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|
Origins of the People of Wigtownshire |
| by Crawford MacKeand |
| Prehistoric Times |
| Possibly the first Gallowegians were a very few Stone Age hunters, but a
fairly strong farming economy appears to have evolved by about 4000 B.C.
As Bronze gave way to Iron Age, the Gallowegians were fighters building
defensive forts, the remains of which are still visible at such sites as
Barsalloch Point near Port William on Luce Bay in Southern Wigtownshire,
In the six or seven hundred years after 800 to 700 B.C. a Celtic influx occurred, of language and culture, or of people
or of all three, maybe originating with Britons speaking a language akin
to Welsh. The Romans called the tribes Novantae, Damnonii a little to the
North in today's Ayrshire and Selgovae to the East in Dumfries. Very
likely these folk, probably with a little genetic input from many of the
previous residents, were still the people of Galloway years after the
Romans left Britain around 420 A.D. The Roman army had penetrated as far
as Wigtownshire, but evidently not in very great strength. Christianity
was a growing force in the later Roman Empire, and even as the Empire
began to die, the Church moved in. Ninian came as a Bishop to Whithorn,
likely serving an established Christian community in the period 390 to
450, and building his Candida Casa or white chapel. Away to the
North, in this same period, Norsemen and Irish Gaels were colonizing the
Scottish West and the Isles, and the Northern Irish Dal Riata were
establishing their first Scottish outposts on the Clyde, though in this
last case with little apparent effect on Galloway. |
| As History Began |
The next scene finds Anglians from Northumbria moving farther afield than
the future Anglo-Saxons of South Britain and invading Galloway in some
strength. By 580 or 590 they had subdued the Novantae, probably subjects
of the British Kingdom of Rheged which had, together with Strathclyde,
until then dominated South West Scotland. Northumberland's King Oswy
married Rhienmelth, a grand-daughter of King Urien of Rheged, in about
632, thus emphasizing the new situation. Meanwhile, neatly bypassing
Galloway, Danes swept from England and the South into the Forth-Clyde
valley, and the Strathclyde British departed to join their brethren in
Wales and defeat the English at the Battle of Conway. The Clyde coast and
further South were now invaded by Norse-Gaels from their Hebridean bases,
despite the best efforts of Edmund of England and Malcolm of Scotland,
whose hands were already too full with Danish raiders on the East Coast.
These Norsemen, warriors and settlers both, moved down the coasts and
southward, to establish themselves in strength in the Isle of Man and
eventually to found in Ireland the city of Dublin, where their king sat.
That kingship even for a short time linked up with the Norse kingdom based
on York. The power was ephemeral, but the settlements were long lasting,
and it is to these Norse-Gaels that we can look for the arrival of some
of our forebears. They were said to be a hybrid race from Norse fathers
and Gaelic mothers, who appear to have settled the Whithorn area in the
early 900s, thence spreading around our coasts and into the higher
valleys. The Icelandic Njal's Saga tells of Kari Solmundarsson wintering
at Hvitsborg, or Whithorn, with earl Malcolm soon after the battle of
Clontarf in 1014, and by 1034 there was recorded the death of Suibne, king
of the Galwegians and son of Kenneth. The Orkneyinga Saga says that the
next king, Thorfin the Mighty, resided in turn in Caithness and in
Gaddgedler, where England and Scotland meet. In 1054 the Norse fleet
sailed under the command of a Norseman, MacScelling; ships and men were of
the Gallgaedel, of Arran, Man, Kintyre and the Alban seaboard. So as the
Norman Conquest was coming up on the southern horizon, Norse-Gaelic Macs
of the Gall-Gaedel, or far-away Gaels, were thoroughly at home in Wigtown
and probably Kirkcudbright too, whether they called themselves Galwegians
or Gall-Gaels or whether they called Galloway by the earlier forms of
Gaddgedler or Gall-Gaedel or even Galwedia or Gallwitheia. It was by all
accounts a cosmopolitan, if rough, community, with Welsh, Irish, Anglian,
Danish, Norse and certainly Gaelic roots, part pagan and part Christian,
making a wild and often dangerous living in an isolated but precarious
political independence.
