Free The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland by Alistair Moffat Page B

was almost five miles in breadth in places. The name derives from two Scots words and means ‘a quivering or quaking bog’. Studded with stagnant pools, some of them very broad and deep, the flat landscape was punctuated by stands of birch and willow. Place names remember the old marsh – Birkenwood for the birches, East Poldar for a bog beside a pool and Powblack for a peat-dark creek. In winter, Flanders Moss was a bleak, sodden place, often flooded as rain and snow swelled the Forth, and, in summer, the midgies and mosquitoes will have been murderous.
    It was not impassable or impenetrable. Under the thick blanket of peat archaeologists have found the remains of prehistoric wooden trackways made from cut logs and, around the fringes of the Moss, there were settlements. Dangerous though it was, the wetland was a reliable source of food for fowlers with their nets and traps. Nests produced eggs in the spring and early summer, and those with patience and a thick skin fished in the pools near the course of the Forth where the murky water moved a little.
    Crossing places were recalled in place-names such as Fordhead and Causewayhead but, while native hunters and travellers knew the safe paths, Flanders Moss was no place for armies. It was the forgotten barrier which made Stirling and its dramatic castle rock the gateway to the north and the Highlands and the strategic hinge of Scotland. When Lord Kames began drainage operations in the 1750s and the peat was removed to make flat and fertile farmland, it was as though a door had opened.
    Tacitus was struck by the importance of Flanders Moss and could see clearly, probably at first hand, the effect it would have on Agricola’s campaign.
     
For the Firths of Clota [Clyde] and Bodotria [Forth], carried far inland by the tides of opposite seas, are separated by a narrow neck of land. This was now being securely held by garrisons andthe whole sweep of the country on the nearer side was secured: the enemy had been pushed back, as if into a different island.
     
    Therefore in AD 82 Agricola had no choice but to march north under the shadow of Stirling Castle rock. It was just as well that the garrison was probably friendly. Later sources suggest that the kingdom of Manau was, like the Venicones of Fife, allied to the Votadini. In post-Roman records, the territories became twinned as Manau-Gododdin. Once again, place-names hint at its extent. For centuries Clackmannanshire was Scotland’s smallest county (with the longest name) and its continued existence may have owed something to its having been the kernel of an ancient kingdom. As already noted (p.9), the name is from Clach na Manau, ‘the Stone of Manau’, and in the centre of the little town it can still be seen. Nearby Slamannan is ‘the Moor of Manau’. And, around the fringes of the tiny county, more Celtic names, such as Powis Burn, imply the boundaries of a distinct territory.
    None of the uncertainties of place-name evidence can cloud Roman actions after the breakthrough past Stirling. Along the high ground known as the Gask Ridge, the legions constructed one of the first fixed frontiers in the empire. It was a series of fortlets and signal towers linked by a road and at either end of the ridge lay a string of larger forts which were strategically sited at the foot of glens leading into the heart of the Highland massif. This was the territory of the Calidones, a kindred whose name came to be applied to all of the early peoples of the Highlands and the north of Scotland, eventually being adopted in modern times as Caledonia.
    The whole Gask Ridge system ran from Loch Lomond in the west, skirting the Highland fault-line and reaching the North Sea coast at Montrose. As with other Roman frontiers it was porous, not aiming to stop armed incursion in its tracks – the individual forts and fortlets were not built to house garrisons large enough to achieve that. Instead the system was set up to police movement, gather