This article is the first in a series which will hopefully fully examine the faintest strand of tradition in Scotland: the tales of the Welsh speaking British kingdoms which once ruled northern England and southern Scotland. An unfortunate barrier to the study of these traditions for the unwary is the unwelcome over-writing of Arthurian 'tradition', a dubious palimpsest with both ancient and modern variants.
Sites associated with King Arthur have been - to coin a phrase - done to death over the past few decades. Every amateur historical sleuth unfortunate enough to be bitten by the Arthurian bug (when he or she should really be out investigating something more substantial) seeks desperately to nail the king or the battle-leader to specific points in the landscape, as if by doing this they would somehow substantiate his reality once and for all. Top of the list is, of course, Camelot - which may or may not be associated with Cadbury in Somerset.
And there the story stalls, like many of the other triads. Gwerthmwl was evidently, in some other longer tale, killed in Wales, but we do not know the details. The story may have originally been entirely set in the North; we will never know. Rachel Bromiwch tells us that Allt Maelawr is the hill-fort of Pendinas to the south of Aberystwyth.
Even more intriguing is Triad 63 which gives a bare list of the Three Bull-Spectres of the Island of Britain (another version stated stag spectre) and includes:
The only other substantial wisp of tradition about this forgotten chieftain of Galloway is contained in the Stanzas of the Graves in the Black Book of Carmarthen, where Gyrthmwl, like many of his northern compatriots, is exhumed and given a grave somewhere in Wales, where traditions of the north migrated en masse. In his case his resting place is designated as near Pontlliw in Carmarthenshire:
Barring the appearances in the Triads, Gwerthmwl 'the ruler' only fleetingly appears elsewhere, listed as one of the advisers of Arthur in the tale The Dream of Rhonabwy. Then he vanishes from tradition and, unfortunately, we will never know who he was.
Sites associated with King Arthur have been - to coin a phrase - done to death over the past few decades. Every amateur historical sleuth unfortunate enough to be bitten by the Arthurian bug (when he or she should really be out investigating something more substantial) seeks desperately to nail the king or the battle-leader to specific points in the landscape, as if by doing this they would somehow substantiate his reality once and for all. Top of the list is, of course, Camelot - which may or may not be associated with Cadbury in Somerset.
The unhappiest hunting ground for detectives seeking out the Once and Future King is perhaps the passage in the early 9th century Welsh composition Historia Brittonum which lists the supposes sites of Arthur's battles. No-one has every satisfactorily and categorically identified the places in this lkist where Arthur is supposed to have fought. Significantly, perhaps, the only place which seems clear is Coed Celyddon, the Forest of Caledonia, which must be within the confines of Scotland, but whether this means somewhere in the Borders area is still unclear. (The next most identifiable battle place is the City of the Legions, probably Chester.) Opinion is divided about how ancient the incorporated list of conflict sites actually is. The former view that the places were taken from an older poem celebrating the battles of Arthur is no longer given credence by every modern scholar.
Battles aside, one major modern strand of current Arthurian speculation is the school of thought which tries to prove that Arthur came from the north. A lot of this, in fairly dubious publications, insists that Arthur was the similarly named son of Aedan of Dal Riata, who died in 603. The evidence for this equation is in fact pathetically weak and need not concern us here.
The second class of Arthurian site in Scotland is the Arthur names. There is, of course, Ben Arthur near Loch Lomond and a cluster of Arthur place-names in Strathmore near the Perthshire-Angus border, plus a sprinkle of other places named after him, here and there. But, in a category by itself perhaps, is the place named in Welsh legend as one of the three seats of Arthur, Pen Rhionydd.
Gerthmwl Wledig in Welsh Tradition
The primary inhabitant of this place in the north (though he is not always named as such) is an extremely shadowy character who appears only in Welsh tradition and especially in the Triads, the summary grouping of related tales which served as memory aids to bards relating the full versions of ancient legends. In Triad 1, Three Tribal Thrones of the Island of Britain we learn about the elusive northern stronghold of power (the other places are St David's in Wales and Celliwig in Cornwall):
Arthur as Chief Prince in Pen Rhionydd in the North, and Gerthmwl Wledig as Chief Elder, and Cyndeyrn Garthwys as Chief Bishop.
