From Rome to St Mungo: Glasgow’s earliest days
BACK IN THE DAY: GLASGOW’S BEST STORIES
TODAY we start one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by a Glasgow-based newspaper. Glasgow Back in the Day is going to tell the history of this great city in chronological order from its earliest days to the end of the 20th century.
It will be a long-running series of columns, probably going well into 2021, and we hope you will like it sufficiently to stay the course with us. We cannot tell every story associated with Glasgow, but we will try to be as comprehensive and detailed as possible, and we will certainly be as factually accurate as we can be and differentiate between myths and legends – and there are plenty of both when it comes to telling Glasgow’s story.
So let’s start at the very beginning, because as the song says, it’s a very good place to start.
There is very little trace left of prehistoric Glasgow. The earliest records of life on these islands are fossils and they show that there was life of sorts in what is now Scotland more than 400 million years ago, and the fossil records do indicate that there were forms of early life in and around Glasgow.
The Bearsden Shark, for example, is one of the best preserved fish fossils anywhere, while the Fossil Grove in Victoria Park in the city has a collection of fossilised trees showing that Glasgow really once was south of the Equator almost 300 million years ago.
What determined the first human presence in Glasgow was the River Clyde. This series will repeatedly show how the history of Glasgow and the River Clyde are intertwined, and how its many variations over time caused human upheaval.
We know from the findings of the remains of canoes during excavations in the 18th and 19th centuries that people inhabited the area and fished in the Clyde in and around modern Glasgow in the time before the first conquerors came from a city far away – Rome.
As is the case with much of the British Isles, the earliest written records of human activity in Scotland were made by the Ancient Romans at the time of the Caesars, and we know that they must have been in the Glasgow area for some time in the first and second centuries
AD because between 142 AD and 154 AD they built the Antonine Wall – named after Emperor Antoninus Pius – just north of Glasgow, running between what is now Old Kilpatrick in West Dunbartonshire and what is now Bo’ness in Falkirk district to defend themselves against the incursions of the tribes north of the Forth and Clyde valleys.
The Romans gave the land north of the Antonine Wall the name Caledonia, and throughout its comparatively brief existence as the northern frontier of the Roman Empire, the Wall was attacked by the Caledonians many times, and by the early years of the third century it was virtually flattened. Built of wood and mud and not stone like the more famous
Hadrian’s Wall, the Antonine Wall is known to have had forts and fortlets along its entire length, but none have survived intact.
There is no record of a Roman outpost in what became Glasgow, but Roman remains have been found in and around the city, including a ‘distance stone’ discovered at Summerston and a superb Samian-ware bowl dating from the second century AD which was found 41ft under Glasgow Green during excavation work in 1876.
The best-preserved ruin dating from the Antonine Wall is the Bearsden Bath House which is both a bath – the Romans were very keen on cleanliness – and a latrine.
The stone structure indicates that it was intended to be permanent, but the Romans were gone from the Wall by the middle of the 3rd century AD.
The Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University is the best place to see Roman artefacts found in the Glasgow area and a visit is thoroughly recommended.
Between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of Glasgow’s founder there is no written history of the place, and it’s probably safe to say that there were no buildings on the site of modern Glasgow, at least none that have survived.
Though he is a shadowy figure in history, there’s little doubt that St Mungo, or St Kentigern as he is also known, really did exist and that he founded a Christian settlement near the point where the Molendinar Burn meets the River Clyde on the site now occupied by Glasgow Cathedral in which the saint lies buried in a magnificent crypt. In other words, there is no contender other than Mungo to be named the actual founder of Glasgow.
We know he died in 612 AD,
There’s little doubt that St Mungo really did exist
but we know precious little else for certain beside that – his birthdate may have been 518 or 528, but we simply don’t know, not least because the first person to write his Life of St Mungo was the mediaeval monk Joceline or Jocelyn of Furness and he did not put pen to paper until 1185.
When Mungo arrived on the scene, the area around Glasgow was at that time part of the Kingdom of Strathclyde ruled by the Britons whose capital was modern-day Dumbarton. The legend is that Mungo – it is supposed to mean beloved one – was born the son of Thenew, daughter of the half-pagan Loth, the king of the Lothians.
Loth is supposed to have been angry at Thenew getting pregnant and had her thrown off Traprain’s Law in what is now East Lothian, Thenew surviving and being miraculously carried across the Forth to Culross to give birth to Mungo.
Growing up and becoming a Christian, Mungo is believed to have taken holy orders and become a wandering friar preaching to the Picts and Britons north and south of the former Antonine Wall.
He was not the first to do so. That evangelisation was first undertaken by St Ninian who founded his church, Candida Casa, at Whithorn in modern Dumfries and Galloway in 397 AD.
Ninian had some success in converting Picts and Britons, but after his death in 437 AD the cause of Christianity in Southern Scotland fell away. Then along came Mungo and the founding of a religious settlement he called Glas-chu, the green place.
We’ll find out next week how he did it and what happened next.