Passing by the
River-drift men and the Cave men, who belong to archaeology rather than
to history, we may take it as settled that the district was inhabited at
a very early period by the Ivernians or Iberians—a short, black-haired,
dark eyed, and swarthy complexioned people, with long or oval heads, and
speaking a non-Aryan language. The land of their origin is unknown, but
by some it is placed in the Western Ocean and identified with the fabled
continent of Atlantis. At one time they inhabited the whole of Europe
west and north of the Rhone and the Rhine, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and
the North of Africa, and are said to have had affinities with the
Firbolgs in Ireland, the Silures in Wales, the Aquitani between the
Pyrenees and the Loire, the Etruscans in Italy, the Sicani in Sicily,
the Basques in Spain, and the Berbers in Africa. A people of the
neolithic age, they were more civilized than their predecessors, the
Cave men. They were acquainted with cereals, had domesticated animals,
and are regarded as the founders of modern European civilization.
Whatever may be the number of the remains they have left elsewhere,
those which have been ascribed to them as found in Renfrewshire are few
and of doubtful origin. Still, it is not altogether improbable that they
fashioned the canoes which were dug up some time ago in the parish of
Lochwinnoch, and that the personal ornaments found in a cist at Houston
belonged to them.
The Iberians were
followed by the Goidels or Gaels, the vanguard of that great Aryan army
which was destined to rule the west. Of Celtic origin, the Goidels were
in personal appearance altogether unlike the Iberians. They were tall,
fair-haired, blue-eyed, with light complexions and broad heads. Armed
with weapons of bronze they drove the Iberians into the west or reduced
them to slavery. By some their arrival in Great Britain is set down as
early as the ninth century B.C., and by others as late as the sixth or
seventh. They were the builders of those vast megalithic structures
which, though in ruins, still stir the imagination of the beholder at
Avebury and Stonehenge, and of the smaller circles, which are scattered
over the moors and hilltops of Great Britain.
After the Goidels came
the Brythons or Britons, who were also Celts. Their arrival in Britain
is set down at from two to five centuries before our era. They were
armed with weapons of iron. Landing on the eastern and south-eastern
coasts of Britain, they gradually drove the Goidels into the west, who
there inter-married with the Iberians, and often joined hands with them
against the invaders. At one time the Goidels, it is said, occupied the
whole of the west of England from the Solway to the Severn ; but under
the pressure of the Brythons they were forced back upon the mixed
population of Wales and driven southward into Cornwall and Devon, and
northward into Cumberland and Lanarkshire, and beyond the Clyde.
During the Homan
occupation Renfrewshire was inhabited by the Goidelic Dumnonians, except
in the east, where in the Mearns, as the name implies,* was a tribe or
clan or settlement of the Maeatae. The Dumnonians were related to the
Damnonians of Cornwall and Devon, who were probably their superiors in
the arts of civilization, in consequence of their more frequent
intercourse with foreigners. The Maeatae are usually mentioned along
with the Caledonians, and are supposed to have come like them from the
north. Both are described as “ living in utter savagery, without
agriculture, or any dwellings but tents, and having wives in common,
living in marshes on roots and other such food, naked, tatooed, armed
with spears having a chain and knob attached to them to strike terror by
noise.” How far this description is true, and whether it represents “a
Celtic people which by long isolation had gone back into savagery, or a
race non-Celtic and perhaps non-Aryan, which had succeeded in
overpowering its neighbours,” are questions to which satisfactory
answers have not been given. The two tribes are first mentioned towards
the close of the second century a.d., by which time they appear to have
got possession of the country adjacent to the Northern Wall; possibly
they had also gained a footing on the south side of the Firth of Forth.
In 208 Severus led an expedition against them. Soon after his return,
the Maeatae were again in arms, and were joined by the Caledonians.
Severus died in 211, and it was probably not till after this that a clan
of the Maeatae settled in Renfrewshire. Whether this clan was among
those who were subsequently called Picts, and along with the Scots
became a terror to the Romanized Britons of the South, are questions
which need not here detain us.
Traces of the Roman
occupation in Renfrewshire are few. A camp at Paisley and a few Roman
coins, discovered near that town, are all that are recorded. Of the
coins nothing is known. They were dispersed immediately after their
discovery, and have gone no one knows where. The camp was situated on
Oakshawhead, on the site now occupied by the John Neilson Institution.
It had two outposts—one on Woodside, the other on Castlehead. The view
from the three stations commands almost the whole of the lower reaches
of the Clyde. Roads probably connected the camp with Carstairs on the
south, with the camp at Loudon Hill on the west, and with the Clyde at a
point opposite to the west end of the great Wall of Antoninus. Down to
the end of the seventeenth century the Clyde above Dumbarton was by no
means deep, and at low water was easily fordable at several places, and
it is not improbable that the camps at Loudon Hill and Paisley were held
by the Romans in order to prevent the natives on the north of the wall
from outflanking it, and then crossing the Clyde to invade Kyle and
Cunningham and the country to the south. |