Early Medieval Borderlands · Edinburgh & the Borders
The Gododdin — The Warriors Who Rode South and Never Came Home
Follow the Gododdin riders from Edinburgh to Catraeth around AD 600, through the Borderlands, Welsh poetry, Arthur and Hawick’s Teribus tradition.
Around AD 600, long before the Scottish Borders divided Scotland from England, a company of warriors rode south from the country around Edinburgh. They belonged to a northern British world whose languages, rulers and loyalties would seem unfamiliar to us today. Their destination was Catraeth, usually identified with Catterick in North Yorkshire. Their journey ended in a catastrophe remembered for more than fourteen centuries.
Imagine the departure rather than the battle for a moment. Horses shifting beneath their riders, spear shafts rising above woollen cloaks, men looking back towards the stronghold they were leaving. Somewhere behind them were families, grazing grounds, familiar tracks and the hall where their lord had entertained them. Ahead lay the long road south through the country that would become our Borderlands. We cannot recover the conversation of that morning, but we can recover something more remarkable: the determination of later generations to remember the men who left.
Their memorial was a poem. Y Gododdin survives in a medieval Welsh manuscript, yet its remembered landscape belongs to southern Scotland and northern England. It is one of the great reminders that the history of this region did not begin with a border, a castle or an abbey. Beneath all of those later stories lies another Britain, and these riders take us into it.
Before Scotland and England
The familiar national map is the first thing we have to leave behind. Around AD 600 there was no Scottish kingdom occupying the borders of modern Scotland, and no unified England stretching south from the Tweed. Northern Britain was divided between competing rulers and communities. Some spoke forms of the British language ancestral to Welsh. Others belonged to the expanding Anglian kingdoms. Gaelic-speaking powers were important farther west, while Pictish kingdoms lay to the north.
These were working landscapes of farms, livestock, strongholds and travelling households. Rivers connected communities as often as they separated them. A ruler's power depended on relationships with neighbouring lords, the food and service he could command, and the armed followers who would answer him. Political territory could change while the people farming it remained in place. That makes this period both fascinating and difficult to draw: the hills are familiar, but the identities attached to them are moving.
Our story of the Votadini and the ancient north explores the earlier background. The name Gododdin is generally connected with the Votadini recorded in the Roman period. That connection provides a thread through changing centuries, although it does not mean that a kingdom around AD 600 was simply an unchanged Roman-era tribe.
Din Eidyn — The Rock Above the Plain
At the northern end of the story stands Din Eidyn, normally associated with Edinburgh and its Castle Rock. Try to picture the place without the skyline of the modern city. The rock still rises above the surrounding ground, an imposing position from which power could be made visible. The stone castle we know belongs to later centuries; the earlier stronghold should be imagined through timber, earth, defended approaches and the everyday business of a ruler's household.
It mattered because it joined position with authority. A stronghold could protect valuable people and possessions, but it could also be where visitors arrived, gifts changed hands and alliances were renewed. A warrior travelling there entered more than a secure enclosure. He entered a society in which his place beside a lord carried expectations. Reputation was made in public, in the sight of the people whose judgement mattered.
That is the atmosphere in which the Gododdin tradition places the gathering before Catraeth. The later poem looks back towards a household generous enough to support its men, and demanding enough to expect their loyalty when the time came to ride.
The Year in the Hall
In the familiar reading of the poem, the warriors were maintained for a year by Mynyddog Mwynfawr before their expedition. The traditional account gives us a company of three hundred mounted men. The number has become inseparable from the story, although heroic poetry should not be treated as a surviving army register. It gives the expedition a memorable scale: a select company setting out against a danger much larger than itself.
The feast is often reduced to an amusing picture of men drinking for twelve months and then attempting a battle. That misses its social meaning. Hospitality created obligation. A lord who supported warriors with food, drink and gifts was gathering service as well as company. The hall was a place where generosity became loyalty, and where men could hear their own achievements praised before being asked to earn further praise.
The poem's recurring association of mead with the price paid in battle gives that relationship a terrible ending. What had been offered in abundance at the feast would be repaid through courage, injury and death. The cups and benches matter because the reader knows where the hospitality will lead.
A Company with Everything to Lose
These riders are easy to turn into silhouettes: three hundred interchangeable heroes on a distant hillside. The poem does something more intimate. It keeps returning to individuals, recalling their qualities and the impression they made. Men are remembered through generosity, appearance, lineage and conduct in battle. Their value lies partly in the fact that someone knew them well enough to say why their absence mattered.
