Last updated on December 29, 2023
There is a path that leads from the city of Edinburgh into the wild interior of southern Scotland. It is a path that runs over the most beautiful of the hills on which the city is constructed, before ascending into the heart of the Pentland range, and then on further yet; into the inner hill country of the Borderland.
This path is one marked out by legends. These are tales connected to one particular legendary figure, present in Celtic mythology from a very early date; that of the White Stag. The stories connected to it span both the history of Edinburgh and the history of Scotland; when both city and country first came into being, stories of the White Stag were made a part of their legendary origins. From that time, they went on to become a part of the medieval culture of the nation; and after that, found their way into the Romantic and Antiquarian literature of the 19th century. Even today the White Stag has an enduring popularity; a quick online search will reveal as many contemporary versions of its image as ancient ones. It has graced the pages of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Harry Potter books; in cinema, it has recently appeared as an extra in both the Hobbit film series and Snow White and the Huntsman. Its presence has proven singularly enduring, spanning the entire history of western European civilisation, from Dark Age legends rooted in the Iron Age through to works of contemporary fantasy literature and art.
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The Edinburgh rendition of the White Stag is a tale from the early Middle Ages, from a time when Scotland was beginning to transform itself from an old-style Celtic society into one more in line with mainstream European civilisation. It is a tale that dates to the foundation of the city as a city; to the time when towns were first introduced to the wilds of the north, and this series of craggy hills by the shores of the Forth made the site of one. It is a tale of how Edinburgh came to be Scottish – and at the same time, a tale that preserves something of the ancient pagan magic that held people here in its spell long before there was a Scotland.
That this legend is not already better known is a consequence of its place in the story we Scots tell ourselves about the origins of our nation – a story into which this figure does not easily fit. Although the White Stag motif is both ancient and Celtic in origin, firmly rooted in this place, it nonetheless originates in a Celtic tradition that has come to be seen as a foreign one. The origins of the Scottish people are seen as lying in the Gaelic culture of the west; it is in the Highlands that we traditionally find the most authentic expression of our culture, and in the Gaelic language the mother-tongue of our nation. The White Stag of Edinburgh does not connect to this Gaelic tradition. Rather, it derives from the other, southern strand of Celtic culture; from the Brythonic Celtic cultures of Wales, Cornwall & Brittany.
These cultures are, today, seldom seen as a part of the heritage of Scotland. That some connections exist between the Celtic cultures is largely accepted – but the Highlands and the Gaelic language are very much seen as ours, in a way that the Welsh mountains or the Breton language are not.
This was not always so. There was a time when the inhabitants of the southern parts of Scotland called themselves Britons, just as did the ancestors of the Welsh and the Cornish – and the era when they did so was not so long ago as we might think. Nor is it the case that these Britons were driven out and Scots came in to take their place; genetic archaeology reveals a continuity in the native bloodlines of the region, rather than any sweeping replacement of the original inhabitants by incomers from the west.
It is a singular fact that the great majority of the inhabitants of southern Scotland who today call themselves Scots descend from ancestors who did not; that we are largely the children of Britons, with an infusion of Gaelic and Pictish blood from the north, and a little Anglian, Viking, Flemish and Norman-French DNA mixed in for good measure. The nation of Scotland was in truth forged from the union of the two strands of Celtic culture; Gaelic combined with Brythonic. Much of the ancient culture of Wales and of Brittany may therefore legitimately be seen as part of our own – and this same assertion may be made on behalf of those portions of England in which Brythonic cultures once prevailed. In this alternative Celtic tradition there lies a whole lost history of northern Britain, a forgotten civilisation with all manner of secrets yet to be uncovered – one whose memory has been excised almost completely from the dominant narratives of Scottish history.
This excision was a very deliberate one. The disappearance of the Brythonic identity in northern Britain was the result of the deliberate exercise of power; unity was imposed on the diverse tribes of northern Britain by making them forget that they were in any way different from one another. Much was lost in this process. The story of Scotland was once much longer and far more complex than the one that remains to us now; but the pages that might have contained it were either ripped from the book long ago, or simply allowed to moulder away. There are things our ancestors were not meant to remember – and the origins of the White Stag of Edinburgh are one of these.