One historian has said that the history of Galloway is a blank from the
time when the father of Kenneth I was slain upon the borders of Kyle, in
844, until the days of David I, who ruled Scotland from 1124 to 1153.
Other sources than the written document have helped to make the Dark Ages
less dark, by combining the efforts of archaeologists, linguists,
place-name specialists and historians. Even legend can, with great care,
sometimes be effectively woven into the final fabric. But as that period
ended, Malcolm's campaigns in 1197 took Carrick, today's Southern
Ayrshire, into the Scottish kingdom, and established a boundary that still
defines Galloway. Fergus was at this time (pre 1136 - 1161) the ruler of
Galloway. He was born in Galloway, his father probably being named
Somerled, a name frequent among the Gaelic-Norse. One of the sons of
Fergus was Gilbert, who held Kirkcudbright. The other was Uchtred who had
Wigtown from 1161 to 1174, when he was murdered by his brother, and who,
like his father, had favored the Norman introduction of feudalism. But all in all, it is fairly clear that our corner of today's Scotland was
ever an independently minded realm, although freedom in any modern sense
was surely notable only by its absence. Wars, raiding, and slave trading
were then very normal facts of European life.
|
| A Later Record of Galloway |
|
In 1821 the New Edinburgh Encyclopaedia said, of Wigtownshire, "The people
of this county are industrious, moral, intelligent and enterprising."
While this is very pleasing to hear, it goes on to say that they "have
from the remotest antiquity been a warlike people." And also that "the
present inhabitants can trace back their descent through many generations.
They are originally .... a Celtic people; and it is a curious fact that
they retained their early predilections so long that the Gaelic was their
vernacular dialect in the time of Queen Mary, when it was unknown in every
other district in the South of Scotland. This speech was not disused in
the remoter parishes even at the beginning of the 17th century; and if
tradition may be relied on, it is not more than a hundred years since it
entirely disappeared in the parish of New Luce." [Maybe this should be no
surprise, given the continued trade & passage across the very narrow seas
to Ireland.] Names of former Galloway princes and lords are considered at
some length, noting the most powerful families in the 1300s as M'Dowalls,
M'Cullochs, Hannays and Adairs, and commenting on others, Christie,
M'Kerlie etc. etc. Finally, "The oldest names, in addition to those
already mentioned, are M'Guffie, M'Kinnen, M'Keand, M'Gowan, M'Geoch,
M'Nish, M'Gill, M'Cracken, Milwain, Milhench, Clumpha, Broadfoot, Dickson,
Donnan, the most of which are evidently Celtic, and must have come down
from the remotest antiquity."
|
Crawford MacKeand
Greenville, Delaware USA, Feb 2002 |
| NOTES AND REFERENCES |
Useful historical references, especially for the earlier periods, are
- Galloway Land and Lordship, R.D. Oram and G.P. Stell, eds., Scottish Society for Northern Studies, Edinburgh 1991
- Wigtownshire Charters, R.C. Reid, ed., Constable, for University of Edinburgh and the Scottish History Society, Third Series, Vol. 51, 1960. (see the introduction)
- Discovering Galloway, I. McLeod, John Donald Ltd., Edinburgh, 1986
- Scottish Place Names, W.C. McKenzie, Kegan Paul etc., London 1931
- The Place Names of Galloway, Sir Herbert Maxwell, Castlepoint Press Dalbeattie, 2001
- New Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, D. Brewster, ed., [American Edition],Whiting & Watson NY 1815 - 1821 (entry for Wigtownshire, p522-525, final volume.)
- The Surnames of Scotland, G.F. Black, New York Public Library, NY 1946
- Lands and their Owners in Galloway, P.H. M'Kerlie, 1890
- History of Dumfries and Galloway, Sir Herbert Maxwell
- Galloway - A Land Apart, Andrew McCulloch, Birlinn, Edinburgh, 2000
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