That changes how we should imagine the company. They were not merely weapons belonging to a king. They were people whose deaths would leave gaps in households and local relationships. A skilled fighter might also be someone's son, brother, patron or protector. Losing a body of experienced followers could therefore weaken a community in ways that continued long after the field was quiet.
There is a tension here that makes the story compelling. The poem celebrates the courage that carried men into danger, while its very existence tells us how much was lost when they went. The praise cannot bring them back. It can only insist that they deserve to remain known.
Riding Through the Future Borders
A journey south from Edinburgh towards Catterick brings the Scottish Borders into the story. It does not give us permission to draw a precise line through every modern town, but it does invite us to look again at the corridors through which people travelled. The country between the Forth and northern Yorkshire was crossed by old roads, river valleys, upland passages and routes inherited from the Roman period.
Dere Street offers an especially powerful connection. Its line joined places far to the north and south of the modern border, passing through the wider landscape of the Tweed and the Cheviots. Parts of that Roman network remained features that travellers could recognise after imperial government had gone. A road did not cease to be useful simply because the authority that built it had disappeared.
Mark explores that landscape in the film on Woden Law, Pennymuir and Dere Street. Standing beside an old route helps put the expedition into human scale. The riders had to cover real ground, cross real water and find sustenance for real animals. The poem gives us the destination; the hills remind us of the effort between departure and arrival.
The Roman World Beneath Their Horses
By the time usually assigned to Catraeth, Roman rule in Britain had ended nearly two centuries earlier. That is a long time in a family's memory, but a shorter time in the life of a road, a ruined enclosure or a place-name. Later people inherited a landscape that Rome had altered, sometimes using its features for purposes the original builders had never intended.
Near Melrose, Trimontium belonged to that earlier military network. We should not imagine its Roman garrison still standing ready as the Gododdin passed. Its interest lies in the older geography of movement and authority. The Eildon Hills, the crossing country around the Tweed and the route south remained part of the same physical world, however much political control had changed.
This is one of the rewards of following early history through the Borders. A single view may contain prehistoric settlement, Roman movement and much later medieval power. The Gododdin belong to the interval between those better-known layers, when the great stone structures of Rome were becoming an inheritance rather than a functioning empire.
Why Catraeth Mattered
Catraeth is usually identified with Catterick, where the Roman settlement of Cataractonium developed beside the crossing of the River Swale. The association of road, river and settlement helps explain why this area mattered. Crossings concentrate movement, and movement brings opportunities to control people, goods and access to neighbouring country.
We should picture a changing place rather than freeze the Roman town at its peak. Archaeological work has revealed occupation after Roman rule and changes in where settlement was concentrated. The landscape around Catterick remained important even as the older urban pattern altered. That makes the destination more interesting than a generic battlefield: the riders were heading towards a place with a long history of strategic value.
The traditional interpretation presents their expedition as an attempt to win Catraeth from Anglian control. Its attraction would have been larger than the ground on which the battle was fought. Success could have altered influence along a major route; failure would help those who already held the advantage. The poem preserves the disaster, while the geography helps us understand why men might have risked so much there.
The Enemy Was Close to Home
The expanding Anglian kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira supply the usual political background to the encounter. Bernicia's northern power and Deira's more southerly territory would contribute to the world of Northumbria. Their rise transformed the country through which the Gododdin story moves.
It is tempting to describe all this as a neat contest between two peoples, with a clear line separating each side. Early medieval power rarely worked so tidily. Rulers competed with neighbours, made alliances and fought rivals within their own linguistic world. Families could live under changing overlords without moving from their farms. The struggle was about lordship and survival as well as language or inherited identity.
For the northern British communities, however, the pressure was real. Powerful neighbours were extending their reach into country whose strongholds and traditions had belonged to another political order. The Gododdin expedition becomes especially poignant against that background: a company riding south with confidence, into a balance of power that would not turn in their favour.
When the Road Ended in Battle
The surviving poem is not a battlefield report. It does not give us a dependable sequence of manoeuvres, a clear plan of the opposing armies or the sort of operational detail from which a modern historian could rebuild every hour. It offers something different: remembered violence and the conduct of men who met it.
In the conventional interpretation, the company faced overwhelming opposition and suffered devastating losses. The poem's praise repeatedly returns to bravery under conditions that bravery could not reverse. Men could be skilful, loyal and admired, yet still fall. That is a harder story than a straightforward celebration of victory because it asks the listener to recognise worth in people whose cause ended in defeat.
