Back to our Celtic roots... from Penyghent to Old King Cole

Sport supplies more than its fair share of cliches but those linked to identity are among the most telling. In the Six Nations rugby tournament, the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots are seen as the Celtic nations, the French have Gallic flair or fail to turn up, so to speak, and the Italians, well…

Alone stand the English, the Anglo-Saxon nation. Sensible, reliable, solid, even blunt, people who call a spade a shovel. At the centre of that endlessly repeating circle of cliches stands Yorkshire and her virtues. Cricketers like Brian Close and Geoffrey Boycott were dogged, hard-working, maybe even stolid. Who can forget Brian Close standing up defiantly to ferocious West Indian fast bowling? As the ball battered his unprotected head and body,

Are these proud, allegedly Anglo-Saxon attributes printed indelibly on Yorkshire’s DNA? Maybe. Launched this week in partnership with the Yorkshire Post, is a new project to discover Yorkshire’s DNA identity – where the men and women of the county come from, what the great journeys were and how they might fairly describe themselves.

History suggests alternatives. Before the Vikings and the Danes, before the Anglo-Saxons and the Romans, the people of Yorkshire spoke a Celtic language. Best described as an early version of Welsh, it can still be detected in place-names.

In the western Dales the word pen as in Penyghent means head or hill and the name of this famous hill is pure Welsh. Less obvious is Ilkley, which comes from Olicana and Catterick from Cataractonium, both Latinised Celtic place-names. Leeds is from the name of a kindred, the Ladenses, and the River Derwent means the Oak River. Buried under centuries of Anglian, Old English and new, is a layer of Celtic experience of Yorkshire.

This was political as well as geographical. In his biography of Agricola, the great governor of Roman Britain, Tacitus reckoned the Brigantes the most populous native people. They straddled the Pennines but one of their strongholds appears to have been at Stanwick Fort, eight miles north of Richmond. The most famous ruler of the Brigantes (the name probably meant something like the Highlanders) was Queen Cartimandua, who exchanged her consort Venutius for a man who sounds like a 1st-century AD toyboy, a charioteer called Vellocatus. Cartimandua also supported the growing Roman power and handed over in chains the British resistance leader, Caratacus. Too much for the spurned Venutius, he raised Celtic Yorkshire in rebellion against Rome. The warriors of the Brigantes rallied at Stanwick and, inside a long perimeter impossible to defend, they were defeated by the legions and Rome annexed Brigantia. In the massive ditching around the fort archaeologists found skulls, which had been set on the ramparts so that their power would deter the Roman assault.

Once the huge legionary fortress had been completed at York, the north of Britannia was subdued, but its Celtic roots were only hidden, not destroyed. When the Empire in the west began to crumble in the 5th-century AD, a shadowy figure governed from the fortress. Now almost entirely forgotten, Coel Hen, was probably the last Roman-appointed commander in the north. The Celtic royal dynasties that re-established themselves after Rome almost all claim Coel Hen as a founder. But the sole historical memory of the most powerful Yorkshireman of the 5th century is a nursery rhyme. Coel Hen means Cole the Old and he became that merry old soul Old King Cole. Brigantia did not re-form after Rome but the kingdom of Elmet is remembered in the place-names of Sherburn in Elmet and Barwick in Elmet, east of Leeds.

It was wealthy but quickly became the target of a new people, a new wave of immigrants. In 600AD at Catterick, the kings of Elmet and all of the Celtic rulers of the north led their warbands to Catraeth or Catterick and there they were defeated by an army led by the Angles.

A people from southern Denmark, they were to give their name to England and on a blood-soaked day by the rapids of the Swale, they slaughtered the Celtic nobility of Yorkshire and eclipsed a native culture. However, it is likely that there are many Elmetians and Brigantians living quietly where their ancestors lived for many centuries. Only DNA can find them.

www.yorkshiresdna.com. On November 1 at West Yorkshire Playhouse the first results of testing will be revealed along with a lecture on the project. Tickets: 0113 213 7700.