Mariners, Mobility and the Isle of May

Nowadays, you can pay a little bit and catch a boat out to the Isle of May, located out at the mouth of the Firth of Forth in Scotland. It’s not a long journey (about an hour) and if the weather’s fair, it’s a smooth trip.

Unfortunately, when I visited the Isle in summer of 2022, the journey was not so easy. My friends and I sat at the back of the boat, in the open elements, and rain dripped down my coat as we bumped up and down on choppy surf. The elements aside, I was riveted: I was getting a slight glimpse into the sort of watery travel that forms a central part of my research.

The Isle of May is frequently discussed in early medieval Scottish studies largely because of an archaeological excavation carried out in the mid-nineties on the site of a medieval monastery on the island. While the later medieval evidence was abundant and full of interesting information, the radiocarbon dating added a new and interesting element: some of the graves could be dated to the fifth to seventh centuries. These graves, and their implications for monastic history, have been amply discussed by scholars such as Adrián Maldonado - but I’m interested in them today for a slightly different reason.

Tracking watery travel can be difficult, especially in the centuries I research - roughly the fifth to the eighth - which are not known for their bevy of textual sources. The best research on the period in Britain has tended to come from scholars who feel comfortable stepping outside the text, who turn towards archaeological evidence and the material to open up new vistas and find forgotten people. This often means each researcher has to find their own balance - which evidence do we prioritize? Which evidence do we take with a grain of salt?

The fifth-to-seventh century graves on the Isle of May hint at watery travel after the end of the Roman era. Their mere existence on the island demonstrates that people were still moving around the waters of the Forth in a time when our textual evidence of such movement is nil. Knowing what this movement looked like is valuable to my research, as movement and mobility are key parts of what makes a periphery peripheral.

So, today, with the Isle of May trip fresh in my mind, I’m asking:

What was seafaring like around the Firth of Forth in my period?

The problem of mobility and medieval movement has always been looming over my shoulder as I worked on the concept of the frontier. A paradox of movement has always existed around borders, modern and premodern. Some impede human mobility, others are eminently crossable, and while many exist at the ‘edge’ of society, they often create new centers for trade, communication, and cross-cultural encounters.

Such new centers on the periphery are easy to imagine in a land-locked context, but water adds a whole new dimension, especially in the premodern. Books such as the classic study The Corrupting Sea by Horden and Purcell have illustrated that such watery spaces could be centers of connectivity. However, it’s hard to ignore that water is also often quite inaccessible, forming a potent barrier to simple travel. This contradiction was well-known to the Romans when they constructed both of their British walls: placing the Antonine Wall between the Firth of Clyde and the Forth allowed easy resupply by sea, but also kept the edges of the wall safe and secure.

So, understanding the seafaring going on around the Firth of Forth after Rome is important to understanding the frontier, because water can be both a barrier and connector! So was the Forth filled with ships trading interesting goods, or was it a dead space? This is where the question of evidence comes to the fore.

Some of the best recent studies of watery connectivity have tracked human movement with a wide variety of evidence. Horden and Purcell found movement in trade goods and merchant records. Ewan Campbell found Irish Sea trade in glass and porcelain fragments, and K.A. Hemer et al. used isotope analysis on human remains to find early medieval migration to Wales from overseas.

When I try to apply these approaches to the Firth of Forth, we run into a multitude of problems.

First, the textual evidence. We’re already working with a relatively small body of written sources for the period, and what they offer for the Forth is slim. The eighth-century Northumbrian monk known as the Venerable Bede knew of the Forth, but he doesn’t mention any crossings or sailing in the estuary itself. In his Life of Saint Cuthbert, he references the titular seventh-century saint traveling by sea to the Niduari, a Pictish group identified with the area of modern-day Fife. If he were traveling presumably from his monastery at Melrose to Fife, it’s possible that this journey crossed the firth, but it’s just as likely that he moved up the coast and bypassed the Forth entirely. Other texts - such as Saint Patrick’s letter to Coroticus, or Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae - would suggest that sailing was a common part of late antique piracy around Britain, but that can only go so far in helping us imagine the case of the Forth specifically.

