The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland Read Online Free PDF Page A

in Rome after AD 14, considered
On the Ocean
to be little more than a catalogue of lies and exaggeration. But, in his vast, seventeen-volume
Geographica
, he used it nonetheless. Here is his, and Pytheas’, version of the agriculture of the communities ‘who lived near the chilly zone’:
     
Of the domesticated fruits and animals there is a complete lack of some and a scarcity of others, and that the people live on millet and on other herbs, fruits and roots; and where there is grain and even honey the people also make a drink from them. As for the grain, since they have no pure sunlight, they thresh it in large storehouses having first gathered the ears together there, because [outdoor] threshing floors are useless due to the lack of sun and the rain.
     
    Some of this is little more than a Mediterranean view of long northern winters, cloudy days and the bewildering absence of several months of uninterrupted sunshine. The mention of millet is a fascinating misunderstanding. It does not grow in Britain but the reference, bracketed with ‘other herbs, fruits and roots’, is probably to Fat Hen, a nutritious plant now seen as a weed. Still known as
myles
or
mylies
in Scotland and cognate with the Latin word for millet, it was gathered, boiled and eaten as late as the eighteenth century by country people. Its seeds are rich in oil and carbohydrate and traces of Fat Hen have been found by archaeologists at sites dating back to the first millennium BC .
    More generally, Pytheas was observing a society which still gathered in a harvest from wild places. In all likelihood, these were good locations for such as crab apples, hazelnuts or mushrooms and they will have been cared for and not over-picked. Our ancestors in Scotland ate – until recently – a wide range of plants now regarded as useless weeds.
    Compared with Strabo’s scorn, the tone of Diodorus Siculus’ borrowings from
On the Ocean
is probably much closer to the original:
     
Britain, we are told, is inhabited by tribes who are indigenous and preserve in their way of life the ancient customs. For example they use chariots in their wars . . . and their houses are simple, being built for the most part from reeds or timbers. Their way of harvesting their grain is to cut only the heads and store them in roofed buildings, and each day they select the ripened heads and grind them, in this manner getting their food. Their behaviour is simple, very different from the shrewdness and vice that characterise the men of today. Their lifestyle is modest since they are beyond the reach of luxury which comes from wealth. The island is thickly populated, and its climate is extremely cold . . . It is held by many kings and aristocrats who generally live at peace with each other.
     
    Once again archaeology supports Pytheas’ observations. Iron reaping hooks have been found at several sites in Scotland and the ancient method of cutting the grain near the top of the stalk is well attested into modern times. When cereals were grown in the old runrig system of long strips, the heads were cut so as to leave fodder for grazing animals. In the autumn, after the harvest, beasts came down from the summer shielings and were set on the reaped rigs to muck them, there being no other form of fertiliser. And cutting near the top also avoided the copious under-weeds of pre-industrial farming.
    The last sentence of the extract from Diodorus is the first reference to British kingdoms and, although it is sketchy, even cursory, it has the virtue of simplicity. On his journeys around the coasts and inland, Pytheas clearly came across many kings and therefore many kingdoms. But Britain does not appear, at least not around the year 320 BC , to have been a squabbling anthill of competing autocrats. There were wars, the Greek explorer implied, but peace was the usual condition of life. As the nature of early Celtic kingship becomes clearer and the evidencesupplied by outsiders more substantial, this