‘Merlin’s Grave’ and other lost stories embedded in the landscape
On the banks of the Tweed in the Scottish Borders is the reputed site of Merlin’s Grave, the embedded remnant of a legend long associated with the nearby village of Drumelzier. Dr Ronan Toolis explains how a community archaeology project revealed why this tale became rooted to this part of Tweeddale.
Merlin’s Grave at Drumelzier (pronounced druh MEL-yur) is formally documented in Scotland’s National Record of the Historic Environment, but despite its evocative name this site is little more than a nondescript corner of a field, etched on to the map by local tradition. In 1689, Alexander Pennecuik noted in the draft of his Geographical Historical Description of the Shire of Tweeddale that: ‘a little below the church yeard, the famous prophet Merlin is said to be buried. The particular place of his grave… was shewn me many years ago, by the Old and Reverend Minister of the place…’. The origins of this tradition, the RCAHMS Peeblesshire Inventory speculates, could lie in the discovery of a Bronze Age grave – but, if so, no record of this find survives. While Merlin’s Grave has been marked on maps since the 18th century, no archaeological remains have ever been documented there.
How, then, did Drumelzier come to be associated with Merlin? Our story begins with an old medieval tale, the Vita Merlini Silvestris (‘The Life of Merlin of the Forest’), which tells of a wild man of the woods who was banished to the wilderness because of the terrible slaughter he had provoked at a great battle in northern Cumbria: ‘qui Lailoken vocabatur quem quidam dicunt fuisse Merlynum qui erat Britonibus quasi propheta singularis sed nescitur…’ (‘his name was Lailoken. Certain people say that he was Merlin who was regarded amongst the Britons as unique in his powers of prophecy…’).
The Vita actually contains two stories about Lailoken. In the first, he presses St Kentigern for absolution for his misdeeds. Three times Lailoken asks for forgiveness, and each time he prophesises a different way he will die – crushed by stones and cudgels; pierced by a sharp wooden stake; and drowned. On receiving St Kentigern’s blessing, Lailoken offers a further prophecy that the greatest of the kings of Britain, the holiest of the bishops, and the noblest of the lords will follow him in death that same year.
The second story finds Lailoken as a prisoner of an under-king or sub-king called Meldred, held beside his ‘lofty throne’ at Dunmeller. After three days, Lailoken offers Meldred a trio of nonsensical riddles, and the perplexed ruler promises him his freedom in return for an explanation. Lailoken first foretells his imminent threefold death and asks that he be buried on the east side of the Tweed near where it meets the Powsail Burn. The king agrees, but flies into a rage when the riddles are revealed to tell of the queen’s adultery. Lailoken makes a hasty escape, but the queen exacts her revenge years later when her shepherds attack Lailoken while on his way past Dunmeller, stoning and beating him. In his death throes, Lailoken falls into the Tweed, landing on the sharp stake of a fish trap where, impaled face down, he drowns. Thus, his prophecy became true, and Meldred had him buried at his chosen spot.
Where did this curious tale come from? The Vita Merlini Silvestris survives in only one 15th-century manuscript (held in the British Library). A truncated version of the same legend was also included in the Scotichronicon, written in the 1440s by Walter Bower, Abbot of Inchcolm Abbey, but the story was probably composed centuries earlier, most likel in the 12th century, when the Life of St Kentigern was being written. The Drumelzier tale appears to have much in common with early medieval Welsh poetry about ‘Myrddin Wyllt’, who was renowned for his gift of prophecy – and, interestingly, this same Myrddin was also called ‘Llallawc’ and ‘Llallogan’ in one of these poems, Cyfoesi Myrddin a Gwenddydd ei Chwaer (‘Conversation of Myrddin and his Sister Gwenddydd’). In turn, Myrddin became the wizard Merlin in the 12th century, when Geoffrey of Monmouth drew various Welsh stories together into his Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’), from which stemmed the Arthurian legends easily recognised today – and Geoffrey included yet another variant of the Drumelzier story in his own Vita Merlini.
There are no doubts, then, as to the medieval credentials of the Drumelzier legend – but could it have had even earlier origins? The name Lailoken derives from Cumbric, a now extinct Celtic language that was spoken in southern Scotland during the early medieval period. His gift of prophecy recalls the divination skills attributed to druids by ancient Classical writers such as Dio Chrysostom, Cicero, and Hippolytus, and his triple death reflects the overkill observed among Iron Age sacrificial bog bodies such as Lindow Man (see CA 233 and 375). But was the story simply brought to Drumelzier by a wandering medieval minstrel, or did the Merlin legend actually originate here in Tweeddale? These were the questions that a community project, Drumelzier’s Hidden Heritage, sought to answer. By investigating sites in the landscape associated with the tale, the project (led by GUARD Archaeology) sought to examine the Drumelzier tale’s archaeological roots.
On a very soggy, dreich day in November 2022, a team of 11 volunteers and three archaeologists undertook a geophysical survey of a field to the north of Drumelzier. Led by Magnitude Surveys, the investigation aimed to see what lay beneath the surface on the spot marked as Merlin’s Grave – but unfortunately the answer proved to be ‘nothing’. What the survey did detect, though, was a large pit in the same field, a short distance to the south-east. Was it this that gave rise to the association of this location with Merlin’s Grave? There did appear to be some form of buried archaeological remains there, but only excavation would determine if the pit was indeed a grave, if it contained human remains and what period it belonged to – and unfortunately we were not given permission to dig. It would have been a very short and inconclusive project if this was all the team had to go on – but luckily there were a couple of other sites that we had investigated over the preceding months, which had yielded rather more tangible evidence.
The Vita Merlini Silvestris contained several clues to guide our search. Much of the action takes place in and around Dunmeller, from which the place name Drumelzier derives, and the Powsail Burn and the Tweed do indeed converge at this location. The modern village is also still overlooked by the prominent ruins of Tinnis Castle, which are commonly thought to represent the remains of Meldred’s ‘lofty throne’ where Lailoken was held captive. Meldred himself is mentioned nowhere outside the Vita Merlini Silvestris, but his description as a sub king suggests that he was considered to rule a small area under the dominance of another ruler. This high-king may have been considered to be Rhydderch, a known contemporary of St Kentigern in the years around AD 600, who was the king of Alt Clud, the Rock of the Clyde.
St Kentigern, too, is a historically attested person: a 6th-century bishop of Glasgow, whose death was recorded in the Annales Cambriae (‘Welsh Annals’) around AD 614. Meanwhile, the terrible bloodshed for which Lailoken sought forgiveness in the Vita’s first story appears to have been the Battle of Arthuret, which the Annales Cambriae place in AD 573. It is thought to have been fought on the plain between Liddel and Carwannok (Liddel and Carwhinley in northern Cumbria).
What the Lailoken story therefore offered us was: a period (AD 573-614), a place (Drumelzier), and a context (an early medieval kingdom in Peeblesshire) to investigate – and a key part of this research saw a team of GUARD Archaeologists and 35 volunteers excavating at Tinnis Castle in August 2022, hoping to recover archaeological evidence that might shed light on the origins of the Drumelzier legend.
This is an extract of an article that appeared in CA 415. Read on in the magazine, or click here to read it online at The Past, where you can read all of the Current Archaeology articles in full as well as the content of our other magazines, Current World Archaeology, Ancient Egypt, and Military History Matters.