We can imagine the physical confusion without pretending to recover its exact arrangement. A mounted journey could end in fighting on foot. Shields and spears demanded close contact. Once companions were separated, personal courage could no longer guarantee the survival of the company. What the poem retains is the terrible narrowing of a public expedition into individual moments of courage and loss.
The Men Who Did Not Return
The title of this story describes the fate of the company remembered by the elegies, rather than claiming that every participant was killed. Traditions about survivors vary, and Aneirin is associated with surviving the disaster. What remains consistent is the scale of the loss and the need to remember it.
For those waiting at home, defeat would have arrived through absence before it arrived through explanation. A household accustomed to one man's protection or authority would have to adjust. A lord's circle would be diminished. The confidence of the feast would become something painful to recall. The poem speaks from the other side of that change, when praise is being offered to people who can no longer hear it.
That is why the Gododdin can still move readers who know little about sixth-century politics. Most people understand the shape of a departure, and the fear that someone expected home may never return. The ancient language and distant setting give the story depth, but the grief is recognisable.
Aneirin — A Voice Against Forgetting
The tradition associates the poem with Aneirin, a poet of the northern British world. Its surviving verses are elegies: acts of remembrance shaped around the dead. Rather than follow a single hero from beginning to end, they turn from one remembered figure to another, giving the company a collective memorial through separate lives.
There is great power in that arrangement. A victorious ruler can commission monuments, reward followers and establish the account that later generations hear. A shattered company has fewer ways to control its memory. Poetry gives it another kind of survival, carried by recitation, copying and the willingness of people far from the original field to keep listening.
We cannot put Aneirin into a recovered scene and claim every detail as fact. We can, however, recognise what the voice attributed to him achieves. The men are prevented from disappearing into an anonymous defeat. Their failure to return becomes the reason their names and qualities are repeated.
A Scottish Landscape Remembered in Welsh
Perhaps the most surprising part of the story is where its memory survived. The poem concerns the northern British world, but its surviving manuscript belongs to the Welsh literary tradition. To modern eyes that can look like a story travelling from one country to another. In the earlier linguistic landscape, the relationship was closer.
British-speaking communities in the north shared connections with those farther south and west. Wales preserved traditions of the Hen Ogledd, the Old North, including the names and deeds of rulers whose territories lay beyond later Welsh borders. The Gododdin are part of that inheritance. Their story reminds us that a modern national label does not neatly describe every earlier cultural relationship.
It also changes the way we look at Scottish history. The oldest remembered voices of a place may survive in a language no longer commonly spoken there. Reading Y Gododdin is therefore a way of recovering a connection that political change did not completely erase. The land around Edinburgh and the Borderlands remained present in the imagination of people who preserved its poetry elsewhere.
Seven Centuries Between Event and Book
The Book of Aneirin, the only surviving medieval manuscript of the poem, was copied in the thirteenth century. That distance matters, but it should not overwhelm the story. A manuscript copied long after an event may preserve older material, just as a traditional song can carry memories through many generations while changing in performance.
In this case the surviving text has layers. Language can be updated; verses can be added or rearranged; a later copyist can preserve something without understanding it exactly as an earlier audience did. Scholars therefore distinguish the age of the manuscript from the age of the material it contains. The battle traditionally belongs around AD 600, while the book that preserves its lament belongs to a much later Wales.
Those centuries make the survival more remarkable. Many halls vanished, many political names changed and countless ordinary voices were lost. Yet this body of verse was still worth copying. Someone wanted the fallen riders remembered when their northern kingdom was no longer a living political reality.
Arthur Appears at the Edge of the Story
One famous passage compares a warrior with Arthur. The point is praise: even an outstanding man is measured against a figure whose reputation represents something greater. It is a brief reference rather than an account of Arthur taking part in Catraeth.
Its importance depends partly on when that particular line entered the poem. If it belongs to an early layer, it would take Arthur's reputation deep into the earliest remembered literature of Britain. If later, it still shows how the Arthurian name worked as a measure of heroic achievement for the audience that received it. Either way, it is a fascinating meeting between the remembered warriors of the north and the figure who would become Britain's most celebrated legendary king.
