Voices from the Water Country
I. The Setantii
The Iron Age Setantii tribe, who scholars conjecture occupied the lowland areas of present-day Lancashire and Cheshire between the river Mersey and the river Wyre are known from Ptolemy’s Geography (2 AD), in which he maps the co-ordinates for Portus Setantium, the port of the Setantii. This, along with Ptolemy’s name for the Mersey, Seteia, is the only written record of their existence.
In his History of the Fylde (1876) John Porter refers to the Setantii as ‘the dwellers in the country of water’. This provides an accurate description of the landscape they inhabited. Part of it was known as ‘the Region Linuis’, ‘the Lake Region’, and included Martin Mere, England’s largest lake at 20 miles in diameter, along with Shoricar’s Mere, Renacres Mere, Gettern Mere, and Barton Mere. Much of the rest of the landscape was marshland, fenland, carr wood, and mosslands or peat bog.
We know a little about the lifestyle of the Setantii and their ancestors from the archaeology. From across the wetland areas they occupied we find evidence of lake dwellings, wooden walkways, dug-out canoes, tools and weapons such as axes, adzes, polishers, spearheads, and arrowheads. Many of the latter were purposefully deposited in lakes, rivers, peat bogs, and in the roots of old bog oaks.
II. Bog Bodies and Severed Heads
Most intriguing and disturbing are the plethora of bog bodies and severed heads. The most famous of these is Lindow Man who was ritually sacrificed, dying a ‘threefold death’ who was hit on the head, strangled, then his throat cut before his body was deposited in the peat on Lindow Moss. The skull of Lindow Woman was buried nearby and the skull of Worsley Man on Worsley Moss.
Historian David Barrowclough writes that ‘the severed head represents a discrete category of bog deposit, which appears to be particularly well represented in Lancashire’. A skull from Pilling Moss was buried with a good deal of care and reverence suggesting she was an important ancestral figure: ‘the head of a woman with long plaited auburn hair… wrapped in a piece of coarse woollen cloth and with it were two strings of cylindrical jet beads, with one string having a large amber bead at its centre.’
In stark contrast a head from Briarfield was ‘deposited in a defleshed state without the mandible’ leading Barrowclough to speculate that it was ‘a battle trophy’. It was buried with ‘abundant remains of hazel’. In Cumbria, on Sea Scale Moss, a body was found with ‘a hazel walking stick’.
During the draining of Martin Mere ‘human Bodies’ were ‘found entire and uncorrupted’ ‘in a Moss near Meales’. The excavations also unearthed eight logboats, seven canoes, a bronze palstave, two Bronze Age swords, three bronze arrowheads, the remnants of two bronze crucibles, and an ‘iron arrowhead embedded in a bog oak… evidence that one disappointed hunter in the wildwood missed his quarry’.
I live in Penwortham and the Brythonic word pen refers to Castle Hill, a prominent headland once surrounded by marshland. During the excavation of the marsh to create Riversway Dockland the remains of a 17 by 7 metre brushwood platform for a lake dwelling was found, along with two dug-out canoes, a bronze spearhead, 23 human skulls, 21 aurochs skulls, and 25 red deer skulls along with remains of wild horse including a pelvis that had been gnawed by a large dog or a wolf.
It was once believed the human skulls were a sacrificial deposit. However, radiocarbon dating shows that, whilst most of the skulls are dated to between 4000 and 3000 BC, others date variously to later periods and the oldest is Anglo-Saxon, showing they were not deposited at once.
Professor Mick Wysocki suggests the bodies floated downriver and washed up in a tidal pool where the heavy skulls sunk. This does not rule out the possibility some may have been ritual deposits. Examinations show a Neolithic man was killed by a stone axe and a Neolithic woman by ‘trauma to the right and back of her skull’. A Romano-British person (the sex cannot be determined) was killed by ‘a pointed object such as a spear passing through the open mouth and into the skull.’
The aurochs skulls date from 2600 - 1700 BC and the red deer skulls from 2670 - 810 BC. Again, it has been argued their carcasses were washed downriver from grazing places on higher ground. However, it may also be suggested, as the deer skulls are all males with antlers between 6 and 12 years old, that they are ritual deposits akin to those made at Star Carr (1) and reflect a special relationship between the dwellers in the water country and the animals they hunted and a hunter deity.
III. The Cult of the Head
These depositions of have deep roots in ‘the cult of the head’ in Celtic culture. The Celts believed the head was the seat of the soul, thus they went to great lengths to safeguard the heads of their ancestors and to hunt, take, preserve, and display the heads of their enemies (2) before their ritual burial. Andrew Breeze translates Setantii as ‘reapers of men’, claiming set is corrupted from the Celtic *met ‘cut, harvest’, relating to the Welsh medaf ‘I reap’. This would fit the evidence for head-hunting.
