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!