentative, aren't they? And feckless? And yes, they have a certain rough charm, but aren't they always fighting among themselves, especially when they've been drinking? (Laughing) May the road rise with you and may the wind at your back (Hiccoughs) never be your own.
This, now, is the moment you have been waiting for, isn't it? Proof proof of identity.
(Chuckles) The Celtic stereotype, ah, yes.
The Irish and the Scots, even the Welsh, boozers and bosom friends of John Barleycorn.
No point even in trying to correct the impression, so long ingrained, has been the cliché.
Pointless, for example, to point out that the Irish, despite their reputation, are further down on the league table of drinkers in the European Community than most people would even begin to imagine.
Oh, to be sure, there's boozing and brawling, singing and "Have youse no homes to go to? Drink up, lads!" But it was the Romans turned it into a racial prejudice.
It's not a vice.
It was no more than wild, imaginative, colourful conviviality.
Much more a case of, "Do you drink much?" "No.
Spill most of it.
" Sláinte.
I think that the myth of the Celtic legacy is something that's really been created, largely in the 20th century to support us in our 20th-century world.
Youth It's great ground mass of roots, comfortable roots that we can retreat to when we've got a need.
Think of the drunkard from Alice Springs, for example, the third generation Irishman who can suddenly explain his alcoholism when he learns of the Celts' love of alcohol, he can relax.
Or the man from Detroit, alienated by modern cities, coming across here to the Highlands to buy himself a tartan so he can feel part of the landscape.
This is the sort of the sort of myth that is created around the Celts, so, on the one hand, I'm sceptical.
On the other, I do think that that is a legacy, but it's not a small world legacy, it's not our little community legacy, it's quite the opposite.
The Celts were a European people, they spread across Europe and they created a gene pool which is with us, from which we have grown, and whenever we travel across Europe, whether we go to Ireland and hear Gaelic, whether we go to Scotland and buy our tartans, whether we listen to the bagpipes of Galicia or Brittany, or indeed, eat charcuterie in France, we're enjoying some aspect of our Celtic tradition coming through.
It is a European tradition, and I think that is where the Celts are important in our world today.
They were a European people, and they're a reminder to us that we are a European people as well.
(Marching) (Frank) Some of these Celtic reminders have been powerful and distinguished, especially on the field of battle.
Here the romance of the Celts became a measurable reality.
The legendary prowess and tenacity of the Celtic fighting man has been renowned for centuries.
The attack on the French-held fort Ticonderoga in Canada in 1758 by the Black Watch is a superb example of Celtic bravery.
The British force attacked without adequate artillery preparation and went straight for the thickest part of the hedge.
The Black Watch lost officers and men on almost a First World War level, it lost prodigiously heavily and kept on coming to try to get to hand strokes with the French.
And it was ground down by superior French firepower, and there are other examples and there's the great example of Fontenoy, where in fact it was the Wild Geese, Irish regiments in the French service that were responsible for defeating the British on that particular occasion.
Later on, for example, in the First World War, the poet Robert Graves, rather unkindly, I think, said of the Scots that the Scots charge like hell both ways, but he was pointing to a characteristic, which was that Celtic regiments are very good in the offensive but perhaps haven't got staying power.
Field Marshal Montgomery believed that certain types of regiment were good at certain sorts of job, that some regiments had got more dash than others, and some were good at what he called the solid killing match in close country.
And I think it's true to say that Celtic regiments are certainly perceived as having lots of offensive élan, lots of dash, and perhaps not being as good at this solid, static pounding match.
- OK, let's go for it! - (Yelling) (Frank) The Celtic warriors, we're told, were an elite core, chosen only after tests of great rigour.
In the Irish mythological cycles, many tales occur of the Fianna, the legendary band of warriors led by the mighty Fionn mac Cumhaill.
In order to become a member of the Fianna, a young man had to undergo several extraordinarily rigorous trials.
He had to jump a spar the height of his forehead.
He had to run helter-skelter through a wood without disturbing a leaf or a branch.
