Where Cumbrians really came from

Mainstream history claims they were pathetic survivors of an Anglo-Saxon massacre. But evidence mounts they sailed from Spain.

Was Castlerigg Stone Circle built by Celts?

It is one of the most notorious myths that has ever been told about a group of British people.

The story is that when the Romans left Britain in 410 AD the country was inhabited mainly by Celts, the richest of whom collaborated with the Emperors, built villas, cooked with olive oil and swigged mediterranean wine. Then, about forty years later, when the economy had collapsed due to the disappearance of Rome’s money the largest invasion of foreigners in British history took place.

Big, slightly bovine but efficient Anglo-Saxons swept in huge numbers from north west Europe, initially as mercenaries. They were hired to fight the Picts by the naïve Romano-Celtic king Vortigern. But then following a dispute over wages the incomers decided to settle down so they killed virtually all the otherworldly, disorganised Celts and grabbed their land and farms, it is said.

Except that a tiny group of Celtic stragglers somehow managed to escape the slaughter and limped over the Pennines. These few pathetic refugees began scratching a living in the mountainous wasteland that no one else wanted. These were the ancestors of today’s Cumbrians, or so the conventional story has it.

Professor William Duguid Geddes of Aberdeen University threw his full academic weight behind this narrative in an 1885 speech. He said the Celts “dreamed” while “more realistic and less imaginative races acted.”  As a result the Celts were: “pushed in the pressure of ages into the remote fastnesses and picturesque, but shadowy, glens overlooking the western main.”

The implication was that when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, they found a bunch of weak, artistic and hopelessly unmartial Celts who were unfit to survive in a tough world. The Anglo-Saxons annihilated almost all of them as they were supposed to under Social Darwinist theory. This allegation of unfitness has been used to marginalise and disempower Cumbria and other parts of  Celtic Fringe for centuries.

The disparaging term “Celtic Fringe” was invented by the Tory Prime Minister, the Marquess of Salisbury. He first used it in 1895 when he found that he could not get all parts of the country to comply with conservative policy and so he proposed that the Celtic areas should have fewer MPs: “The great defect of our present representation is that the Celtic edges of the country on both islands are represented enormously out of proportion to the rest of the Anglo-Saxon population,” he wrote. Note his firm conviction about the racial origin of the bulk of the population.

This baldly demonstrates that, for the Victorian ruling elite, the Celtic holocaust story was the founding myth of British history. It seemed to justify a prejudice that the people of the “fringe” were lesser Brits with diminished political legitimacy.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th Century Britain’s politicians used the supposed victory over the Celts as evidence of superior Anglo-Saxon, and therefore English, military potency. Through the public schools the sons of the Establishment were taught to believe that the Germanic blood inherited from the Anglo-Saxon incomers is what gave the English the steel to carve out the British Empire.

As the Central Lancashire university academics Will Kaufman and Heidi Slettendahl Macpherson wrote in “Transatlantic Studies” (2000): “An important racial belief system in late 19th- and early 20th-century British and US thought advanced the argument that the civilization of English-speaking nations was superior to that of any other nations because of racial traits and characteristics inherited from the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain.”

Indeed, the idea that the British share a common Anglo-Saxon ancestry based on biology still has prestige in Whitehall, even though the more intelligent civil servants know it is nonsense. For example, the notion that we are an Anglo-Saxon nation underpins the story of Britain taught in the National Curriculum today.

Even though DNA tests show Brits on average are 68% of Celtic stock, GCSE teachers are not obliged to even mention the Celts at all in history lessons. This is no accident because the omission enhances the impression that the Anglo-Saxons are the main players in early British history and that we inherit our culture from them.

Artist’s impression of pre-Roman Celtic Hill Fort, examples exist at Castle How, Wythop and Maiden Castle near Penrith in Cumbria

The slight problem with all this is there is no evidence than an Anglo-Saxon invasion ever took place, nor the murders that are necessary for this version of history to be true.

No archaeological  remains, no battle sites, no caches of weapons, no mass graves, no aerial photography, no ground radar readings or anything else have been produced to prove there was an invasion around 450AD by foreigners of any description, let alone a big one or a mass death. In fact the main image is one of relative peace, gradual racial integration and uninterrupted agriculture.

