Trusty's Hill is an early medieval fort at Gatehouse of Fleet, Dumfries and Galloway. The hillfort comprises a fortified citadel defined by a vitrified rampart around its summit, with a number of enclosures looping out along lower-lying terraces and crags. The approach to its summit is flanked on one side by a circular rock-cut basin and on the other side by Pictish Symbols carved on to the face of a natural outcrop of bedrock. This Pictish inscribed stone is unique in Dumfries and Galloway, and southern Scotland, and has long puzzled scholars as to why the symbols were carved so far from Pictland and even if they are genuine. The Galloway Picts Project, launched in 2012, aimed to recover evidence for the archaeological context of the inscribed stone, but far from validating the existence of Picts in this southerly region of Scotland, the archaeological context instead suggests that the carvings relate to a royal stronghold and place of inauguration for the local Britons of Galloway around AD 600. Examined in the context of contemporary sites across southern Scotland and northern England, the archaeological evidence from Galloway suggests that this region may have been the heart of the lost Dark Age kingdom of Rheged, a kingdom that was in the late sixth century pre-eminent amongst the kingdoms of the north. The new archaeological evidence from Trusty's Hill enhances our perception of power, politics, economy and culture at a time when the foundations for the kingdoms of Scotland, England and Wales were being laid.

Trusty's Hill is an early medieval fort at Gatehouse of Fleet, Dumfries and Galloway. The hillfort comprises a fortified citadel defined by a vitrified rampart around its summit, with a number of enclosures looping out along lower-lying terraces and crags. The approach to its summit is flanked on one side by a circular rock-cut basin and on the other side by Pictish Symbols carved on to the face of a natural outcrop of bedrock. This Pictish inscribed stone is unique in Dumfries and Galloway, and southern Scotland, and has long puzzled scholars as to why the symbols were carved so far from Pictland and even if they are genuine. The Galloway Picts Project, launched in 2012, aimed to recover evidence for the archaeological context of the inscribed stone, but far from validating the existence of Picts in this southerly region of Scotland, the archaeological context instead suggests that the carvings relate to a royal stronghold and place of inauguration for the local Britons of Galloway around AD 600. Examined in the context of contemporary sites across southern Scotland and northern England, the archaeological evidence from Galloway suggests that this region may have been the heart of the lost Dark Age kingdom of Rheged, a kingdom that was in the late sixth century pre-eminent amongst the kingdoms of the north. The new archaeological evidence from Trusty's Hill enhances our perception of power, politics, economy and culture at a time when the foundations for the kingdoms of Scotland, England and Wales were being laid.

Presents new archaeological evidence for the presence of a royal stronghold as the heart of the hierto lost Dark Age kingdom of Rheged, that was pre-eminent amongst the kingdoms of the north in the late sixth century AD"

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to re-imagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974): representing the first extended study of the influence of early medieval English culture and history on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). Jones's second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), The Anathemata fuses Jones's visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones's Library, this volume reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in Modernist and Medieval Studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages--including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography--to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponised in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore-up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

The North Britons are the least-known among the inhabitants of early medieval Scotland. Like the Picts and Vikings they played an important role in the shaping of Scottish history during the first millennium AD but their part is often neglected or ignored. This book aims to redress the balance by tracing the history of this native Celtic people through the troubled centuries from the departure of the Romans to the arrival of the Normans. The fortunes of Strathclyde, the last-surviving kingdom of the North Britons, are studied from its emergence at Dumbarton in the fifth century to its eventual demise in the eleventh. Other kingdoms, such as the Edinburgh-based realm of Gododdin and the mysterious Rheged, are examined alongside fragments of heroic poetry celebrating the valour of their warriors. Behind the recurrent themes of warfare and political rivalry runs a parallel thread dealing with the growth of Christianity and the influence of the Church in the affairs of kings. Important ecclesiastical figures such as Ninian of Whithorn and Kentigern of Glasgow are discussed, partly in the hope of unearthing their true identities among a tangled web of sources. The closing chapters of the book look at how and why the North Britons lost their distinct identity to join their old enemies the Picts as one of Scotland's vanished nations.

Some years ago a revolution took place in Early Medieval history in Scotland. The Pictish heartland of Fortriu, previously thought to be centred on Perthshire and the Tay found itself relocated through the forensic work of Alex Woolf to the shores of the Moray Firth. The implications for our understanding of this period and for the formation of Scotland are unprecedented and still being worked through. This is the first account of this northern heartland of Pictavia for a more general audience to take in the full implications of this and of the substantial recent archaeological work that has been undertaken in recent years. Part of the The Northern Picts project at Aberdeen University, this book represents an exciting cross disciplinary approach to the study of this still too little understood yet formative period in Scotland's history.

WINNER OF THE FRANK WATSON BOOK PRIZE 2021. SHORTLISTED IN SCOTLAND'S NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS 2021 The first full-scale, interdisciplinary treatment of the wide-ranging connections between the Gaelic world and the Northumbrian kingdom.