Kilmartin Glen: Where Scotland was born
After an ambitious redevelopment project, the award-winning Kilmartin House Museum is set to reopen this summer, promising exciting new insights into the internationally-important archaeological landscape of Kilmartin Glen.
Kilmartin Glen, located between Lochgilphead and Oban in Argyll on Scotland’s west coast, is home to Britain’s richest archaeological landscape, with the highest concentration of prehistoric monuments in the whole of the U.K. The remains there span an astonishing 5,000 years and include almost every kind of pre-and early-historic ritual and ceremonial monument, including two stone circles, a ceremonial avenue, a monumental henge, and various types of cairns (chambered, round, and kerb); an exceptional array of cup and ring marks and other rock carvings; numerous standing stones, cist burials, and a linear cemetery; over 20 crannogs (high-status, artificial islands constructed in lochs); many dùns and forts; ogham inscriptions, early-Christian monuments, and later-mediaeval chapels, churches, and castles (including the 12th-century Duntrune, thought to be Scotland’s oldest continuously occupied castle, and Carnassarie, home to the man who published the first book in Scottish Gaelic). With more than 800 ancient monuments within six miles of the village of Kilmartin, the area is imbued with a profound sense of the ancient and the sacred—so much so that, calling it a ‘misty Scottish Stonehenge’, The New York Times recently named Kilmartin Glen as number 4 in their list of the 52 best places in the world to visit in 2023.
All this on Scotland’s little-known south-west coast. But, far from being remote, as it can sometimes now feel, Kilmartin Glen was in fact perfectly positioned to aid Britain’s earliest settlers as they began to seasonally forage here roughly 10,000 years ago. This was a time when the mainland of Scotland was still heavily forested and it was the seas that were the highways. The glen’s position on the sea at Loch Crinan made it a safe anchorage in waters that are notorious for some of the most powerful tidal streams in Europe and offered a protected launching pad from which to exploit the resource-rich islands of the inner and outer Hebrides. The glen itself runs south-west to north-east, from the coastline into Argyll’s hinterland, and was a natural route for the movement of people, livestock, goods, and new technologies and ideas into the Scottish interior. Once settled, these peoples’ desire to try to fix themselves in time by means of a close observation of the cyclical movement of the sun, moon, and stars, and to worship their gods and commemorate their dead, gave rise to an astonishing ceremonial and ritual landscape.
It was also in this glen, after already millenia of use, that a Gaelic-speaking people known as the Scotti (who traditional accounts say came from Ireland) set up a kingdom in the early 6th-century. Their base, the hillfort of Dunadd, one of 30-such hillforts or dùns which crown the hills overlooking Kilmartin Glen, is the most important of this ancient landscape’s early-historic layer. Facing the harbour at Loch Crinan and situated on a bend in the twisty river Add (‘Dunadd’ means ‘the dùn on the River Add’ in Gaelic), with a ring of protective hills behind it and the Gael’s holy Ben Cruachan looking on, the hillfort of Dunadd protrudes singly from the now very fertile but once treacherous Mòine Mhór, or ‘Great Moss’, one of Scotland’s last raised peat bogs. It dominates its landscape. As the home of this Gaelic-speaking kingdom of the Scots of Dál Riata, Dunadd is one of the most important sites in Scottish and Irish history. It is around this polity and this people that the first kingdom of Scotland was later formed.
Dál Riata was a maritime power with territory on both sides of the North Channel, in Argyll and the Isles and in County Antrim in Northern Ireland, and the citadel of Dunadd was both the ‘hillfort-capitol’ for its Scottish half and the seat of Dál Riata’s kings as a whole (their Irish ‘capitol’ was at Dunseverick on the North Antrim coast). Dunadd was where they crowned their kings, and you can still see the ritual carvings used for their inaugurations in the bedrock of the conspicuous plateau between Dunadd’s two summits: a carved footprint into which the new king would place his foot, a rock-cut basin perhaps used for libation, an enigmatic inscription in ogham (an early form of Gaelic script) which has yet to be deciphered, and an evocative Pictish carving of a boar. These inaugural accoutrements have parallels elsewhere in Ireland and in Scotland and help to unite Dál Riata with the wider Gaelic-speaking world.
We know from written records like Adomnán’s ‘Life of Columba’ (a hagiographical account of St Columba by his relative and successor the abbot Adomnán written in about 690 from impeccable sources including an earlier book from about 640) that the royal citadel of Dunadd also benefitted from its intimate, foundational relationship with the hugely influential monastery of Iona, located nearby off the island of Mull, which Columba founded. It was at the ‘caput regionis’ of Dál Riata (the ‘chief-place of the region’, probably Dunadd), that we are told Columba met with traders from Gaul. And Adomnán’s description of Columba’s ordination of a man by the name of Áedán mac Gabráin to the kingship of Dál Riata in 574 A.D. is the first record of an event like this in Europe. From Iona and bases like Dunadd, Christianity and Latin were brought to the rest of Argyll by Columba and other Irish monks and then disseminated throughout Scotland, most notably into the lands of the Picts by Columba himself. Together, the kings of Dál Riata and the abbots of Iona brought about great and lasting change to their world.
Dunadd was the symbol of this combined temporal and spiritual power. It became a place for ritual, for royal hospitality and diplomacy, and a centre for international trade. It had sophisticated industry, including metal and craft working. The exceedingly fine jewellery, tools, and luxury goods produced in its workshops found their way not just to the neighbouring, competing kingdoms of the Britons, the Picts, the Irish, and the Saxons, but also to the continent, and culminated in an internationally-revered and influential artistic style that, in conjunction with the artists working on Iona, produced such masterpieces as Iona’s Book of Kells.
A powerhouse when the kingdoms of the Saxons were just forming, and as likely at that stage to emerge pre-eminent in the struggle for political dominance that was ongoing between the various peoples in Britain at that time, the importance of Kilmartin Glen and the royal hillfort of Dunadd for the eventual emergence of Scotland cannot be overstated. It is this world that I explore in my historical-fiction series ‘The Chronicles of Iona’.
When Kenneth mac Alpin, a descendant of these first Dál Riatan kings, under pressure from vikings who were taking over Argyll and the Isles, moved his kingdom from Dunadd eastwards in 842 A.D., he took with him what made the Scots Scots. He unified the kingdoms of the Scots and the Picts which, as Alba and then Scotland, proceeded to take its rightful place among the power players of north-west Europe. It was the Scotti of Kilmartin Glen who gave Scotland its name, its first laws and customs, and its language, Scottish Gaelic, which dominated much of Scotland then and remains a national language of Scotland today.
Paula de Fougerolles is a medieval historian and author of The Chronicles of Iona.
