The Auldest Tung

Dun Nechtain

But before the suggestion of this other grouping is explored more there is perhaps the most important piece of the historical jigsaw that we have been assembling still to be dropped into place. It is the Battle of Dun Nechtain. It took place in 685 AD and was fought between Picts and an Anglic army from Northumbria. It resulted in the rout of that Anglic army, size unknown, and the death probably in Pictish territory of the Northumbrian king, Ecgfrith, and it came about because, firstly, the Angles thought they could make mis-use of the Pictish system of heredity and, secondly, they did not read the signs and over-extended themselves militarily.

In 672 AD Bridei III came to the Pictish throne. He was about fifty at the time so no youngster. Moreover, his accession followed a campaign the previous year, perhaps at the original behest of Oswiu, the powerful Northumbrian king and father of Ecgfrith, who had died in February 670 AD and mounted by the sub-king, the provincial governor of North Northumbria, with his capital at Dunbar. Indeed Bridei’s place on the Pictish throne appears to have been due to those same Northumbrians and he himself also not much of a Pict at all. His father is said to have been Beli, king of the Britons of Alclud, and his mother a daughter of Edwin, King of Northumbria, the same Edwin who had died forty years earlier at the Battle of Hatfield Chase. So Bridei was on the face of it half-Briton and half Anglic, and his mother-tongue may even have been Anglic.

However, things were not quite as blatant as first seems. In fact Bridei had Pictish blood and some claim to the throne could be justified through his paternal grandfather, Nechtain, the King Nechtan of fifty-five year earlier. Which is all fine except that the Picts are thought to have inherited through their maternal lines. Grandfather’s did not count and Bridei should not even have been in the reckoning. It looks as if he had been imposed not chosen. In fact it is more or less certain. He replaced Drest, said to have been deposed after a failed Pictish revolt the campaign was designed to end, which it did with a decisive victory for newly-crowned Ecgfrith at Two Rivers that same year, a battle suggested to have taken place near Perth but with multiple, possible locations. However, the “revolt” could just as well have been an understandable response from Pictland to perhaps twenty years of pressure from Anglic expansion across the Forth territorially and dynastically. With regard to the former from Edinburgh to Leslie deep into Fife once the Firth is crossed it is just fifteen miles and to Lawhill at the head of the salient into Pictish Perthshire from both the Kincardine crossing and Alloa twenty-five. And then with regard to the latter there had been Talorgan, the Pictish king, albeit briefly, just fifteen years earlier before Drest, and his brother, Gartnait, before him, but legitimately as it happens. That was due to his Pictish mother but does not disguise the fact that his father had been Eanfrith of Northumbria, his uncle Oswiu of the same and Ecgfrith had been his cousin.

Nevertheless, the fact is that Bridei became king, seems initially to have been compliant but after a decade in power seems to have begun to have his own ideas and expansionist ones at that. In 680/81 AD he laid siege to the stronghold of Dunottar on the east coast by Stonehaven. In theory it should also have Pictish but lay on the southern boundary of a Germanic enclave, so whether those holding the fortress were renegade Picts, local “Saxons” playing up or an irritating Anglic garrison is unclear. Then in 682 AD he mounted an expedition against the Orkneys, which should on the face of it again have been Pictish, if possibly renegade, but might, indeed seems increasingly likely given modern archaeology, to have been an at least part-Germanic outpost, possibly Anglic but perhaps already Viking, i.e. real, pre-Norse Viking. And it was with a campaign so violent, so lacking in conciliation that the islands were described in the Irish Annals of Ulster as “destroyed”.

Furthermore in 683 AD he began a campaign against the Gaels of Dal Riata, that is Argyll, Lorne and the near islands, that started with them attacking but probably failing to take his Strathearn, i.e. Southern Pictish stronghold, Dundurn by Loch Earn, and ended with the Gaels’ fortress at Dunadd by Crinan being attacked in return and quite possibly falling. So the point seems to have been reached when the Northumbrians, perhaps particularly the Edinburgh-based North Northumbrians, started to think that Bridei was becoming not just too active but too powerful. He seemed to be in control basically of all of Caledonia and also the lands from south of the Highland Line at least to the Forth. He perhaps was even perceived as and could, indeed, have been beginning to apply pressure on areas outwith his permitted orbit, the York Northumbrians regarding him as a sub-king, who was overstepping the mark and, when an order was sent to row back and he did not, enforcement was by the highest level deemed necessary. It may even have been that both parties recognised that, whilst Bridei was indeed part-Anglic, it was Deiran Anglic not Northumbrian, which might for him have meant non-allegiance and for them non-adherence.

As result Northumbria raised an army and under the command of Ecgfrith himself it came north significantly not just to posture from the Lothians but to Tayside. For his part Bridei recognised what was happening and seems to have carried on something of a guerrilla war avoiding a second Two Rivers until in 685 AD the two met at Dun Nechtain or Nechtan’s Mere, the battle that would essentially create Scotland as we know it as a separate entity to England. The battle itself took place on 20^th May, even today a good time as it is as winter is over at long last. It, the battle, had long been considered to have been at Dunnichen in Angus. It’s a good location for it, in a gap in the Sidlaw Hills immediately north of the Tay on what was thought to be the edge of Germanic territory and it has or had the necessary mere, a now drained loch. However, in more recent times a second location has been suggested, Dunachton in Badenoch. It is ninety miles to the north by Kingussie, in an area that in that season would have just been clear of snow, also has its lake, Loch Insch, is on what would have been the borders of Fortriu and in the narrowest of gaps between high mountains to the west and a River Spey in spate. It would have been perfect, rough ambush territory. Moreover, it was in a no man’s land that would have given the Northumbrians long supply lines, allowed Bridei short one’s from the north and would have let him harass as he drew on an opposition that was in a region that was beyond anything they would have seen before and in a way Dunnichen could not and was not. And here Roger of Wendover’s description, written without the benefits of modern mapping and almost certainly not having seen the place is revealing;

“he (Ecgfrith) was led by a stratagem of his enemies, who pretended to flee, into the narrow fastness of their inaccessible mountains, where he perished with the greatest part of the force he had brought with him”

It even sounds in contrast to Dunnichen like what I know with my own eyes, moor and not fields, mountains and not hills, and there is more. Far from being on the edge of an area of Anglic control, and here I have my own research as back-up, the Angus location is in a place where harassment would have been virtually impossible as it lies almost twenty miles inside what would probably have been at least notionally Anglic-controlled lands at the time and given every advantage to those defeated, not the eventual victors.

How large the Northumbrian forces were is unknown, just as those of their opposition are but not only did the Picts triumph but Ecgfrith himself was killed. Moreover, no second army was sent north, at least not for fifteen years even though Aldfrith, Ecgfrith’s half-brother, succeeded him. And the result was that Northumbria never would recover the control it had had in Scotland or at least Scotland north of Forth. But then Aldfrith had been raised in Ireland, his mother Irish, was scholarly by nature and had been preparing to enter the Church. Retribution was not high up his agenda. However, perhaps more curious still was that the clearly not inconsiderable, certainly apparently Anglic-friendly and therefore assumed Germanic population of coastal, eastern Scotland from Fife northwards, which Ecgfrith prior to Dun Nechtain must confidently have considered his territory, having launched his campaign, I reiterate, from Angus not Edinburgh, appears to make not a single demand of the Northumbrians for corrective actions either. In fact from north of the Forth in contrast even to the eventual reaction from its south there was a general, almost strange, calm acceptance bordering on complete indifference, for a beginning of an explanation of which I turn elsewhere for help.