While running at top speed, he should pluck a thorn from his foot, even though being pursued by other warriors, and yet never interrupt his stride.
He had to stand in a pit the height of his forehead and, armed with only a light shield, defend himself against the spears of the Fianna standing above and around him.
And if he passed all these trials, if he surmounted all these tests, he became a rare and admired figure, a champion.
The point about the cult of the champion wasn't just the physical heroism, it was the attitude.
Of course these test, these trials constituted a pathway towards acceptance into an elite corps, but it was how you completed the course that was important.
With humour, with style, with panache.
And the reason why the trials of the Fianna are so prominent in the Celtic mythology is that they were also a lesson for life.
The road is hard, they said, it is demanding, it is often dangerous, but your approach to it determines your success, ultimately your salvation.
- (Thumping) - Stand forward.
Box! The Celts admired fine physique and physical courage.
They applauded endurance and the capacity to suffer without complaint.
The terms of championship were similar to those in many of the western mythologies.
The champion was the man who took on all comers.
In the Celtic tradition, the champion is a dominant figure in countless stories.
It's another legacy, the heroic fighting Celt.
- Box! - Round one, and out of the red corner comes the champion of Ulster, Cú Chulainn, very much the grizzled veteran now, but goodness, what an impressive list of bouts he has behind him.
He took 12 heads in his last fight, four in the fight before that.
Out of the blue corner, Ferdiad, very much the unknown contender, and what a daunting task he faces tonight.
Still, he has behind him the masked ranks of his supporters, on his home ground.
Three-minute rounds, the bout will last a year and a day.
I've only twisted the facts a little.
The principle remains the same.
Celtic warriors fought naked, open, single, hand-to-hand combat.
I believe it was Jack Dempsey who said, "the only good fighter is a hungry fighter".
Hungry, he meant, for prestige, for fame, for glory for the honour of his tribe.
Their champion.
The Celtic Warrior was the representative of his tribe, their white hope.
In defeat, he became the receptacle of their shame.
But if he won, they treated him like a god.
Today the gods are more down to earth.
In Ireland, somebody who represents his county at the ancient game of hurling, he has instant stature.
Look at the tradition he comes from.
When the mighty hero Cú Chulainn was a boy, he carried a silver hurling stick and a golden ball.
In order to make his journey from Tara to Navan Fort less tedious, he would strike the ball with the hurley, then throw the hurley after the ball, connecting with it in mid-air.
And then Cú Chulainn would run so fast that he caught both before they touched the ground.
In France there's a huge modern cult of a Celtic champion.
Asterix the Gaul, a cartoon character who keeps outwitting and infuriating the Romans.
Asterix the little villager and his big friend Obelix are right in the tradition of the warriors who take on the Roman legions single-handed.
Even the great Vercingetorix puts in an appearance.
Other historical accuracies recall the intimidation brought about by the sheer noise of the roaring, battle-hungry Celt.
There's a very interesting suggestion that one of the characteristics of the Celtic warrior, which was this terrible shrieking that he produced - Caesar, I think, called it a horrible and diverse yelling - that this shrieking emigrated from Europe and in fact went to the southern states of America.
And that in the rebel yell, that spine-tingling yell that characterises the Confederate soldier, we have in fact a late survival of the Celtic yell.
Moreover, I know there are some American historians who believe that the tactics of the Confederate Army were very heavily influenced by the Celtic charge.
That the Confederates tended to go straight forward, they were particularly good in offensive battles, that their officers needed to lead from the front.
Discipline was less formally structured than it was in the Union Army.
Some Americans I know believe that this is a Celtic legacy reappearing in the 1860s in America.
Oh, my lassie waits for me Over the sea Here is where I seem to be Over the sea Winds will howl and seas will roar Calling to me Fate has blown he frae her shore.
A different kind of Celtic noise in America, the Scottish singer Jesse Rae.
Over the sea Love and laughter there'll be Over the sea.
Jesse Rae aims his songs at the American rock music market.
In the videos accompanying his records, he has taken images which Americans associate with the Celtic past and given them the celluloid treatment.
