SCOTLAND: A saint and a sin lie at the heart of this town’s story Tales from Tain ... the ‘oldest’ of our royal burghs
TODAY I reach the tenth column in this series on the ancient towns of Scotland which I am glad to say has received positive reviews from readers of The National. I also appear not to have offended anyone with serious errors, but as always, if you think I’ve got something factually wrong then please email me – I can’t fix any mistake in the print edition of The National but I can rectify matters online.
I have already covered Brechin, Elgin, Falkirk, Arbroath, Ayr, Paisley, Dumbarton, Dumfries and Lanark and still to come are Stornoway, Hamilton, Kilmarnock, St Andrews, Montrose, Forfar, Kilwinning, Irvine, Renfrew and two more, which are revealed below.
To be included in the list of ancient towns I set the following rules: they all have to have played a part in the history of Scotland and be “ancient”, which I interpret as being established as a town, usually a burgh, before the Reformation in 1560.
Regular readers will recall that in recent weeks I have urged anyone who wants to promote their own town for a column to contact me on nationalhamish@gmail.com and as a result of readers’ pleas, today I am going to write about Tain, while next week I will feature Haddington.
My interest in Tain was sparked by Malcolm Anderson who emailed me to say: “I am no historian but I would suggest you include the Royal Burgh of Tain in your series. This is Scotland’s oldest Royal Burgh.
“Several Scottish kings made repeated pilgrimages, and if my schoolboy memory serves me well, King Robert the Bruce sent his wife and family to the chapel in Tain for sanctuary but the Earl of Moray ignored the sanctuary, captured Bruce’s family and burnt the chapel. The ruins remain.
“As I say, most of the above comes from my memory of history lessons at Tain Royal Academy but worth a little confirmation from yourself.”
It’s good to know that Scottish history was taught at the Academy, as so many other schools in Scotland had a curriculum which minimised the subject if they included it at all.
Malcolm is mostly correct in what he writes, apart from the fact that it was the Earl of Ross and not Moray who broke the sanctuary rules – one of the saddest incidents in Scottish history, which I will explore at length in this column today.
Readers will also know that as a writer about history I always depend on the accounts of local historians and Tain is no different, as I am very much relying on the 1882 work Researches Into The History Of Tain: Earlier And Later by local minister Rev William Taylor. It can be seen on that excellent website electricscotland.com, to which I am always grateful.
Tain is indeed the oldest of the royal burghs, if you believe local claims – remember, very little is certain about Scotland in mediaeval times. Situated in the ancient county of Ross-shire on the south side of the Dornoch Firth, Tain either gets its name from the River Tain, the word coming from an ancient Celtic description meaning “flow”, or from the Norse word Ting, a meeting place, the Vikings having raided the area and liked it so much that some settled around what became Rossshire in the ninth century. I prefer the Celtic derivation as the Picts undoubtedly settled here in the first millennium, by the end of which the local people, comprising both Picts and Scots joined under one monarch, were devoutly Christian.
That religious connection is a defining factor for Tain, because it was in the immediate environs of the town that Saint Duthac, or Duthus, was born. There has been an ongoing dispute about the origins of the saint, particularly the date he was born. Some have placed him as late as the 12th or 13th century but I very much prefer the local tradition that he was born before the year 1000.
The Gaelic name of Tain shows just how important was the connection with the saint. Baile Dhubhthaich means “Duthac’s town”, and he undoubtedly made a huge impression on the church in both Scotland and Ireland as a confessor and preacher.
Unlike other locations in the north of Scotland, there are no records of any kind about Tain before the 11th century. No major archaeological finds were ever made, though Pictish stones were extant in the area. But in 1066, Tain gained a royal charter which enables it to claim to be the oldest royal burgh.
Taylor concluded: “In this neighbourhood no one of the races absolutely prevailed. Hence, I think, it came to pass that neither Pictish, Gaelic, nor Norse history or tradition proved strong enough to outlive, as in many other parts of Scotland one or other did outlive, that chaotic period of bloodshed and