Ancient Welsh city found

News Wales ^ | 14 Aug 2006 | News Wales

[GoLightly]

Why do academics ignore Welsh records?

Victors write the history. Traditions of defeated people get turned into "myth" anytime they are in conflict with "real" history.

The oldest surviving Gothic Bible is dated to about 350 AD. Goths are believed to have originated in Southern Sweden & they were a Germanic people. History books say Charlemagne "Christianized" those "barbaric pagan" German tribes.

Back to Wales. Welsh built stockade type forts & they retreated from them when necessary to survive. They'd attack parties trying to forage from the locations of their former forts. The Welch long bow was useful for this, so attackers found staying is Wales unattractive.

Romans built stone fortresses along the Welch coast, so I have to think that digs along the coast that look like permanent settlements would have to be from the Roman "occupation", though they would be upon older Welsh settlements. Get deeper into the heart of Wales, a defeated people's last stronghold, purposely inaccessible, built of wood becomes a "mythical" place pretty quickly.

[Reily]

Actually the Goths were already Christian before Charlemagne. Arian Christian but Christian none the less!
For example Christian Goths with Aetius one the last great Western Roman commanders against Attila. Also the Goths what defeated a Western Roman army at Adrianople were Christian, again Arian Christian. The Ostrogothic Kingdom in Attila which followed the battle of Adrianople was a Christian kingdom, again Arian Christian.

[GoLightly]

I knew that, which is I put quotes around "Christianized" & "barbaric pagans". I thought it was a good example of the way history gets distorted.

[BobS]

In Scotland there is a little castle on Loch Ness called Urquehart Castle. Nobody knows who built it or why. Certainly not a bunch of guys that drank beer and went fishing there years ago. Maybe it had another purpose. The rain in the summer there is about the same temp as the water temp. I skinny-dipped around there once and that is a very deep glacial lake. Cute little red heads live around there that like to fish. Inverness has a nice restaurant that serves steamed or fried fish. Dunvegan is on the Isle of Skye and it's sort of like Kansas. Nice people there.

[GoLightly]

http://www.castles.org/Chatelaine/URQUHART.HTM

http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/drumnadrochit/urquhart/

From the looks of it, I was gonna say it was built in the Middle Ages. A lot of castle building involved using stones from previous structures, other crumbling castles or walls. It was faster to "borrow" than to start from scratch.

Text from the second link I posted...

"Opinions differ as to whether Urquhart Castle was originally the site of a Pictish fort dating back to a visit by St Columba in 597, but there was certainly a Pictish settlement in the area at the time. The first real evidence of anything recognisable as a castle dates back to the years following 1230, when Alexander II crushed a revolt in the province of Moray, to the north, and decided to defend this strategic route."

From what I can tell, my MacBean ancestors were from Iverness. Maybe they had a hand in building it. :o)

[Bellflower]

ping

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[SunkenCiv]

This topic was posted 8/15/2006, thanks again Marius3188. Just an update.