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and even inland to the Grampian region. There are far fewer Land Jasmines in the Isles. I found
none in Ireland, only one in Wales, just five in Scotland, again in the Grampian region and in
Strathclyde. The rest are in England and concentrated there in the Midlands and the east.
After that, the genetic bedrock on the maternal side was in place. By about 6,000 years ago, the
pattern was set for the rest of the history of the Isles and very little has disturbed it since. Once
here, the matrilineal DNA mutated and diversified, each region developing slightly different local
versions, but without losing its ancient structure. Without agonizing over the precise definition, this
is our Celtic/Pictish stock and, except in two places, it has remained undiluted to this day. On our
maternal side, almost all of us are Celts.
I can see no evidence at all of a large-scale immigration from central Europe to Ireland and the
west of the Isles generally, such as has been used to explain the presence there of the main body of
‘Gaels’ or ‘Celts’. The ‘Celts’ of Ireland and the Western Isles are not, as far as I can see from the
genetic evidence, related to the Celts who spread south and east to Italy, Greece and Turkey from
the heartlands of Hallstadt and La Tène in the shadows of the Alps during the first millennium BC.
The people of the Isles who now feel themselves to be Celts have far deeper roots in the Isles than
that and, as far as I can see, their ancestors have been here for several thousand years. The Irish
myths of the Milesians were right in one respect. The genetic evidence shows that a large
proportion of Irish Celts, on both the male and female side, did arrive from Iberia at or about the
same time as farming reached the Isles. They joined the Mesolithics who were already here, having
reached the Isles either by the same maritime route or overland from Europe before the Isles were
cut off by the rising sea.
The connection to Spain is also there in the myth of Brutus, who came to the Isles from the
Mediterranean and up the Atlantic coast to found New Troy in the land of Albion. This too may be
the faint echo of the same origin myth as the Milesian Irish and the connection to Iberia is almost as
strong in the British regions as it is in Ireland.
One myth that the genetic evidence certainly does not support is the relic status of the Picts.
Their ancestors, just like the rest of the people of the Isles, have been there a very long time, but
they are from the same basic stock. They are from the same mixture of Iberian and European
Mesolithic ancestry that forms the Pictish/Celtic substructure of the Isles. It is very clear from the
genetic evidence that there is no fundamental genetic difference between Pict and Celt.
This ancient matrilineal bedrock has been overlain to any substantial extent in only two places.
In Orkney and Shetland there was a large settlement of women from Norway during the Viking
period and the ancestors of roughly 40 per cent of today’s Shetlanders and 30 per cent of modern
Orcadians first stepped ashore from a Viking ship. But plenty of others in the Northern Isles can
trace their ancestry back well before the Viking age to the sophisticated Picts who built the brochs
at Mousa in Shetland and Gurness in Orkney.
The second overlay is in eastern and northern England, above the Danelaw line which ran from
London to Chester. Above that line, and particularly in the east, there are clear signals of female
settlement overlying the Celtic substratum. As we have already touched on, it is very difficult to
distinguish Saxon, Dane and Norman on a genetic basis, since they are all from the same
Germanic/Scandinavian origins, but the concentration of these signals above rather than below the
Danelaw line makes me think they are more likely to be Viking than Saxon or Norman. The
approximate extent of this overlay I estimate to be between 10 per cent in the east and 5 per cent in