Then wipe the tears from your blues and from me I'll be back, just like the claymore flying free For my bonnie lass who got your love for me.
Long before Jesse Rae wielded his claymore, popular culture found in the Celts a rich source of entertainment.
In many ways, they were born to be film stars.
The stories, the characters, the colour, the romance.
This is the Brigadoon syndrome, a mixture of Walt Disney, Rob Roy, Lassie, Bonnie Prince Charlie and Whisky Galore! The Celts go to Hollywood.
But in fact, there were more suitable reasons as to why the Celts should receive the star treatment.
Whoo! So smile and bang a drum, Bridget Over the sea.
The morality in the Celtic legends is quite shocking, especially those that deal with sexual love.
There's infidelity, hypocrisy, duplicitousness, and all dressed up in a glossy widescreen way.
And the courtly love, the chivalry between knight and comely maiden, the sort that echoed along rocky coasts in the mediaeval romances, much of that can be traced directly back to Celtic legend.
Take, for instance, the old story of Midir and Éta ín, in which the queen is seduced away from her king by a shining knight.
That's much the same as the story of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot.
Projected forward, the morality of such triangles, their description and their resolution, that's what Hollywood always used to call "box office".
Distant castles, enchanted and dramatic, alchemies and magic potions and sorcerers to stir them, the storybook connotations of the word Celtic might have been specifically created for the cinema.
The French writer who wrote about these subjects, I think it's probably about 30 years ago, Denis de Rougemont, he argued that, of course, the whole concept, the whole concept of romantic love which you get in modern novels, the whole of modern literature and in Hollywood, that these all derive from the Arthurian cycle.
And, through the Arthurian cycle, from Celtic literature.
Insular Celtic literature.
Now, one could quibble, one could argue with this judgement, but there is a certain amount of validity, I think, in it.
Because, if you take, for example, one particular point One of the motifs that crop up throughout insular Celtic literature is the conflict, conflict between love and duty.
Say, the duty of loyalty of the hero to his prince, his ruler, his lord, and, of course, his love for a woman who he comes across.
Now, this is a motif that crops up constantly, and it's one that always ends with the hero being obliged to violate one or other of these conventions, these restraints.
And this crops up in the Tristan saga, it crops up in many of the Arthurian tales as well.
And there, it's given a veneer of sophistication, of course, and is rationalised in rather a different way, but this is one of the, I'd say, one of the basic plots, one of the basic motifs of the whole of romantic literature, from the Middle Ages down until the present day.
And one could argue that this is a Celtic motif, a Celtic structure.
(Frank) There is another Celtic structure which is simpler.
It's basic, and it's a true and continuous legacy.
The Celts of western Europe still have the tradition of expressing their own way of life, feeding off the land and the sea, in their songs and in their stories.
(Singing in Breton) This is a Breton song called "Three Sailors From Brest".
The group singing it are entertainers, a professional folk group, the sort of strolling players who might as easily have been singing a similar song, traditional and colloquial, at the court of a Celtic chieftain centuries before the birth of Christ.
Along another Atlantic shoreline, an event on Tory Island off the coast of Donegal bridges another gap in time.
They had a bull on Tory who had become too strong and excitable to be housed safely in their small community.
They trussed the bull up in nets and they loaded him on a fishing boat and took him to the mainland.
And thus, they provided, unconsciously, a powerful image of what has happened to the Celts.
The bull was one of the most significant symbols of the ancient European Celts.
Useful agriculturally, potent mythologically, now, here, he's blindfolded and tied, commanded and humiliated by the will of others, a helpless hostage to fortune, powerless, pathetic, even.
But he remains a part of the legacy.
His presence, and the presence of all animals in Celtic art, in Celtic metalworking, in Celtic expression, evokes the vital connection between the Celts and the natural world.
The mystical relationship between the Celts and their environment was always a dominant feature of their culture.
There is something there that gives a distinctive character to the western peoples, but I do wonder how much of this is necessarily Celtic.