The types of material evidence used by Campbell, Hemer et al., and others has limited application as well. While evidence of trade up the Irish Sea is now an accepted part of the narrative, the east coast does not seem to have been part of those networks. There is evidence of movement or portage between the Firths of Clyde and Forth, but it doesn’t appear that there was any substantial long-range trade network running up the coast, or at least any visible one. Francis Morris’s thorough study of shifting Roman trade networks argues that visible trade as far north as the Forth vanishes after imperial armies stopped venturing past Hadrian’s Wall, at least as far as we can tell through pottery and trade goods. While Christopher Ferguson has argued that we can see early medieval connectivity between Northumbria and the North Sea world, his evidence only goes as far north as the River Tyne near modern-day Newcastle.

So, I turned towards different types of material evidence. If we know people were moving across the Forth in this period (and we know they were, because of the graves on the May) then the first sub-question arises:

How were people traveling on water in the early medieval Firth of Forth?

A helpful suggestion from my advisor put me on the trail of logboats, hollowed out logs which have been a form of water travel across Britain (and beyond!) for millennia. Sure enough, a search through Scottish National Record of the Historic Environment turned up nearly a dozen logboats found (or reported) along the Forth and its rivers. Sadly, many of them were reported and then lost, and many more sit in museum collections with no sense of date. Of the logboats which had radiocarbon dates, none were concretely dated to my period, but with one near Stirling dated to the tenth century AD, and one farther north at the Tay (with a lovely volume devoted to it!) dated to around three thousand years ago, I felt more and more confident that logboats may have been one method of watery transit on the Forth in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Other evidence also hinted at the ability of people along the Forth to sail the estuary and beyond. The Iron Age hillfort at Broxmouth - abandoned by my period of study - had fish remains which Russ et al. noted require deep-sea fishing, so I know that they were able to sail deeper waters centuries prior. In Jonathan’s Cave within the East Wemyss caves, a carving of a ship with oars is dated to the early medieval, hinting at ideas of bigger multi-oared craft. Gildas refers to Picts and Scotti raiding in the Late Antique period in curucis (translated by Winterbottom as coracles), which may well have been down the eastern coast. These hints - each with their own problems - each demonstrate that in some small way, people were moving in boats in the watery world of the early medieval Firth of Forth, perhaps in larger craft than the logboats.

By the seventh century, scholars have been more comfortable to imagine larger craft moving around in the Forth again, largely thanks to the inclusion of the region in a broader Northumbrian world during that time. The traditional narrative has the Northumbrian kings Oswiu and Ecgfrith extending their power to the southern bank of the Forth, supplanting or absorbing local rulers and eventually establishing a bishopric as far as Abercorn in West Lothian. Far more fantastic work has been done on Northumbrian seafaring and ships, assisted by ship burials and discoveries from farther south, and scholars such as David Petts and the aforementioned Christopher Ferguson have shown the incredible watery connectivity within the kingdom. It seems quite likely that larger vessels than logboats were plying the Forth by the seventh century on this evidence, but the sailing of such craft in the two centuries prior seem more difficult to prove.

However, I’m not just interested in the sea as part of my wider research, but rather what the intersection of waterscape and landscape gave to one another! So another couple of subquestions quickly established themselves, some of which I’m still investigating:

Where did they beach/dock their craft?

The former question has been wonderfully addressed by Ferguson, who himself built on the thesis of J. Makepeace, identifying ten possible natural landing-places in coastal Northumbria that such larger craft could access. One of these was Abercorn, deep within the Firth of Forth, which Ferguson argued could have been reached (under ideal conditions for sailing!) in as little as five and a half hours from the Bernician royal center at Bamburgh. Given his estimation of a sixty-four hour overland journey between the two sites, sailing would have been the obvious choice to reach the site!

