First We Take Dumbarton Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
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Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 48 - First We Take Dumbarton
It is 870. If you weren’t relying on it to provide you with protection, you probably wouldn’t choose to live on this volcanic plug jutting out into the River Clyde.
Not that you know that it’s a volcanic plug. You just know you’d rather be living in the castle here than out in the villages surrounding what we now call Dumbarton and, in Scots Gaelic, translates to fort of the Britons.
I don’t speak Gaelic and I’m not going to butcher the pronunciation.
You look out over the mouth of the River Leven and over to Kirktonhill. You’re trying not to look off down the Clyde because if you do then the air of eerie calm that you feel as you stand here and look out over your home, the seat of the Kings of Alt Clut (alt cluh), is going to shatter into tiny pieces.
Because you know if you look into the river you’ll see them. The longboats. The brightly coloured sails fluttering in the gentle summer breeze, the figureheads all fire-spitting dragons and vicious dogs.
The Vikings have been sitting on the river for months now. King Arthgal thought they might turn tail and flee when it became obvious that you weren’t going to give up the fortress at the top of Dumbarton Rock, but here they are.
And here they’ll stay.
This is Scotland. A podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
It is a few weeks later. Late at night. The lower part of the Rock is burning. The Vikings have attacked and you have retreated to the upper part of your fortress. King Arthgal thinks it’s all a bit embarrassing to be honest.
People have been taken. There’s hushed whispers among some of the higher nobles who didn’t want to end up stuck between Norsemen and the Alt Clut (alt cluh) lands towards Partick and Govan. They say that everyone the Norsemen take is going to be sold as a slave in Ireland.
They’re Irish vikings. Vikings from Ireland. Well they’re Viking kings from Ireland called Ivar and Olaf. They know that if they take the Rock they’ll have a free run down the Clyde to many precious treasures in central Scotland.
They’re so convinced of the importance of this one fortress that they’ve sat and waited for almost four months. Nobody besieged fortresses for four months - certainly not Vikings.
But here they were. And now they were inside.
You reflect that whoever built the fortress at Dumbarton Rock probably thought they were really clever. But here you are, up on in a high fortress looking down on a bunch of sweaty Viking warriors. Pretty safe, some of the nobles think.
But the nobles don’t have to go and howf the water up the steps every day from the well in the lower part of the enclosure.
The nobles don’t have to go and howf water up the steps every day… from the only well in the fortress.
You have no water. It’s done. Game over, man, game over.
And yet you feel that eerie calm come over you again because faced with the inevitability of the fall of Alt Clut, the rock of the Clyde, you know that there’s nothing you can do except accept your fate.
It’s only a matter of time until the Vikings hold the rock, until the capital is moved further up the Clyde to Govan and Partick, and until you’re taken back to Ireland aboard one of two hundred ships packed full of slaves.
Nobody truly knows what happened to King Arthgal. Two years after the Rock fell, he was dead. Assassinated on the order of Causantin the King of the Picts. But people argue about whether he was being held in captivity in Ireland or if he was ruling as a Viking puppet over the new Kingdom of Strathclyde.
As for the rock, the Vikings held it, and then they didn’t. With its location at the mouth of the Clyde it was vital to defending the waterways from… well… themselves.
So they burned it to the ground.
And the Rock doesn’t appear again for almost 300 years when it became, once again, an important royal fortress.
There is still a castle on Dumbarton Rock today, more a stately home than a fortress but there the Rock stands, jutting out into the Clyde, looking down on the River Leven and Levengrove Park, watching with interest as Dumbarton FC play football in its shadow.
The rock may fall, but the rock still stands.
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You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
The title of this episode is of course a song by the amazing Kid Canaveral from their album Faulty Inner Dialogue. It’s not really about this specific period of history - I just felt like you should probably go and listen to that album.
The music for every episode of Scotland is by Naval Cipher Number 3, Mitch Bain, you can check out more of his work at mitchbain.bequiet.media.
Jamie Mowat does stunning illustrations for us which you can see in our episode art. See more and buy prints at tidlin.com.
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Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.