That's the problem, it's not so easy, for example, to link it up to the material heritage left to us in central Europe, which is the central place of the Celts.
The other day, I was near a place called Fenit on the Dingle Peninsula, the most westerly promontory of Europe, listening to a traditional storyteller reciting a story in Irish about a barren woman who went swimming in a cove and came back and became pregnant, as a man a merman swam beside her.
I've this feeling that these stories were probably being told before there was ant Celtic language spoken in Ireland.
I think we are dealing, in part at any rate, with the heritage of people who were there before the Celts, of Atlantic barbarians whose heritages is distributed along the western coasts of Europe.
One of the things that does seem to run into the continental Celts from this western area, mentioned by Caesar and by other writers, is a passion for freedom.
Individual freedom and freedom from a certain kind of order, a certain kind of order is rejected.
It's a kind of order that the Romans imposed, order laid out in squares, and that for some reason the other barbarians, the Germans, took to like fish to water.
The western peoples did not.
And so part of the heritage of the Celts as I would see it is a certain kind of terrorism, a certain way of driving cars badly, and the custom of filling gaps in ditches with old bed frames.
(Frank) In this intimate domestic world, another legacy lingers on.
In the houses of the countryside, they still delight in colourful talk.
I like vernacular, I like a lovely phrase.
There's something in the poem which says you'll find "A phrase as in wild earth a Grecian vase".
So I hit upon the idea of saying, "What way are you?" to different country people, at the variety of answers I got was really something lovely.
It was poetic to me.
I said to an old man, "What way are you, Tom?" And he said, "Perpendicular, no more.
" Then another man, I said, "What way are you, Jack?" "Keeping the best side out, like a broken bowl in the dresser, that's the bowl.
" "What way are you?" "Good without being great.
" "What way are you?" "Fit to fall.
" "What way are you?" "I'll be shortly making a load for four.
" "What way are you, Jim?" "Shovin' close up to the timber.
" The I get a surrealistic one, you know? "What way are you?" "Pass on, friend, I'm slightly oiled.
" "What way are you?" "Well, never mind what way am I, "but my mind keeps turning on the doings of my mad uncle, "who spent his days figuring out "how long it would take him to set an acre of oats "if he dibbled in each individual oat "with the point of a cobbler's needle.
" Now, where that led me, I don't know.
But the best one I got was beautiful.
After a whole string of these, maybe a hundred of them.
I said to a man, well, I said to an old man and his wife, I said to him, "What way are you, Mick?" And before the man could answer, the wife said, "There's a deal of fear in that fella.
" And I said to her, "And what way are you, Josie?" And she said, "What way would you think I am?" But the one that staggered me was this.
I said to an old fella, "What way are you?" And he said, "I'm stumbling along between the immensities.
" And I said, "What immensities?" He said, "The immensities of birth and death.
" (Frank) It was through their celebration of the immensity of death that we first witnessed the Celtic legacy.
The ritual of the Celtic funeral bequeathed us there glorious graves at Hallstatt, at Hochdorf.
The Celts believed that death was a journey to the legacy of the next world.
And they furnished death wonderfully.
The elaborate ceremony of the aristocratic Celtic funeral, ornate, but social, involved the entire community as well as the family.
And this idea of giving the dead person a good send-off created an attitude towards death which we now, perhaps, regard as bizarre.
At one point I was reading histories of how villages would go into rivalry with each other.
And one of the rivalries which existed was that if somebody died in a village, the young of the other village would try and steal the corpse and hide it.
So therefore, the people in the first village couldn't have the wake.
Because you couldn't have the wake, so you couldn't have a good feed, or good music, you couldn't have dancing or drinking, if the corpse wasn't there.
And the idea was to keep the corpse as long as possible.
And you'd have all these people running around the countryside, looking for the corpse so they could have the wake.
The story I was reading about was where they'd they'd actually hidden the corpse as a scarecrow.
They'd dressed him up as a scarecrow, stuck him on a stick and put him on the top of a hill.
And they didn't find him I mean, whether he was ever found, I don't really know! But it was one of those things that never existed, in that sense that they couldn't have the wake, the wake was never done, the man was never buried because he was never found.
