Free Blood of the Isles by Bryan Sykes Page A

the people migrating
en masse
from central Europe to the far west? Although there is very good archaeological and historical evidence that people from this region did indeed move in numbers east and south to Greece, where they attacked the temple at Delphi in 273 BC , before finally settling in central Turkey, there is no evidence at all that the ancestors of today’s Celts of the Isles took the opposite track and ended up in Britain. Yet, although support for the popular notion that the Celtic people of the Isles travelled across land from central Europe may be entirely lacking, we may still find the evidence for it in the genetics.
    However, the most obvious of routes linking today’s Celts of the Isles is not the land at all but the sea. Motorways and fast roads have inverted in our minds the comparative difficulty of moving across land and water. In ancient times, and indeed until the last two centuries, getting around by boat was a lot easier than travelling over the land. Until the rise of, first, the railway and then the car and the lorry, water was the way to travel. Was a sea route to the Isles the more likely?
    At school we are taught that ‘civilization’ arose around the Mediterranean, in the ancient cities of Egypt, and that we trace the origins of our culture and our political processes to the countries bordering that almost landlocked sea. Our taught impression of life beyond the Strait of Gibraltar is one of barbarism and savagery, rather like the Greeks’ view of the
Keltoi
. We are taught nothing of the vigorous culture and the technological achievements of the Atlantic seaboard, the coastline stretching from North Africa in the south 2,000 miles to Shetland off the north coast of Scotland and beyond to Scandinavia. But this Atlantic zone has a prehistory as ancient and as colourful as any in the Mediterranean. There were people living along this coastline 8,000 years ago and they were using boats not just for cruising close to the shore but for venturing out into deep water, judging by the types of fish whose remains litter their encampments. None of these sea-going vessels survives, which is no surprise since they would have been made of perishable wood and animal skins. By 6,000 years ago, agriculture had seeped into the region via the Mediterranean coastline, evidence once again of the maritime traffic. The first, literally, hard evidence of widespread exchanges along the coast came in the form of distinctive polished stone axes, manufactured in Brittany, which found their way all along the coast of France and Spain to the south, and north across the sea to Cornwall. But the most dramatic examples of continuity along the Atlantic zone are the great stone monuments, the megaliths, which rise from the ground from Orkney and Lewis in the north to Spain and Portugal in the south. These area purely Atlantic phenomenon, owing nothing at all to the Mediterranean world. Could it be that it was by this route that the Celts of the Isles first arrived?

4
THE SKULL SNATCHERS

    The first forays of science into the highly charged arguments about British origins came at the height of the Victorian enthusiasm for Saxon superiority. It is hard to imagine how ingrained was the sense that the people of Britain were split into two entirely different ‘races’ and how superior the Saxons felt about themselves. Just to remind us, I quote again from the extremely popular if eccentric author, the surgeon Robert Knox. He wrote that ‘Race is everything, literature, science, art – in a word, civilisation depends on it.’ And Knox left his readers in no doubt where his sympathies lay in the debate on the racial character of Celt and Saxon. The Saxon, he claims, ‘cannot sit still an instant, so powerful is the desire for work, labour, excitement, muscular exertion’. The Celts, on the other hand – judging by such woodcut illustrations as ‘A Celtic groupe, such as may be seen at any time in Marylebone, London’,