The figure of the stag is one of the ghosts of the lost history of the North; one whose pale white form still haunts the streets of a city that was once known by other names, spoken in another, older tongue. In tracing the stag’s path through history we find that we are led back into that ancient world; and a whole other land opens up in the hills of southern Scotland, ripe for exploration. The ancestral land we have lost was not simply different to the one we know; it was also an utterly fascinating place, one that richly deserves to be better known. The path that leads us back to it is, in this case, that marked out by the hoofprints of the White Stag; a path that runs through the legends of southern Scotland, in Edinburgh and beyond. Follow the tracks far enough, and we will find ourselves led back into the world of pre-Christian belief from which the Stag first sprang. A lost world, into which we find we now have a new doorway…
What better reason could there be to take up a hunt?
My own hunt began many years ago, before I even understood that it had. I had encountered the image of the White Stag many times in my life, but without taking the time to study it properly. It was only lately that something of its meaning was revealed to me. I had been doing a little reading on the origins of that portion of the Celtic world where my wife was born, and from which her family hail; the region of Morbihan, in southern Brittany. In this land, it turned out, the legends of the White Stag had an especially great siginificance.
There is a particular class of medieval tale believed to have originated in Brittany, which explore supernatural and Arthurian themes drawn from old Brythonic Celtic culture. These tales are called the Breton Lais. Among them are some that concern the origin of the various kingdoms and ruling dynasties of the Bretons – and within these origin legends, the figure of the White Stag plays a prominent part. This theme was explored in detail by Professor Rachel Bromwich in “Celtic Dynastic Themes and the Breton Lays”, and certain key elements elaborated upon more recently by John Koch of the University of Wales in Aberystwyth. Diving into this legendary literature, I found myself faced with a fascinating series of narratives in which the White Stag figure served as a harbinger or herald for female spirits from the Otherworld; spirits who seemed to personify the land itself, who possessed the power to bestow kingship, and who were associated strongly with sacred springs. Morbihan was one land associated with such a sovereignty spirit. An Arthurian tale with Breton roots called “Erec & Enid” seemed to preserve the tradition of a union between the region’s founding king, Waroch, and the sovereignty goddess of the land – a land called in Breton Gwened, from which name ‘Enid’ appeared to derive. The hunt for the White Stag was a precursor to Erec’s encounter with this transmuted goddess, and this pattern repeated in multiple other narratives containing similar female characters; there seemed to be a regular connection between the otherworld stag and the goddess.
The tales in question were fascinating ones, and so I stowed the theme of the White Stag away in my memory for further future exploration. I knew that it cropped up here and there in the legends of southern Scotland, and intended to attempt my own hunt for it at some point in the future. As it turned out, though, that time came sooner than I had expected.
A few months ago, I set out for a day exploring the Old Town of Edinburgh. Though I have lived here for some twenty years, there are still corners I have not explored; for a small city, it packs a phenomenal amount in, and to know its every facet would take a lifetime – perhaps more. A couple of years ago, a day off would have seen me head for the hills with my tent; we now have two small children, however, and so my range of movement has been reduced. This does not matter as much as it might have in other places, however. My leisure pursuit of choice is to trek through the hill country looking for traces of Celtic legend – and since the city in which I live is both built upon a range of hills and thoroughly steeped in legend, it is a pursuit that can be adapted to Edinburgh without losing much in the process.
I’d taken my bike up from Leith to the New Town, along the new cycleways that have transformed Leith Walk from potential death-trap to credible cycling route. I stopped off at a few of the city’s galleries, then made my way up to the Old Town to follow a route called the Patrick Geddes Trail. Geddes was both the leading figure in the city’s Celtic Revival of the late 19th century, and also the foremost pioneer for the conservation of its architecture; his mind is one that appeals to mine, and I wished to step inside the urban environment that was its most powerful remaining expression. In the end, though, it was something far older I ended up encountering; something deriving not from the Celtic revival, but from the ancient Celtic culture that inspired it.
The route led me steadily downhill, from the slopes of the Castle Rock towards the palace. Around halfway down the High Street, I reached the crossroads where stands the World’s End pub. Rather than the beginning of the apocalypse, this place marks the spot where the city walls of Edinburgh once crossed the Royal Mile and, therefore, the urban world once ended. The buildings of the city have long-since overflowed these original boundaries, however, and the lower slopes now form the neighbourhood known as the Canongate.
It was here that images of the White Stag became especially numerous. I’d already glimpsed him, haunting the Grassmarket; an old inn to be found there is named the White Hart, and the image of the Stag looks down both from the sign outside, and from an old carving above the door.
