Scotland's Oldest Tartan Rose | Hacker News Reader

Scotland's Oldest Tartan Rose

atlasobscura.com

36 pointspepys4 comments

Was wondering what the hell a Tartan Rose was until I went to check the article and "rose" is just a verb - it was a piece of tartan lifted from a peat bog. The title got butchered along the way somehow.

Pretty great article, though, I'm amazed that it apparently leads back to the Roman Era. I guess I just never thought about it but these two cultures co-existing blew my mind a bit.

The Romans didn't conquer Scotland, they built walls at the northern boundary instead. Hadrian's Wall [1][2] was begun in 122 AD and big parts are still there and it's a tourist attraction. About 20 years later they started a wall further north, roughly between Glasgow and Edinburgh.

[1] https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/hadrians-wa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian's_Wall [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine_Wall

The Romans didn't interact with Scots either - or at least the names changed.

The Romans fought natives in the area and built the walls to keep out what they generally called the Caledonii, although that's the name they gave them, not the names the natives called themselves. There's a map by Ptolemy with various tribal names [0]

Many years after the decline of the Roman Empire in Britain, four tribal kingdoms dominated the area we call Scotland today: the Picts (mainly the east), the Gaels/Celts (Dál Riata; the western isles and coast), the Britons of Strathclyde (the south west), and the Anglo-Saxons of Bernicia (later Northumbria; the south east).

The Celts and Picts merged under Kenneth I MacAlpin as the Kingdom of Alba in the 800s, [1] which became known as Scotia in Latin, which is where we get the name Scotland from, long after the end of Roman Britain.

The Scots took Northumbria north of the River Tweed during the 900s, and took over Strathclyde between 1018-1054. There continued to be disputes over the border for quite some time - see the two wars of Scottish independence, and the "Debatable Lands" [3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland_during_the_Roman_Empi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Alba

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wars_of_Scottish_Independence

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debatable_Lands

Its from the 1500s. The Falkirk Tartan dates back to the Roman era (although is arguably not a tartan).

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