The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland

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

Book: The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland Read Online Free PDF
Author: Alistair Moffat
Tags: History, Non-Fiction, Scotland
even through periods of profound cultural change.Stonehenge still inspires powerful devotion in the twenty-first century. In Aberdeenshire, not far from Inverurie, a small but striking circle has a very interesting name. The second element of Easter Aquhorthies is a Gaelic word which means ‘Prayer Field’, a clear recognition of what took place inside the ring of huge stones. But the important issue here is chronological. Gaelic arrived in Aberdeenshire much later than the date of Easter Aquhorthies’ construction and probably millennia after the original religion of the prehistoric farmers of the Urie Valley who built it had begun to change. The gods were not the same but the traditions of reverence did not entirely fade and were understood. The stones of the Old Peoples were not fenced off and thought of as relics or monuments but were part of a changing landscape, of an aggregate of experience in one place.
    Far to the south, a long way from Easter Aquhorthies and the Clach an Truiseal, another great stone circle retained all sort of significance. The Lochmaben Stane stands on the northern shore of the Solway Firth, near the outfall of the little River Sark and the modern border between England and Scotland. Pytheas probably saw it and its lost companions and, almost four centuries later, many more Mediterranean eyes looked at the huge round boulders. By AD 74, the invading Roman legions had reached Carlisle, the place called Luguvalium. Under the command of the governor of the new province of Britannia, Petilius Cerialis, soldiers built a fort on the eminence between the rivers Eden and Caldew, just to the south of their confluence. As the first professional army in European history, the Romans were methodical and, as Cerialis looked out over the grey waters of the Solway and to the flatlands beyond, his first thoughts will have been on the gathering of military intelligence. If the eagle standards were to be carried into the wilderness of the north and the legions were to march to glory behind them, then their general needed a map. As scouts rode out of the camp at Carlisle and began the long process of reconnaissance, what became Scotland began to emerge from the darkness of the past.
    Markers in a largely treeless landscape will have provedinvaluable and the Lochmaben Stane is huge, a granite boulder standing more than two metres high and measuring more than six metres around. Very visible on the flat Solway plain, it would have been even more impressive when Cerialis’ patrols saw it. The
New Statistical Account
of 1845 recorded a ring of nine large stones which enclosed a wide area of almost half an acre. Seven had been removed by the farmer at Old Graitney just before 1845 to allow him to plough more ground and an eighth had been dug out and rolled into a nearby hedge. Recent examination of the remaining megalith (almost certainly too big to shift) gave a date of around 2525 BC . And, when the Roman scouts rode north and west from Carlisle, the old circle was already ancient, still venerated and very useful.
    Over the four centuries of Roman Britain, the first maps made for Petilius Cerialis and his fellow governors of the province of Britannia were added to and refined. Much later, in the seventh century AD , a clerk working at the Italian town of Ravenna used them to compile a composite map of Britain (and much of the known world) and he attached two place-names to the area.
Locus Maponi
supplies the initial elements of the name of the old stone circle but it was almost certainly more precisely applied to the town of Lochmaben ten miles to the north-west and, by extension, to the district between it and the Solway.
Locus Maponi
does not mean the ‘Place of Mapon or Maben’ but ‘the Loch’ or ‘Pool’ and, at Lochmaben, there are three. The Castle Loch is larger than the Kirk Loch and the Mill Loch is the smallest.
    Mapon or Maponus was a god. His name derives from the Old Welsh root,
map
, which meant
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