These brief sightings had placed the symbol in my mind, led me to question why a character I had recently encountered in such a fascinating series of Breton tales should be present here in my home city. Heading down the Canongate, I found more such images proliferating around me; as it was to turn out, the White Stag has been the emblem of the neighbourhood since the remote past, and carvings of him were to be found everywhere there. I reached the central Kirk and, finding the Stag’s image gazing down in gold from the summit of the spire, I made up my mind to step within and do some research.
The interior of the Canongate Kirk is a home to a veritable herd of White Stags. It’s there in marble on the war memorial; carved in wood on the pews near the altar; enswathed in Celtic knotwork on a scroll on the wall; resplendently embroidered on the altar-cloth; and portrayed in a most striking form in a large antique painting upon the southern wall.
These images do not portray the stag in a purely symbolic form, as an emblem of the Kirk and the neighbourhood; rather, a good number of them represent in visual form the Edinburgh legend from which the stag-symbol springs. This is a legend that exists in a number of forms, but the following (derived from the Chronicle of Scotland by Boecce & Bellenden – book 12, pg 184) is consistent with that given in the Ordinale of Holyrood Abbey, and may thus be considered a fair representation of the official version (translation from Middle Scots my own);
In the fourth year of his reign this noble prince (David I of Scotland) came to visit the Maiden Castle of Edinburgh. At this time all the bounds of Scotland were full of woods, pastures and meadows. For the country was more given to store of beasts than any production of corns. And about this castle was a great forest full of harts, hinds, foxes and suchlike manner of beasts. Now was the Rood Day coming; the day called the Exaltation of the Cross. And because this was a highly solemn day, the king went to join the congregation of the church. After the mass was done with most solemnity and reverence, there came before him many young and insolent barons of Scotland, desiring to go hunt for pleasure with their hounds in the forest.
At this time with the king was a man of singular and devout life, named Alcuin, a Canon of the Order of Saint Augustine. He had for a long time before been confessor to King David when he resided in England, at a time when he was Earl of Huntingdon and Northumberland. This religious man dissuaded the king for many reasons to go on this hunt, alleging that the day was so solemn that he should give himself only to contemplation, and no other exertion. Nevertheless, his dissuasions availed little, for the king was finally so provoked by the inopportune solicitations of his barons, that he passed notwithstanding the solemnity of this day of the cross to his hunt.
When he was coming through the vale that lies to the east of the castle, where now lies the Canongate, the hunting band passed through the wood with such noise and sound of bugles and cries, that all the beasts were raised from their dens. Now the king came to the foot of the Crag, and all his nobles separated here and there from him to chase their game and have their sport. Then, suddenly there appeared to his sight the fairest hart that ever was seen before among living creatures. The noise and din of this hart rang with awful and deep brays, making the king’s horse so afraid, that no reins might hold him, and he ran away across moss and mire with the king. Nonetheless, the hart followed so fast, that he charged upon them, and struck both king and horse to the ground. Then, the king reached his hands up between the antlers of the hart to save himself from being struck by them – and he found the holy cross contained within his hands. At sight of this the hart fled away with great violence; and this was in the same place where now springs the Rood Well.
The people, rightly afraid, returned to him from all parts of the wood to comfort the king after his trouble, and fell on their knees adoring the holy cross. For it was not common for such heavenly providence to appear. There is no man who can show of what matter that cross is, of metal or tree.
Soon after the king returned to his castle, and in the night following, he was admonished by a vision in his sleep to build an abbey of Canons Regular in the place where he received the miraculous cross. As soon as he awakened he told his vision to Alcuin his confessor, who did nothing to discourage this good idea, but instead inflamed him with most fervent devotion to accomplish it. The king sent his most trusted servants to France and Flanders, and brought crafty masons to build this abbey. It was dedicated to the honour of the Holy Cross.
The story tells the tale of how King David the 1st of Scotland founded Holyrood Abbey; the dominant ecclesiastical site of what subsequently became one of the first burghs of the country. The ruins of that Abbey are still to be seen today, rising monumentally from the grounds of the Royal Palace of Holyrood. The trail of the stag leads us from the Castle of Edinburgh down the Canongate, then across the base of Holyrood Park before finally ascending onto the slopes of Arthur’s Seat. Here, below the northern end of Salisbury Crags lies a gentle depression on the hillslope; all that remains of the spot where St David’s Well once rose. The waters of that well have been diverted since, by a combination of time and human effort; they now flow into the stony interior of the St Margaret’s Well complex a short distance below.