The connection opens naturally into Mark's film on King Arthur in the Scottish Borders, and our story of Merlin, Arthur and the northern Borderlands. The attraction is not that the poem resolves every Arthurian question. It is that Arthur is already present in the language of heroism carried by this northern tradition.
A Kingdom Lost, a Population Still Living
The decline of Gododdin belongs to the wider growth of Northumbrian power. The siege of Eidyn recorded under 638 is commonly associated with the loss of Edinburgh to that expanding kingdom. We should resist making a single earlier battle responsible for every later change. Political transformation took place over decades, and Catraeth is one remembered disaster within that larger story.
A kingdom's disappearance also did not mean that all its people disappeared. Farmers, households and local communities could continue under different rulers. Landholding, language and allegiance changed at different speeds. The men who survived these transitions were not watching the birth of modern national borders; they were finding ways to live within a shifting structure of power.
That longer transformation connects the poem with the battle of Degsastan and the struggle for the north. The stories overlap in their world of competing rulers, but they describe separate traditions and should not be merged into one battle. Together they make the early medieval Borderlands feel less like an empty interval between Rome and the abbeys.
Hawick and the Appeal of an Ancient Cry
For a Borders reader there is another connection that deserves attention: Hawick's Teribus ye Teri Odin. It is a deeply rooted expression of local identity, heard in the life of the Common Riding and attached to the town's pride in its past. Its unusual sound has invited explanations reaching far beyond the history of Hornshole.
Attempts to connect it with the Gododdin belong to that search for ancient meaning. It is easy to understand the appeal. A town that celebrates riders, loyalty and shared remembrance encounters an old northern story about a mounted company and hears something that feels familiar. But a resemblance of sound is not a secure translation, and the slogan should not be presented as the recovered war-cry of the men at Catraeth. The Scots dictionary records forms around 1800 and describes the phrase's origin as obscure.
Hawick's use of the words is not the mistake. Treating one proposed Gododdin explanation as an established origin would be. The tradition remains powerful on its own terms. Our Hornshole and Hawick story follows the town's later history of flags, boundaries and celebration, another example of a community keeping its past alive through riding and remembrance.
What the Ground Can Still Tell Us
The poem and the archaeology answer different kinds of question. Excavation can reveal settlement, roads, burials and changes in occupation. It can help us understand the world in which people travelled and fought. It is much less likely to identify one named warrior from an elegy or recover the exact words spoken before a departure.
That difference need not drain the landscape of interest. At Catterick, the Roman and early medieval remains show why the area was an important place. In the Borders, old routes and strongholds make the northern world tangible. You can stand near the Eildons, look towards the Tweed and realise that movement through this country has a much longer history than the modern road beneath your car.
The landscape keeps us honest about distance and effort. Poetry keeps us close to the people. Put the two together, and the Gododdin become more than a difficult name in an old book. They become riders passing through a country whose hills we still recognise, carrying hopes that the later lament tells us were broken.
Why Defeat Became the Memory
There is a reason this story has lasted longer than many successful campaigns. Victory settles a contest for a time; a terrible loss can leave a question that each generation asks again. Why did they go? What did loyalty demand? What survives when the people who acted with courage could not save their cause?
Y Gododdin answers through remembrance rather than explanation. It does not rescue the expedition by inventing a triumphant ending. It gives dignity to people whose story would otherwise belong to their conquerors. The surviving praise allows courage and catastrophe to occupy the same page, which is a more human account than either simple glory or simple failure.
For us in the Borders, it also restores depth to the familiar landscape. Before the reivers, before the great abbeys and before the wars that made this a national frontier, there were other rulers, other languages and other communities remembering their dead. Their histories did not cease to matter when the names on the map changed.
The Riders We Still Remember
Return to that imagined departure from Din Eidyn. The company moves out, the stronghold recedes and the country opens ahead. They cannot know that the journey will become a lament, or that people in another century and another language will still be repeating their story. They are thinking of the task before them, of the men beside them and of the honour they hope to bring home.
Most of the warriors commemorated in the poem never did come home. Yet the memory of their company travelled farther than they ever could. It crossed the loss of their kingdom, the changing speech of their country and the long distance between oral tradition and manuscript. It reached readers who would know Edinburgh and Catterick by different names and who would call the country between them the Borderlands.
That is the enduring achievement of the Gododdin. A disaster that might have reduced men to a forgotten number became a record of people worth remembering. When we follow the old roads south, we are looking at a landscape that has carried many armies. This one left behind something quieter, and harder to erase: a voice asking us to remember who rode.
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