Yet senior traditionalist historians such as Kendal-born David Starkey cling to the story of Anglo-Saxon warriors wading through Celtic blood. He told viewers of his 2015 documentary “Monarchy” on Channel 4 that around 200,000 sword-wielding Germanic warriors invaded Britain. “This was ethnic cleansing at its most savagely effective,” he intoned.

David Starkey

Starkey apparently bases his grisly claim on a very tentative research paper by a team of Oxford geneticists led by Michael E. Weale. It is called “Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration”. It suggests that between “50% - 100%”of all men in Central England were either killed or pushed out of the region in 450 AD. Unfortunately, as the authors admit, the mathematics in the DNA results depend on the rather unlikely assumption that the invasion was “a single instantaneous migration event” from north Germany and that no Germans have crossed  the Channel since. “We accept that our data do not prove conclusively that an Anglo-Saxon mass migration event took place,” Weale rather abjectly added.

Starkey’s claim that there was a holocaust is also based on some excitable but vague passages in a book called The Ruin of Britain written in AD 540 by a monk called Gildas. The cleric said that the coming of the Anglo-Saxons in 450 AD was as “a fire heaped up and nurtured by the hand of the impious easterners spread from sea to sea. It devastated town and country round about, and…burned the whole surface of the island”. But there is no archaeological evidence for widespread destruction in Britain at that time. Gildas’s polemic acquired the status of fact because it was repeated by some of Britain’s most illustrious historians, mainly because Gildas is practically the only written source for that period.

For example, two hundred years later, the Jarrow-based monk, Bede, also told of how “these heathen conquerors devastated the surrounding cities and countryside” in his famous Ecclesiastical History of the English People completed in AD 731. Bede’s account has also been enormously influential. But scholars now point out he produced no actual evidence of a massacre and simply repeated Gildas in order to suggest that Celtic Christianity died out and therefore Roman Catholicism should be the official faith in Britain.

Then Henry VIII, after his acrimonious break with Rome, needed to distance Reformation England from Catholicism. So his propagandists seized on the evidence-free passage in Gildas to suggest the Saxons killed all the original Celts. Therefore, Henry’s propagandists argued, the English were all Saxons with no Catholic blood in their veins.

So, the original texts supposed to justify the massacre myth do not actually say what was claimed. There is also a total lack of objects or documents to substantiate the invasion and killings. So why do traditional historians still repeat it? Well, the myth conveniently from their point of view suggests that, with all the Celts supposedly dead, the Anglo Saxons became the majority and established our language, monarchy, laws and, essentially, the Britain we have today.

But, again, this is questionable. Before the Anglo-Saxons arrived the Celts had their own language, kings and laws, too. It is quite wrong to claim the Celts had no influence on the culture of Britain today. There is also a growing consensus that the Celts of the Celtic Fringe (Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria, Scotland and Ireland) did not, as the traditional story claims, come to Britain from the East, ie. the Continent in 500 BC. This traditional idea was based on the combination of the Biblical story of Noah’s children spreading out after the flood and classical sources recording fears of Celtic migrations into Italy and Greece and the Balkans and Asia Minor.

Instead, many academics say there is sound evidence that the Celts came from Iberia and travelled up the Atlantic coast following the herds as the ice age melted. These new ideas are not based on the Bible or the complaints of classical polemicists, but archaeological finds and linguistics.

So, the real history of Cumbria is beginning to look quite different from the orthodox story about a region populated with waifs and strays who fled from the swords of the Anglo-Saxon supermen.

Given how ubiquitous and powerful the conventional story is in British life, it might seem a little outrageous to argue that it is all a load of lies. But the problem is that since the Victorian period archaeologists and scientists have painstakingly gathered an enormous amount of material, much of it dug up out of the ground, that reveals an entirely different reality.

This body of evidence shows Cumbria was, during the period of the so-called Anglo-Saxon invasion. a powerful, militarily strong and independent Celtic kingdom. It lasted at least five hundred years after the Roman departure. Pinning down the history of Cumbria around this time is challenging because the Celts maintained an oral culture, largely doing without writing. However King Urien Rheged, the long-time ruler of North Rheged (the predecessor of Cumbria), is considered to be an historical figure who lived between 510-585. Urien led a successful coalition of British Kings that inflicted severe defeats on the expanding Anglo-Saxons. These are hardly the “dreamy” and unmartial Celts portrayed by Professor Geddes. Despite setbacks and reverses, the proud, separate kingdom of Cumbria survived Viking and Anglo-Saxon invasions and persisted more or less recognisably until it was finally dragged into England and colonised by the Normans in 1092.

