IX—A GUESS AT THE POSSIBLE PURPOSE OF LANGBANK AND DUMBUCK
The Dumbuck structure, when occupied, adjoined and commanded a ford across the undeepened Clyde of uncommercial times. So Sir Arthur Mitchell informs us. [51a] The Langbank structure, as I understand, is opposite to that of Dumbuck on the southern side of the river. If two strongly built structures large enough for occupation exist on opposite sides of a ford, their purpose is evident: they guard the ford, like the two stone camps on each side of the narrows of the Avon at Clifton.
Dr. Munro, on the other hand, says, “the smallness of the habitable area on both “sites” puts them out of the category of military forts.” [51b] My suggestion is that the structure was so far “military” as is implied in its being occupied,
with Langbank on the opposite bank of Clyde by keepers of the ford. In 1901 Dr. Munro wrote, “even the keepers of the watch-tower at the ford of Dumbuck had their quern, and ground their own corn.” [52a] This idea has therefore passed through Dr. Munro’s mind, though I did not know the fact till after I had come to the same hypothesis. The habitable area was therefore, adequate to the wants of these festive people. I conjecture that these “keepers of the watch-tower at the ford” were military “watchers of the ford,” for that seems to me less improbable than that “a round tower with very thick walls, [52b] like the brochs and other forts of North Britain,” was built in the interests of the navigation of Clyde at a very remote period. [52c]
But really all this is of no importance to the argument. People lived in these sites, perhaps as early as 400 a.d. or earlier. Such places of safety were sadly needed during the intermittent and turbulent Roman occupation.
X—THE LAST DAY AT OLD DUMBUCK
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 Zuñis 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!