Was it on the line of the Catrail, or of the Roman wall between the
Forth and Clyde, or on what other ground, that there was fought the
great battle or siege of Cattraeth or Kaltraez, which Aneurin sings of
in his _Gododin_, and where, among the ranks of the British combatants,
were "three hundred and sixty-three chieftains wearing the golden torcs"
(some specimens, of which might yet perhaps be dug up on the
battle-field by our Museum Committee, seeing three only of these chiefs
escaped alive); and how was the "bewitching mead" brewed, that Aneurin
tells us was far too freely partaken of by his British countrymen before
and during this fierce struggle with the Saxon foe?
Is the poet Aneurin the same person as our earliest native prose
historian Gildas, the two appellations being relatively the Cymric and
Saxon names of the same individual? Or were they not two of the sons or
descendants of Caw of Cwm Cawlwyd, that North British chief whose
miraculous interview with St. Cadoc near Bannawc (Stirlingshire?) is
described in the life of that Welsh saint?
Of what family and rank was the poet--Merddin Wyllt--or "Merlin the
Wild," who, wearing the chieftain's golden torc, fought at the battle of
Arderydd, about A.D. 573, against Rhydderch Hael, that king of Alcluith
or Dumbarton, who was the friend of St. Columba, and "the champion of
the (Christian) faith," as Merlin himself styles him? And when that
victory was apparently the direct means of establishing this Christian
king upon the throne of Strathclyde, and the indirect means which led to
the recall of St. Kentigern from St. Asaph's to Glasgow, how is it that
the Welsh Triads talk of it enigmatically as a battle for a lark's nest?
If Ossian is not a myth, when and where did he live and sing? Was he not
an Irish Gael? And could any member of the deputation give us any
accurate information about our old nursery friend Fingal or Fin Mac
Coul? Was he really, after all, not greater, or larger, or any other
than simply a successful and reforming general in the army of King
Cormac of Tara, and the son-in-law of that monarch of Ireland?
From what part of Pictland did King Cormac obtain, in the third century,
the skilled mill-wright, Mac Lamha, to build for him that first
water-mill which he erected in Ireland, on one of the streams of Tara?
And is it true, as some genealogists in this earthly world believe, that
the lineal descendants of this Scottish or Pictish mill-wright are still
millers on the reputed site of this original Irish water-mill?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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