My book

There isn’t room in this piece to go into Cumbria’s fascinating post-Roman history. If you are interested in it, can I recommend my book “Secrets of the Lost Kingdom” which explains it all? The purpose of the rest of this Substack is to answer the question we started with: where did the Cumbrians really come from?

Now, it is possible to construct a provocative narrative that presents all of British history as a series of colonisations emanating from the centralised monarchy set up by the Anglo-Saxons in the South of Britain.

These conquests incrementally gobbled up the regions and nations of the British Isles and then much of the world. This subjugation was always accompanied by sweeping acts of suppression.

Laws banned the vanquished people’s languages, (Welsh was banned in 1535, Irish was banned in 1541, Gaelic was banned in 1616) traditional clothes, (wearing your clan’s tartan was banned in 1746) and industries, (import of Indian cotton to the UK was banned in 1720).

The aim was to create economic dependency and a kind of cultural amnesia. When the British Empire fell apart after the Second World War, the process started moving into reverse. Colonies and the so-called Celtic Fringe have started to seize their independence back from the heirs of Salisbury – a recovery that Boris Johnson has denounced as “a disaster”. But the lack of public awareness of Cumbria’s true history is related to this campaign of suppression.

So what really happened? Fortunately, a lot more research tools are available today than the Anglo Saxons, Victorians and Tudors could get their hands on. To the discomfort of traditionalists, new techniques such as radiocarbon dating and the genetic analysis of DNA are at last inserting some badly needed facts into the debate. What it reveals is the vast majority of the people who live in Cumbria today came from the south of Europe – they are not the descendants of a beaten people chased out of the west of Britain by the Anglo Saxons.

The real story of the Celts begins 18,000 years ago during the coldest phase of the last Ice Age. Then, mile-thick glaciers covered the Lake District mountains in the ice age, gouging out steep-sided valleys and pulverising the bedrock. Quite suddenly in 6,000 BC temperatures rose to roughly what they are today. Red and roe deer, elk, auroc, (a now-extinct form of large, wild cattle) and fish became abundant.

This is when the first Cumbrians, our Mesolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors, began to travel north to colonise Britain. DNA analysis shows the incomers came mainly from northern Iberia (Spain, Portugal) and Southern France.

By 4,000 BC the Mesolithic population, though only a few hundred individuals, was flourishing within Cumbria. The hunter-gatherers lived on fish and mussels, supplemented with deer and wild boar from the woods, along with any edible plants they could find.

They kept up contacts with kin in their old homes down south, probably for centuries, and exchanged gifts.  These “Atlantic Celts” were strung out in coastal communities from Spain to Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Southern Scotland and Cumbria, all places connected by the sea. The people came to speak mutually-understandable versions of the Celtic language that originated in Spain’s Basque region. It acted as a “lingua Franca” for trade, much as English does in world markets today.

Instead of spreading from Central Europe, the Celts migrated north from Iberia via the Atlantic coast, firstly northwards, then East. Source: three 'Celtic from the West' books, each a follow up to the other, edited by Barry Cunliffe and John T. Koch.

The earliest traces of hunter-gatherers living in Cumbria have been found in Kents Bank Cavern above the rich fishing ground of Morecambe Bay. Remains include human bones, horse and elk remains dating to around 11,000 BC. LargeLarge flint-chipping sites have also been uncovered at Drigg near Seascale, Eskmeals near Ravenglass, and at Stainton West, Cumbria.

Their characteristic tool was the microlith, a tiny, pointed shard of flint used to make spear tips and the points and barbs of arrows. Evidence of hunter-gatherers burning heathland to create grazing have been found in the Eden Valley floodplain and near Carlisle. Hunter-gatherer communities shared everything. But once they came into contact with the fine goods available from Neolithic communities, such as stone axes that enhanced their ability to win marriage partners, clients and labour, the Mesolithic people became acquisitive, and abandoned their egalitarian traditions.

They moved from a culture where sharing gave you kudos to one where displays of wealth and prestige became important. This slow change became a revolution. From 4,200 BC the British landscape was transformed as waves of Neolithic immigrants arrived, bringing a more settled way of life. The incomers again came from Iberia, although this time some members of these bands could trace their ancestry back to Turkey where agriculture was invented.

