Anawr gynhoruan
Huan arwyran.
Gwledic gwd gyffgein
Nef enys brydein.
Welcome to Ancient Lothian, the website dedicated to the historic and prehistoric cultures of South-East Scotland.
Ancient Lothian aims to catalogue the majority of ancient, medieval and early modern sites within the Lothians, as well as documenting the Celtic and Germanic histories and mythologies of the region up to about 1600 AD.
If you're planning an excursion to any of the local archaeological sites, click here to view a daily weather forecast for South-east Scotland, provided by the Met Office. There is also a five-day forecast available from that page for Edinburgh, Grangemouth, Hawick and St. Andrews, respectively.
Feel free to peruse the contents of other sites on the CyberScotia domain, including other work-in-progress such as Inchcolm: Iona of the East, The Complete Tannhill, or Cairnpapple.
A PERSONAL DISCLAIMER
I began Ancient Lothian in the late 1990s when I was a rather esoterically-minded Critical Musicologist who discovered an amateur passion for the local history of the place he's from. As such, it became an off-campus playground offering some light relief from more brow-furrowing academic toils. Problematically, although it has never represented a professional academic statement, it has occasionally been mistaken for one. But surely even professionals are allowed to have hobbies? The important thing is to recognise the difference between the two activities, and it strikes me that this is sometimes a difficult difference to recognise in the online world. However, putting the website together also taught me that the internet can be a powerful tool for research and publication — when used wisely, the internet is undoubtedly the biggest technological innovation in scholarship since Gutenburg, Caxton, and Chepman & Myllar.
Significantly, my new hobby of being a Local Historian (and hopefully not much worse than most) started hooking in to various Scottish Studies interests that had previously managed to squeak into the margins of my overly-interdisciplinary PhD: The Sonorous Body: Music, Enlightenment & Deconstruction (Edinburgh University, 1994). Among other things, that landed me with a specialism in the aesthetics of the Scottish Enlightenment through Romanticism, as well as making me a minor Burns scholar with a sideline in Tannahill. Soon, I was also haunting the outer limits of Celtic Studies, setting up that discipline's first online peer-reviewed journal, Celtic Cultural Studies. At first, I didn't entirely grasp the consequences of all this, and made a few questionable career-choices as a result. Nonetheless, I was slowly getting closer to the scholarly implications of Ancient Lothian, and have continued in this direction since — not least with a major new project on Llyfr Aneirin ("The Book of Aneirin"), which hopefully represents my first attempt at genuine Lothian scholarship per se, as well as moving me further up the foothills of professional Celtic Studies. Only time will tell...
All of this just made Ancient Lothian's joyful amateurism an increasing embarrassment. As a result, the site went quietly onto the back-burner, and is now a practically static project. I did think about spending a year or so rewriting with more academic rigour, or even just wiping it entirely. But, in the final analysis, I have Ancient Lothian to thank for precipitating a bit of a career change (even if this often felt more like a career-crisis), and apart from my own sentimental attachment to it, a surprising number of folks keep saying how useful they've found it. So, roughly a decade on, and after much deliberation, I've decided to let it stand as it is, despite its many flaws. But if you're an archaeology undergraduate writing an essay on, say, the Traprain Law silver hoard, I strongly suggest that instead of copying and pasting from this website, you dig out the sources for yourself. But then, that should go without saying anyway, shouldn't it? ;-)
Overall, Ancient Lothian might be said to represent an Antiquarian phase. I admit, one of my local heroes here was always the recklessly-enthusiastic (but rather pioneering) "Lothian chiel" par excellence, James Young Simpson. But the heady vapours are finally clearing, and maybe a better model now would be the sagacious Skene himself. One can but hope, eh?