Suppose the sites were occupied by the watchers of the ford. There they
lived, no man knows how long, on their perch over the waters of Clyde.
They dwelt at top of a stone structure some eight feet above low water
mark, for they could not live on the ground floor, of which the walls,
fifty feet thick at the base, defied the waves of the high tides driven
by the west wind.
There our friends lived, and probably tatooed themselves, and slew _Bos
Longifrons_ and the deer that, in later ages, would have been forbidden
game to them. If I may trust Bede, born in 672, and finishing his
History in 731, our friends were Picts, and spoke a now unknown language,
_not_ that of the Bretonnes, or Cymri, or Welsh, who lived on the
northern side of the Firth of Clyde. Or the occupants of Dumbuck, on the
north side of the river, were Cymri; those of Langbank, on the south
side, were Picts. I may at once say that I decline to be responsible for
Bede, and his ethnology, but he lived nearer to those days than we do.
With their ladder of fifteen feet long, a slab of oak, split from the
tree by wedges, and having six holes chopped out of the solid for steps,
they climbed to their perch, the first floor of their abode. I never
heard of a ladder made in this way, but the Zunis used simply to cut
notches for the feet in the trunk of a tree, and "sich a getting up
stairs" it must have been, when there was rain, and the notches were wet!
Time passed, the kitchen midden grew, and the Cymri founded Ailcluith,
"Clyde rock," now Dumbarton; "to this day," says Bede, "the strongest
city of the Britons." {54} Then the Scots came, and turned the Britons
out; and St. Columba came, and St. Kentigern from Wales (573-574), and
began to spread the Gospel among the pagan Picts and Cymri. Stone
amulets and stone idols, (if the disputed objects are idols and amulets,)
"have had their day," (as Bob Acres says "Damns have had their day,")
and, with Ailcluith in Scots' hands, "'twas time for us to go" thought
the Picts and Cymri of Langbank and Dumbuck.
Sadly they evacuate their old towers or cairns before the Scots who now
command the Dumbuck ford from Dumbarton. They cross to land on their
stone causeway at low water. They abandon the old canoe in the little
dock where it was found by Mr. Bruce. They throw down the venerable
ladder. They leave behind only the canoe, the deer horns,
stone-polishers, sharpened bones, the lower stone of a quern, and the now
obsolete, or purely folk-loreish stone "amulets," or "pendants," and the
figurines, which to call "idols" is unscientific, while to call them
"totems" is to display "facetious and rejoicing ignorance." Dr. Munro
merely quotes this foolish use of the term totem by others.
These old things the evicted Picts and Cymri abandoned, while they
carried with them their more valuable property, their Early Iron axes and
knives, their treasured bits of red "Samian ware," inherited from Roman
times, their amber beads, and the rest of their bibelots, down to the
minutest fragment of pottery.
Or it may not have been so: the conquering Scots may have looted the
cairns, and borne the Pictish cairn-dwellers into captivity.
Looking at any broch, or hill fort, or crannog, the fancy dwells on the
last day of its occupation: the day when the canoe was left to subside
into the mud and decaying vegetable matter of the loch. In changed
times, in new conditions, the inhabitants move away to houses less damp,
and better equipped with more modern appliances. I see the little troop,
or perhaps only two natives, cross the causeway, while the Minstrel sings
in Pictish or Welsh a version of
"The Auld Hoose, the Auld Hoose,
What though the rooms were sma',
Wi' six feet o' diameter,
And a rung gaun through the ha'!"
The tears come to my eyes, as I think of the Last Day of Old Dumbuck,
for, take it as you will, there _was_ a last day of Dumbuck, as of windy
Ilios, and of "Carthage left deserted of the sea."
So ends my little idyllic interlude, and, if I am wrong, blame Venerable
Bede!