(Owl hooting) Nothing, that's what's different about this grave.
There's nothing in it.
Some bones, some timber, nothing else.
The burial cult called Christianity says you can't take it with you.
Culture shock for the Celts.
Remember the grave of the chieftain at Hochdorf? The man was measured by the lavishness of his burial, and yet the civilisation called Christianity says that in death, all are equal.
But we know the Celts today by what they buried.
Their style, their splendour, their civilization.
And if we are to be buried in graves like this, how will we yet be known? The material legacy of the Celts continues to be pieced together in the restoration laboratories of Europe's museums.
Fragment by fragment, we glimpse the Celtic civilisation at its highest, and therefore we have a tangible legacy.
But even though the piecing together of these fragments improves our picture of their ancient lives, do these museum pieces necessarily have any meaning for the people who today call themselves Celts? This is, after all, Celtic archaeology, 2,000 years and more old.
Isn't the gap in time and in culture between their ancient, tribal lives and the Celts of today, isn't it too wide to be bridged? I'm not at all sure that the Celtic world actually survives today.
The thing that troubles me more than anything else is the way in which the so-called Celtic fringe demands a survival through language, through literature, through whatever you might say.
These are all fascinating and absolutely worthy of study, but the Celtic world for me is the prehistoric world, the idea of a pan-European exercise, something which spans, for argument's sake, the far East to the far West.
This is really what the Celtic world was about, the idea of freedom of movement, the idea, which I think is embodied in their art style When we look at the prehistoric Celtic art forms, it depends to a very much to a very large extent upon that open-ended curve.
Now, dare we suggest that the open-ended curve really indicates free will? Can we use art as an indication of a philosophy? So that this open-ended curve, this beautiful swell, does this argue that the Celtic world is all about freedom, all about a determination to be real people as opposed to what we find with the Romans, anyway, a bureaucracy? We find rectangular versions, their pictures are all blocked in.
Everything is organised and layered.
The Celtic world is full, for me anyway, of freedom.
And in a sense, if only the Celtic heritage were here today, I rather fancy the world would be a better place.
(Frank) Let us enjoy, then, the small material legacy of the Celts a bequest made by a people who found joy in the fact that nature had no straight lines.
These beautiful pieces are the concrete, the solid proof of such a legacy.
If their legacy has an abstract dimension, then that may be found in a certain mentality, a spirit, a certain inherited attitude to the natural world.
I have seen men christen their fields with female names.
And I have seen them enclosed within the whitethorn confines of that field as if they were confined in a study, although this field might be of several acres.
I have seen them in the springtime, the late springtime go on their knees preparatory to discovering whether or not a meadow was ready for cutting.
I have seen them on their knees feeling the fleecy bottom grass of the meadow the very same way another man might part the hair on his the head of his love.
I have seen them rub their fingers up and down through the grass as if they were massaging the nape of the neck of a beautiful woman.
This affection is not an evil thing and it's not an animal thing.
It's a beautiful thing because it means that man, the man in question, understands his land, and he loves his land.
(Frank) The land sustained their culture, their heroes strode the mountains, their gods were countryside gods, who dwelt in wood and in water.
In their land, they found their art, their legends, their beliefs.
Now long dispossessed, there was only one direction in which the Celts could go, to another world, the world of the imagination, where their most enduring legacy will be found.
(Enya: Aldebaran) (Singing in Irish) But finally, what is unique about the Celts is not their love of horses or their love of nature, their passion for poetry or for wild music, it's the way in which they think.
Opposing facts can be equally right, a conclusion can be arrived at from any number of different directions.
Now, to the Anglo-Saxon or the classical mind, this may seem ambivalent, but it isn't.
All it means, that in there there's a sense of freedom, a sense of adventure which says the world isn't all black and white.
This mentality may be frustrating or fey or amusing or duplicitous, depending upon whom it strikes, but all it means, that in the Celtic mind, the world is full of possibility.
(Enya: Portrait)