Bede describes Abercorn as a very briefly-occupied Northumbrian bishopric, established around 681CE and abandoned by its bishop Trumwine in the year 685, following the disastrous defeat and death of King Ecgfrith in Pictland. Charles Thomas suggested, intriguingly, that its Brittonic place-name might suggest some pre-Northumbrian foundation on the site, but the lack of firm archaeological evidence for even the seventh-century foundation makes this no more than a suggestion. The stunning corpus of early medieval carved stone at modern-day Abercorn, some of which is suggested to be from as early as the eighth century, suggests that the monastery did not end with Trumwine’s flight. We know from Bede that the bishop traveled down to Streanaeshalch to live out the rest of his days, a site generally identified with Whitby, which Ferguson (building on the work of Rosemary Cramp) noted had evidence of seventh-century Continental contact. Did a ship similar to the ones carrying Continental pottery bear Trumwine out of the Forth to refuge in Whitby?

Indeed, there may be some evidence of a possible beaching-spot on the Isle of May, and another on the isle of Fidra farther in the Forth, as Liz Curtis has identified tarbert place-names on both, a Gaelic-derived word which generally means that a nearby location was a portage for watercraft. The 1885-1900 OS One Inch map (accessed through the National Library of Scotland’s excellent map viewer) shows a “Tarbethole” at one inlet on the Isle of May - could this represent a place where older seafarers beached or portaged craft across the island, and might it have served the same purpose in the early medieval period?

Of course, anyone who’s had a conversation with me for longer than five minutes knows I’m particularly fascinated by frontiers and borderlands, so another question immediately emerges:

What might this travel have meant for connectivity across the Forth?

The Venerable Bede describes the Firth of Forth in his eighth-century Ecclesiastical History as a freti or firth “…which separates the lands of the Angles from those of the Picts” (iv.26), using the Latin verb distermino, to mark apart. Bede, writing presumably from his monastery on the River Tyne, considered the water to be the major boundary between his own Angles and their northern neighbors at the end of the seventh century. This divide often seems reflected in burial practices and symbol stones, a pattern which Adrián Maldonado has most recently thoroughly covered. As our chronology for the Pictish symbol stones moves steadily forward thanks to the work of scholars such as Gordon Noble, Martin Goldberg, and Derek Hamilton, do the waters of the Forth loom large as the ultimate divider in the first millennium CE?

This is one of the central questions of my research, and by no means is it firmly answered in my mind. The May burials and other evidence show that moving across the firth was certainly possible in the period, and the long-cist graves of southern Fife and single Pictish symbol stone unearthed in Edinburgh suggest that these areas were not working in total isolation. There are clearly differences, and while we should be careful not to apply Bede’s boundary too uncritically across the early medieval period, the people on either side of the firth were certainly marking their worlds in different ways. I’m looking forward to exploring this more in my dissertation, as it speaks to a construction of difference between groups, and the formation of a frontier, and speaks to contradictions in our idea of the connective power of water.

What must the memory of Roman connectivity been like?

You’ll all have to excuse me for this, as it’s entirely speculative, but as I wandered across the Isle of May, I was struck by the question of what it must have been like to see the last Roman ships sail away from the installations of the Forth.

I wonder about whether any of the grander ships of the Roman Classis Britannica ended up in local hands, or whether the technology of such long-distance ships vanished along with the imperial military presence. Did old men and women in the third- or fourth-century Lothians tell their grandchildren about the great ships which used to sail the Forth’s waters? When I was a kid, my family would occasionally travel to the Virginia coast for vacation. We’d travel to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, near Norfolk, the home of a vast U.S. navy base, and when you were sitting on the beach looking out to the Atlantic, you’d sometimes see the big navy ships sailing in the distance. As a child, it was absolutely amazing. What must it have been like to see the last ships of the Classis Britannica sail out of the Forth?

This question is almost certainly unanswerable, but I’m finding it useful to keep in mind. The people buried on the Isle of May or in Midlothian lived in an entirely different world than their grandparents and great-grandparents, but it makes you wonder what they thought when they passed by the ruins of imperial forts.

Anyway. Despite having more answers than when I’ve started, there’s twice as many questions that have come up, which is part of the joy of research! The question of the Forth’s connectivity and watery travel will continue to be a central part of my research for the foreseeable future. I’ve been writing the proposal for my dissertation (and there is a chapter on watery mobility proposed), and it’s creeping towards completion with the generous assistance of my advisor, other academics, and my fellow graduate students.

