The White Mare: The Dalraida Trilogy, Book One (81 page)

The Sacred Isle

In the book, I equate the Sacred Isle with the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides, purely because here, on a lonely headland facing the Atlantic, happens to stand the greatest stone circle in the British Isles after Stonehenge and Avebury: Callanish. The broch tower that is the site of Rhiann’s raid is also mostly still standing nearby; it is called Dun Carloway. Interestingly, the historian Plutarch relates the story of a traveller, Demetrius of Tarsus, who visited a ‘holy island’ probably in the Hebrides, during Agricola’s campaigns.

The Female Royal Line

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Picts (my Albans) is that there is some evidence that royalty was passed through the female line, rather than from father to son. If true, this puts the Scottish people out of step with what we know of the early Irish and British. This idea was one of the starting points for my story.

The Old Ones / The Sisterhood

Following on from the above, I began to muse that perhaps the reason why only Scotland had this strange custom could have been because an ancient form of Mother Goddess worship, which had died out elsewhere, survived there. In the book, I’m proposing that the female-centred religion of the Neolithic or Bronze Age people (the ‘Old Ones’) may also have involved an order of priestesses. The existence of the Druid order is well-known to classical writers, so I had the idea that, at this time, the two are still co-existing. A note to all boffins: I know there is no evidence for this!

Stones / Mounds

All of the standing stone arrangements and tomb mounds in the United Kingdom were built by Neolithic or Bronze Age peoples before 1500
BC
, not by my Iron Age peoples in the first century ad. However, most scholars agree that Iron Age peoples probably venerated and
possibly used older monuments for their own rites. Though there is evidence for this in other parts of Scotland and Britain, there is no evidence that the monuments in the Kilmartin valley or the great stone circle of Callanish on the Isle of Lewis were used in this way.

Pictish Stones

The most well-known aspect of the Picts is that they left behind extraordinary carved stones, mostly dating from the sixth or seventh century ad onwards. Although I’m aware that we have none dated to my time period, I had the idea that the same symbols were used to decorate wood, walls and bodies much, much earlier. Drust’s few stones are an invention, but I’m proposing that the idea died out with him for a few more centuries. Perhaps his eagle stones are even now buried somewhere, waiting to be discovered! The symbol used for chapter headings is a real Pictish symbol, as seen on the later stones.

One point of interest: I chose the boar as Eremon’s family totem because at Dunadd there is a famous rock carving of a boar. Though it is of much later date, I like to think that it was Eremon who brought the boar symbol to Dunadd and that it became a sign of the Dalriadan royal house because of him.

Names of Landmarks

For some of the major landmarks, I’ve given the real meaning as far as we can ascertain. Thus the (existing) hillfort of Traprain Law, Samana’s home, seems to mean the ‘place of the tree’. The Leven river that flows from Loch Lomond probably means the Elm River. Lomond itself probably means ‘beacon’ so we have the Loch of the Beacon and The Beacon for the mountain Ben Lomond. The Clyde was known as the Clutha, but its meaning is not clear: the same applies to the Forth. Likewise, no one seems to know what Crìanan means, so I’ve left it in its original form. Calgacus’s Dun of the Waves is an invention, but I’ve sited it at present day Inverness because it is at the mouth of the Great Glen, and because the form of the Moray Firth makes this site easy to defend from sea attacks.