Some Welsh commentators identified this with the Mull of Galloway and it is possible that it equates with Ptolemy's Rerigonion, which means 'very royal place'. If so, it would be a remarkable instance of continuity of a place-name from the Iron Age to Medieval times, and all the more remarkable because the name is found in Welsh and not in any Scottish source. (It seems to be unique to the triads also.)
But , before we venture to locate the 'very royal place,' we should take a pause to consider the people. Arthur needs no introduction and the third person in the triad is the patron of Strathclyde, St Kentigern/Mungo. Like Arthur, the saint seems to have been drawn into the story and pinned to his locality by his regional, if not national, fame. There are no historical, legendary or hagiographical associations with St Kentigern and the far west of Galloway whatever. Gerthmwl Wledig is a trickier proposition, for we know very little about him. The title wledig signifies he was of some imptotance. Was he possibly a prince or warlord of the Novantae, the British tribe who occupied what later was called Galloway (and whose name means the Young Hunters)?
He appears again in Triad 44, Three Horses who carried the Three Horse-Burdens. The other two strands of the triads feature characters of the Old North and relate to incidents, one almost certainly fictitious and the second concerning a real battle. The first tells of a supposed raid from the Strathclyde region to Anglesey (the horse burden of Elidir Mwynfawr) and the second mentions a prelude to the Battle of Arderydd in 573 (and a horse burden of the sons of Eliffer). Although the incidents are likely unhistorical the people in them are likely to have actually existed. The third section concerns us in detail:
Heith, horse of the sons of Gwerthmwl Wledig, bore the third Horse-Burden: he carried Gweir and Gleis and Archanad up the hill of Maelawr in Ceredigion to avenge their father.
And there the story stalls, like many of the other triads. Gwerthmwl was evidently, in some other longer tale, killed in Wales, but we do not know the details. The story may have originally been entirely set in the North; we will never know. Rachel Bromiwch tells us that Allt Maelawr is the hill-fort of Pendinas to the south of Aberystwyth.
Even more intriguing is Triad 63 which gives a bare list of the Three Bull-Spectres of the Island of Britain (another version stated stag spectre) and includes:
...the Spectre of Gyrthmwl Wledig.
The only other substantial wisp of tradition about this forgotten chieftain of Galloway is contained in the Stanzas of the Graves in the Black Book of Carmarthen, where Gyrthmwl, like many of his northern compatriots, is exhumed and given a grave somewhere in Wales, where traditions of the north migrated en masse. In his case his resting place is designated as near Pontlliw in Carmarthenshire:
The grave of a chieftain of Britain in the open country of Gwynassed, where the Lliw goes into the Llychwr, in Kelli Friafael (is) the grave of Gyrthmul.(The above translation is given by Bromwich. The version by John Bollard is: 'The grave of a chieftain of Pictland in the open land of Gwynasedd, where the Lliw goes into the Llwchwr; in Celli Friafael, the grave of Gyrthmwl.' Jones give the following: 'The grave of a chieftain from the North is in the open land of Gwynasedd, where the Lliw flows into the Llychwr; at Cell Friafael in the grave of Gyrthmwl.')
Barring the appearances in the Triads, Gwerthmwl 'the ruler' only fleetingly appears elsewhere, listed as one of the advisers of Arthur in the tale The Dream of Rhonabwy. Then he vanishes from tradition and, unfortunately, we will never know who he was.
Ptolemy's Rerigonium
The Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy wrote his Geographica in the 2nd century AD and was the first to add to the meagre written record of the peoples and places of early Roman Britain. To him we are indebted for giving us the northern British tribal names of Damnonii, Selgovae, Carvetii, Novantae, Votadini.
The Location of Pen Rhionydd
Where was Pen Rhionydd and was it identical with the earlier Rerigonium? W.J. Watson stated:
Rerigonion stood on the Rerigonios gulf or bay, which is agreed to be by position and name Loch Ryan...and there can be no doubt that Penrhyn Rhionydd is the old Welsh name of the northern end of the Rhinns of Galloway, that is to say, on the promontory on the west side of Loch Ryan...Rerigonion this means "very royal place"; it was, in fact, the royal seat of the Novantae...
The most significant modern feature of this peninsula is Cairn Ryan, which is possibly an unlikely candidate for 'a very royal place', being principally noteworthy as a ferry terminal which connects Scotland with Northern Ireland. But there may be a clue here in its location. It is often found that places on the borders of territories during the early Middle Ages had significance, both symbolically and politically. Such places were sometimes deliberately used as meeting places between kingdoms or peoples and sometimes religious settlements were deliberately placed there so ecclesiastics could both mediate between tribes and have access to peoples on both sides of the border. Any settlement here would be on the border, albeit a sea-separated one, between Britain and Ireland.