Their veneration of the head lived on into the Dark Ages and is recorded in a haunting poem from The Red Book of Hergest (1375 - 1425) in which Llywarch Hen bears back the head of his cousin, Urien, after his assassination near Lindisfarne, to his fort, perhaps Ribchester in Lancashire (3).
A head I bear by my side,
The head of Urien, the mild leader of his army–
And on his white bosom the sable raven is perched…
A head I bear from the Riw,
With his lips foaming with blood–
Woe to Rheged from this day!
In the Second Branch of The Mabinogi (1350 - 1410) the head of Brân the Blessed continues to speak after he is beheaded. When it is finally buried beneath White Hill in London it defends the Island of Britain from attack. The heads of the water dwellers may have served a similar apotropaic function.
IV. Ancestral Communion
The sites where the heads of ancestors were buried were no doubt seen as especially sacred. As places where the living and the dead, Thisworld and Otherworld, the people and the gods met. Each would have its stories passed down from generation to generation and rituals surrounding it. It is likely that, at liminal times, such as Nos Galan Gaeaf/Samhain (the 31st of October) (5), the seers of the Setantii tribe (6) would commune with their dead and their heads would speak again.
Ancestral communion amongst the Celtic peoples is evidenced in The Tain (1100). This story is set in 1st century Ireland. Its hero Sétanta/Cú Chulainn, may have originated from Setantios, a tribal god of the Setantii, whose stories were borne to the Ulster region of Ireland during the Roman invasions.
In the opening passages we find out the narrative was recovered by the seer-poet Muirgen. He went to the grave of one of heroes, Fergus mac Roich, and chanted over it. For three nights and days he was surrounded by a ‘great mist’ and in it Fergus approached in ‘his fierce majesty’ and recited the story.
Perhaps it was a common practice amongst the Setantii to speak with their dead and listen to their stories. This was likely brought to an end as a consequence of the Roman invasions and the imposition of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine in 313 CE.
However a certain specialness continued to be assigned to the head within the Christian tradition. At St Mary’s Church on Castle Hill in Penwortham during excavations to install a new floor in 2011 ‘three skulls’ were ‘found within the medieval wall’ which ‘might represent deliberate ritual depositions associated with vernacular religious practices or aspects of popular religious belief’.
V. Unburyings
In The Triads of the Island of Britain (1300) we find out that Brân’s head was dug up by the Christian warlord, King Arthur, because he could not bear anyone else defending the island but him. (Perhaps if Arthur had not removed it the British resistance to the Anglo-Saxons would have succeeded?).
Most of the remains of the ancestral people of the Setantii were discovered during excavations for the drainage of the water country’s lakes, marshlands, and mosslands or peat bogs. The people who dug them up recognised their value as historical artefacts but not as ancestral persons whose burials were intrinsically bound up with the places they were buried, with their gods, and with their stories.
The skulls of the people found on Penwortham Marsh have been treated respectfully and are now displayed nearby in the Harris Museum in Preston under the title ‘Ribble Ancestors’, their personhood acknowledged, what we can know of their lives through radiocarbon dating disclosed. Lindow Man is in the British Museum and the head of Worsley Man is in the Manchester Museum. The locations of many of the other heads and bog bodies I have been unable to track down.
If their function was to defend their tribal memories and their lands it seems their magic eventually failed. Yet, still, there is a presence about them, a numinosity, that speaks their roles as carriers of traditions, as threshold guardians, as holders of the gateways between modernity and our ancient past.
No museum walls can keep out the ‘great mist’ in which ancestral communion takes place spirit-to-spirit. Listen carefully and from glass cabinets voices from the water country can still be heard.
Fists of Stone
‘The face of a Stone Age man from the North West… about 40 years old when he died’
The Harris Museum
They’ve given you a face.
Taken your 5,500 year old skull,
added facial tissue and facial muscles –
temporalis, masseter, buccinator,
occipito frontals, nose, lips.
Decided upon your expression.
It’s 2019 and the ‘ug’ caricatures
and Flintstones references are behind us
yet there is flint and stone in your jaw.
Your shoulders are like a boxer’s
so I imagine you ‘putting them up’.
Fists of stone – you were a prize fighter.
You would have been the strong man
of your day, felling old bog oaks
with your rough stone axe,
pulling them two at a time,
the muscles in your back –
trapezius, rhomboideus, serratus,
teres minor and major, thoracolumbar fasciastraining as your broad feet sucked
in and out of the marsh.
Your children swinging from
your broad arms like long-tailed tits –
countless, twittering, as you tossed them
like juggling balls into the air.
Your wife liked to massage out
your knots and twists – tighter more oaklike
as you aged, treating each muscle
in turn like a polished stone,
tending to your calloused hands –
bathing your blisters, dabbing ointment
on your cracked knuckles, mending
your broken fingers with oaken splints.