There was plenty of room for them in Cumbria because the incomers made space for themselves by chopping down trees to grow barley and ancient emmer wheat in garden-sized plots. When the small fields lost fertility the Neolithic farmers abandoned them to the forest and cleared new ones.

The farmers introduced domestic cattle, pigs and sheep. A grain of emmer wheat was found in a Neolithic pottery vessel just north of Cockermouth. The best example of a Neolithic settlement is at Plasketlands, just north of Allonby. Dating from around 4,000 BC, archaeologists found the post-holes of a timber longhouse where the pioneer community lived together.

Such houses were key to establishing stable social units at a time of rapid change. For a period the incomers lived communally and only gradually moved out to create smaller, family based villages when Neolithic economy was soundly established.

Cunliffe believes these people spoke an early version of the Celtic language derived from Proto-Indo-European which had its origins as far back as 4,500BC.

At this point, the Neolithic Cumbrians started manufacturing a remarkable new invention - polished greenstone axes using rock quarried from high up on Pike o’Stickle in Langdale. Examples have been found all over Britain and Ireland. The most dramatic aspect of this revolution was the building of monumental architecture.

Construction of Castlerigg and the other stone circles only began after the communities were reliably producing an agricultural surplus. Almost all the circles were built in a tight, 200-year period when Neolithic society was first putting down roots.

So why did they build Castlerigg? Western people used to huge cities might find it hard to grasp the profound effect spectacular landscapes had on the minds of early people. Building a monument to indicate respect for such a place was not a luxury - mystical sites gave Neolithic Celts a focus for their spiritual and social lives. Castlerigg existed to foster important social relations and to help create networks of allegiance and obligation embodied in the exchange of material objects such as the axes.

The circle had a practical use, too. In today’s highly mobile age we are used to easily meeting family and friends at marriages, funerals and graduations. Meetings were even more important in prehistory when people were more far flung.

Castlerigg, for example, sits on a key Langdale axe-trading route with eastern England. Most surviving stone circles are in the west of Britain. 

Now, if the Saxon brutes had annihilated the entire Celtic population, the DNA of the massacred Celts would, by definition, not show up in the bodies of people living now. Yet a succession of gene studies shows the Celtic DNA did not just survive – in Cumbria particularly it dominates people’s genetic makeup.

For example, Cunliffe in his book Britain Begins quotes a startling DNA study showing that a huge 68 per cent of the people living in England today are the descendants of the original hunter-gatherers who arrived after the Ice Age. This figure would have been tiny if the Celts had all been murdered. A separate DNA study by Oxford University and the Wellcome Trust showed the current inhabitants of Cumbria are overwhelmingly the descendants of the people who inhabited Rheged in 600AD, and probably long before. Bryan Sykes, the Oxford University geneticist said his own separate results showed there was “no reason” why their lineages should not go back to the first Paleolithic settlers who arrived in Cumbria 13,000 years ago. Tests by another geneticist, Peter Oppenheimer, suggested Saxons contributed “just five percent to the English gene pool.”

Yes, the Romans, Vikings, Normans and others invaded Cumbria at different times. But they did so on a relatively tiny scale so that their DNA has made relatively little impact on the Celtic domination of Britain’s gene pool.

This all suggests, to put it mildly, that the Saxons did not invade or conduct genocide. It is more likely that from around 450 AD, a small minority of wealthy incomers from Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands came over in dribs and drabs. This is not to say there wasn’t prejudice, snobbery and violence between the two groups. Contemporary literature shows wealthy Anglo-Saxons looked down on the poor Celts and initially would not live near them. But the evidence is that the process was relatively peaceful.  The incomers bought land, lived alongside and eventually intermarried with the local population.

The Celts were not massacred or driven into fringe areas such as Cumbria. In fact, as we have seen, the Cumbrians came, not from the east, but from the Iberian south, up the Atlantic coast.

They did eventually come to call themselves English - but their genes were unaffected by that. In Cumbria, as you would expect, the process of absorbing this foreign cultural influence was slow and stubborn.

Many Lakelanders were still speaking the ancient Celtic language, Cumbric, in the 13th Century. And that is what you would expect from the proud, independent and undefeated Cumbrian Celts – who have a justified grievance against pompous Victorian Professors.

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You can read more about this topic in my book, People of the Sacred Valley. You can pick up a copy from the New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, Bookends in Keswick or Carlisle and Sam Read in Grasmere.

You can get it as a printed book by post instantly here: