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terms Celt and Gaul were pretty much interchangeable, used to describe the inhabitants of their
territories in France and northern Italy and to tell them apart from the real enemy – the Germans.
However, when we come to the people of Britain and Ireland during the Roman period, nobody
called them Celts. They called them a lot of things, but not Celts. Neither is there any record of
anyone from the Isles using the word Celt to describe themselves until the eighteenth century, after
Edward Lhuyd had reinvented the term for his language family and then for the people who spoke
it. If a Celt is someone who speaks one of the Celtic languages as defined by Lhuyd, then everyone
in Britain and Ireland would have been a Celt when the Romans invaded. If a Celt is someone
whose ancestors lived in the parts of the Isles where these languages are still spoken today, then the
definition becomes much narrower and more akin to what the Celtic brand now represents. So, just
as to the Greeks, there is no precise definition of Celt. It is amorphous, fluid, capable of many
simultaneous meanings. To some, like the archaeologist Simon James, it is a shameless invention.
In his angry polemic The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention?, James concludes
that ‘The ancient Celts are an essentially bogus and recent invention’, an invention used most
recently for political purposes in the lead-up to Scottish and Welsh devolution. C. S. Lewis
expressed the ambiguity and uncertainty in softer tones when he wrote, ‘anything is possible in the
fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the Gods but of reason.’
When it comes to getting hold of a definition of the Celt, or Celtic, a definition to be tested by
genetics, I found myself struggling, enveloped in a mist of uncertainty and enigma. For sure there
was the marketable expression of Celticity, the silver brooches, the tartan ties, the kilts. But these
are caricatures of something much deeper. What it means to be Celtic, to feel Celtic, is very
different. As is to be expected of him, Sir Walter Scott’s description of the Celtic Muse is highly
sentimental. He writes in his novel Waverley:
To speak in the poetical language of my country, the seat of the Celtic muse is in the mist of
the secret and solitary hill, and her voice is the murmur of the mountain stream. He who
wooes her must love the barren rock more than the fertile valley and the solitude of the
desert better than the festivity of the hall.
And yet there is something in what Scott says. The emotional, almost the physical, attachment to the
land is central to the poetry of the Celt. Out of term time, when I am not required to be in Oxford, I
live on the Isle of Skye. My house once belonged to Sorley Maclean, widely acclaimed as the
greatest Gaelic poet of the twentieth century. In fact, that is where I am writing this chapter and it is
in his old filing cabinet that the manuscript will remain until I send it off to be typed. Sorley’s
poetry is rich in reference to the woods, the sea and the hills. In ‘The Cuillin’ he writes:
Loch of loches in Coire Lagain
Were it not for the springs of Coire Mhadaidh
The spring above all other springs
In the green and white Fair Corrie.
Coire Lagain is a high place in the Cuillin Hills of Skye, hemmed in by hundreds of feet of the
steep rock ramparts that protect the high ridge. But this is not at all a romanticized description of