The proposal, and a conference paper I presented on Roman memory in the Lothians, have kept me from completing this post as quickly as I would have liked, but I’m bursting with ideas and plans for its successor.

I’m looking forward to sharing whatever this process brings with you all next, and as always, if you have any comments or suggestions, I always love to hear them!

Bibliography, Used and Recommended

(listed in order referenced in the post)

• Heather James and Peter Yeoman. Excavations at St Ethernan’s Monastery, Isle of May, Fife 1992-7. Perth: Tayside and Fife Archaeological Committee, 2008.

• Maldonado, Adrián. “Death and the Formation of Early Christian Scotland.” In Making Christian Landscapes in Atlantic Europe: Conversion and Consolidation in the Early Middle Ages, 225–48. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2016.

• Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

• Ewan Campbell. Continental and Mediterranean Imports to Atlantic Britain and Ireland, AD 400-800. Vol. 157. Council for British Archaeology Research Report. York: Council for British Archaeology, 2007.

• K.A. Hemer, J. A. Evans, C. A. Chenery, and A. L. Lamb. “Evidence of Early Medieval Trade and Migration between Wales and the Mediterranean Sea Region.” Journal of Archaeological Science 40 (2013): 2352–59.

• The Venerable Bede. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Edited by Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

• Anonymous, and The Venerable Bede. Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life. Translated by Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940.

• Breeze, Andrew. “St Cuthbert, Bede, and the Niduari of Pictland.” Northern History 40, no. 2 (2013): 365–68.

• Gildas. The Ruin of Britain and Other Works. Translated by Michael Winterbottom. Phillimore & Co. Ltd., 1978.

• Saint Patrick. “II. Epistola ad Milites Corotici.” Edited by Ludwig Bieler, 1950. https://confessio.ie/etexts/epistola_latin#.

• Morris, Francis M. North Sea and Channel Connectivity During the Late Iron Age and Roman Period (175/150 BC - AD 409). BAR International Series 2157. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010.

• Ferguson, Christopher. “Re-Evaluating Early Medieval Northumbrian Contacts and the ‘Coastal Highway.’” In Early Medieval Northumbria: Kingdom and Communities AD 450-1100, 283–302. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011.

• Strachan, David. Carpow in Context: A Late Bronze Age Logboat from the Tay. Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 2010.

• Armit, Ian, and Jo McKenzie. An Inherited Place: Broxmouth Hillfort and the South-East Scottish Iron Age. Monographs of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 2013.

• Russ, Hannah, Ian Armit, Jo McKenzie, and Andrew K G Jones. “Deep-Sea Fishing in the Iron Age? New Evidence from Broxmouth Hillfort, South–East Scotland.” Environmental Archaeology 17, no. 2 (October 1, 2012): 177–84.

• Petts, David. “Ecclesiastical Tidescapes: Exploring the Early Medieval Tidal World.” Norwegian Archaeological Review 52, no. 1 (2019): 41–64.

• Thomas, Charles. “Abercorn and the Provincia Pictorum.” In Between and Beyond the Walls: Essays in Prehistory and History of North Britain in Honour of George Jobey, 324–27. Edinburgh: J Donald Publishers, 1984.

• Cramp, Rosemary. “A Reconsideration of the Monastic Site at Whitby.” In The Age of Migrating Ideas: Early Medieval Art in Northern Britain and Ireland, 64–73. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Museums, 1993.

• Curtis, Liz. “Tarbat or Not Tarbat? Was There a Portage on the Tarbat Peninsula?” The Journal of Scottish Name Studies 5 (2011): 1–34.

• Maldonado, Adrián. “Burial in Early Medieval Scotland: New Questions.” Medieval Archaeology 57, no. 1 (2013): 1–34.

• Noble, Gordon, Martin Goldberg, and Derek Hamilton. “The Development of the Pictish Symbol System: Inscribing Identity Beyond the Edges of Empire.” Antiquity 92 (2018): 1329–48.