In Welsh tradition also there is possibly a clue to the renown of the place, in fleeting mentions in the Book of Taliesin. One poem, 'Teyrnon's Prize Song', asks various questions regarding the qualities of an unnamed hero and includes the lines,' Is he famous, a wise one?/Or the ruler of Rheon', whci place may likely be Caer Reon, somewhere possibly in the vicinity of modern cairn Ryan. Another poem, 'I Make My Plea to God,' speaks of warfare far and wide in Britain, 'From Penwith Head as far as Loch Ryan' (Pen ren Wleth and Luch Reon', Penwith in Cornwall and Loch Ryan).
It is believed that there were settlers arriving from Ireland into this western extremity of Galloway from prehistoric times, though the population patterns are complicated by later movements. Galloway as a whole was conspicuously Gaelic in speech and character into the 17th century, the result of Norse-Irish settlement in the Middle Ages. But, before this and the English settlement in 8th century in the eastern part of the region, Galloway was ruled over by Celtic British, Welsh-speaking elite. A trace of the linguistic and social structures remarkably survived into the modern era. John MacQueen and others have pointed out the presence of local nicknamed in the Rhinns area: Creenies and Gossocks. The Creenies was a rather derogatory nickname for a poor class of people in the peninsula ( as noted in the 1901 book Galloway Gossip by R. de B. Trotter). Historians have recognised that this term is an Anglicization of Cruithneach, a people of northern Ireland and probably means that such a people migrated here and were regarded as low in status by other parts of the population. Remarkably, the same source named the Gossocks as another work for this impoverished breed. In this case the term appears to be cognate with the Welsh term Gwasog, meaning 'servile person'. At some stage, therefore, there was a substantial Irish population here which was held in subjugation to some extent by a dominant class of Welsh/Brittonic speaking people.
The prime candidate for Ptolomy's place-name has long been Innermessan, a site on the east side of the sea-loch of Loch Ryan (and between modern Stranraer to the south and Cairn Ryan to the north). Although he is the only person who names this presumably important place, the Ravenna Cosmography mentions somewhere called Brigomono, which some have thought as the same place. Mike McCarthy has endorsed the identification of Innermessan, though we we never know more about the place until some happy accident of archaeological discovery.
Sources
Bollard, John K. and Griffith, Anthony, Englynion y Beddau, The Stanzas of the Graves (Llanrwst, 2015), p. 35.
Bromwich, Rachel (ed. and trans.), Trioedd Ynys Prydein, The Triads of the Island of Britain (2nd. edn., Cardiff, 1978), pp. 1-4, 109-10, 170-1, 388-9.
Gantz, Jeffrey (trans.), The Mabinogion (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 190.
Jones, Thomas, 'The Black Book of Carmarthen Stanzas of the Graves,' Proceedings of the British Academy, 3 (1967), pp. 97-137.
Lewis, Gwyneth and Williams, Rowan (trans.), The Book of Taliesin (London, 2019). p. 70, p. 73.
MacQueen, St Nynia (2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 45-47.
McCarthy, Mike, 'Rerigonium: a lost city of the Novantae,' Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 134 (2004), pp. 119-29.
Morris-Jones, Sir John, 'Taliesin,' Y Cymmrodorion, 28 (1918), p 222.
Bromwich, Rachel (ed. and trans.), Trioedd Ynys Prydein, The Triads of the Island of Britain (2nd. edn., Cardiff, 1978), pp. 1-4, 109-10, 170-1, 388-9.
Gantz, Jeffrey (trans.), The Mabinogion (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 190.
Jones, Thomas, 'The Black Book of Carmarthen Stanzas of the Graves,' Proceedings of the British Academy, 3 (1967), pp. 97-137.
Lewis, Gwyneth and Williams, Rowan (trans.), The Book of Taliesin (London, 2019). p. 70, p. 73.
MacQueen, St Nynia (2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 45-47.
McCarthy, Mike, 'Rerigonium: a lost city of the Novantae,' Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 134 (2004), pp. 119-29.
Morris-Jones, Sir John, 'Taliesin,' Y Cymmrodorion, 28 (1918), p 222.
Watson, The History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1926, rep. 1986), p. 34.