When you fell like a tree,
not in battle but quietly on
your way back from the woods,
little birds in your branches,
muscles knotting one last time,
she did not carve your head but your fists
in stone, cast them into the river
with the oaklike log
of your corpse.
The little pebbles
of your pisiform bone,
metacarpals and phalangescan be found on the riverbank
where she once grieved.
Cribra Orbitalia
‘This is the oldest skull so far dated – to between 3820 and 3640BC… This woman may have suffered from anaemia, indicated by an area of pitting in her left eye known as cribra orbitalia.’
The Harris Museum
You were a pale child.
Always the first to tire
on the walk from camp to camp,
struggling for breath, clutching at your chest.
You said your head was light as a wisp of smoke
before you lay down and floated away.
You said you were a feather.
The reddest of meat failed
to bring a blush to your cheeks,
to keep you to the ground.
Often you touched the ridge
of your left brow and pressed
as if probing for the lesion.
When your skin turned yellow
as the beak of a whooper swan,
your eyes eerie and wolf-like,
you were exalted and they listened
to your visions of flying white-winged
to the distant north where frost giants fought
with fists of ice and the claws of bears
were hungry for your children.
When you returned with
seven cygnets ghosting from
beneath your right wing
they walked on egg shells
fearing you were the daughter
of the God of the Otherworld.
When you were found
with a single feather on your breast
it was said you flew with him to Cygnus,
rising on your last swan’s breath.
Now instead they point to the pitting
of your left eye and speak of cribra orbitalia –the hypertrophy of red bone marrow, megabolasts,
megabolastic anaemia, lack of intrinsic factor,
the uptake of coblamin (vitamin B12).
And I try to hold both science and myth
in the cavelike porosities of your left orbit….
*The rest of my sequence of poems ‘Ribble Ancestors’ can be read HERE.
FOOTNOTES
(1) Star Carr was a Mesolithic camp in Yorkshire on the edge of former Lake Pickering. Here were found deposits of the remains of red deer and ‘twenty one frontlets of red deer skulls with antlers still attached’ which may have been used in hunting rituals along with 101 barbed points ‘made from red deer antler’ that resemble the weapons used in Lancashire to hunt ‘Horace the Elk’.
(2) Diodorus Siclus, writing between 60 and 30 BC, records how the Gauls ‘decapitate their slain enemies and attach the heads to their horses’ necks… the choicest spoils they nail to the wall of their houses like hunting trophies… They preserve the heads of their most famous enemies in cedar oil and store them carefully in chests. These they proudly display to visitors...’
(3) Urien was the ruler of the Brythonic kingdom of Rheged during the sixth century. He held lands in Cumbria centring on Carlisle and the Eden Valley and stretching to the Solway Firth and Galloway and perhaps as far east as Catterick. Llywarch may have been the ruler of Lancashire and Cheshire. In The Origins of Lancashire (1991) Denise Kenyon suggests Llywarch’s seat was Ribchester.
(4) This is evidenced by the Roman ballista balls found on Castle Hill.
(5) The cross quarter calendar of the festivals of Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh and Samhain developed in Gaul in the first millennium BC and was likely being used in Britain at around this time too.
(6) The Roman writers refer to persons known as Vates, a Latin loan-word from the Celtic *wātis referring to a prophet or seer.
SOURCES
Andrew Breeze, ‘Three Celtic Toponyms: Setantii, Blencathra, and Pen-Y-Ghent, Northern History, XLII: 1, (University of Leeds, 2006)
Rev. C. Nelson, St Mary’s Church, Penwortham, Lancashire, Archaeological Watching Brief and Excavation, (Oxford Archaeology North, 2011)
David Barrowclough, Prehistoric Lancashire, (The History Press, 2008)
Denise Kenyon, The Origins of Lancashire, (Manchester University Press, 1991)
John Porter, History of the Fylde (W. Porter, 1876), https://archive.org/details/historyoffyldeof00portiala/page/n4
John T. Koch (ed), The Celtic Heroic Age, (Celtic Studies Publications, 2003)
Rachel Bromwich (ed), The Triads of the Island of Britain, (University of Wales Press, 2014)
Sioned Davies (transl.), The Mabinogion, (Oxford University Press, 2007)
Thomas Kinsella, (transl.), The Tain, (Oxford University Press, (1969)
W. G. Hale and Audrey Coney, Martin Mere: Lancashire’s Lost Lake, (Liverpool University Press, 2005)
William Skene (transl.), ‘Red Book of Hergest XII, Four Ancient Books of Wales, https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/fab/fab060.htm
LORNA SMITHERS
Lorna Smithers is a poet, author, awenydd, Brythonic polytheist and devotee of Gwyn ap Nudd. Based in Penwortham, Lancashire, she writes poems for the land and myths for the old gods of Britain. She has published three books: Enchanting the Shadowlands, The Broken Cauldron, and Gatherer of Souls. She is a conservation volunteer and is learning to grow small green things and listen to the land.