There are clear supernatural elements in the tale. It is the king’s failure to respect the holy day of the cross that results in the stag attacking him, and the miraculous appearance of that cross in his hands that saves him. When the stag flees, it disappears into thin air at the site of a holy well; the place the tale names as the Rood Well (‘well of the cross’), and which latterly came to be known as St David’s Well in honour of the king. The site of this well and all the high terrain that surrounds it were subsequently bestowed upon Holyrood Abbey; these lands now form Holyrood Park, the patch of wild terrain that rises so picturesquely above the city centre of Edinburgh.
On the face of it, this legend might appear to be nothing but a conventional Christian morality tale of the Middle Ages. A lordly figure strays from the path of righteousness, in consequence of which he is assailed by some peril – but at the last minute divine intervention saves him from danger, and he gives thanks to God by building a church. So the story has been interpreted for many a year.
At first glance, there is nothing terribly flawed in this analysis. It is not absolutely essential to explain every sighting of a white stag as the product of ancient Celtic myth; after all, to this very day such beasts do periodically appear in the forests of Scotland. The tale of David’s encounter might simply be explained as an encounter with a striking animal with folkloric associations, wrapped up in a Christian parable. This is the conventional wisdom, and interpretation of the legend has not previously felt the need to delve any deeper.
I believe this interpretation to have been an error – and that in overlooking the more ancient overtones of the tale, we have overlooked one of the most fascinating aspects of the history of this city. There are reasons to believe that the White Stag tale does connect to Brythonic legend. These reasons are many in number and, when looked at in their totality, surprisingly clear.
The first is perhaps the most obvious. It is not simply obvious but, in fact, very large – 251 metres in height and 2 square kilometres in area. This is the miniature mountain that forms the centrepiece of Holyrood Park, and bears the name of Arthur’s Seat.
Arthur is the central figure of Brythonic legendary tradition. If we are to look for a reason to believe that the White Stag might be connected to Brythonic legend, the fact that it appears on the slopes of a hill named after a figure from such legends certainly provides one.
No specific tale has come down to explain the connection between Edinburgh’s mountain and Arthur. Sacred hills are however commonplace in Celtic legends; they form gateways to the Otherworld, containing within their slopes an alternate reality inhabited by elves, fairies and their supernatural rulers. Such creatures represent the faded memory of an old belief system; in earlier times they were likely the gods and spirits of the pagan pantheon. Arthur is often represented as sleeping in such holy hills, where he and his warband await the time they will return to restore his lost kingdom; in Scotland, such tales are told of the Eildons in the Borders, and of Dumbuck Hill near Dumbarton.
There is a piece of Edinburgh folklore of unusual provenance that suggests Arthur’s Seat should be counted among the number of such hills. It derives from the records of one of the early Witch Trials; in 1572, one Janet Boyman of the Canongate was executed for the crime of witchcraft, and in her trial she is noted to have invoked a being from Elfland at an ‘eldritch well’ on Arthur’s Seat, summoning him in the name of the Father, the Son, King Arthur and Queen Elspeth. In return her elven associate gave her healing powers, the ability to restore children stolen by the fairies, an imperviousness to pain, and five children of her own.
The association of the name of Arthur with the tale, and the implication that the king held authority over the supernatural denizens of the hill, shows that a folk tradition connecting Arthur’s Seat, the king and the fairies was present here in the 16th century at least, as it was elsewhere in the country.
The antiquity of the hill’s connection to Arthur has been questioned. Arthurian legend was popular in medieval Europe, and it has been theorized that the presence of the name here reflects the later importation of such legends into the country. There is, however, no doubt at all that Britons were present in southern Scotland from the earliest times; and no doubt either that those Britons had their legends of King Arthur, as did their cousins to the south. There is no realistic reason to rule out the possibility that the name of the hill originated among them.
We know with certainty that there were Britons present in the Edinburgh region at the time of King David, when the tale of the White Stag is set. Records from the period name the landowner of Duddingston on the southern slopes of Arthur’s Seat as one “Uviet the White”, and Uviet is a Brythonic name. The village over which he ruled also then bore a Brythonic name; Treverlen, a name beginning with the Brythonic ‘tre-‘ meaning ‘settlement’. There is evidence, therefore, that a settlement of Britons still lay adjacent to the hill bearing Arthur’s name in the era of David; that they might have had some hand in the association between king and mountain is hardly fanciful.
What is true of the name of Duddingston is also true of the name of Edinburgh. ‘Edin’ derives from the Brythonic language; the city was previously known as Din Eidyn, and referred to as such in the annals of the Britons with some regularity. It was one of the principal fortresses of a tribe of Britons called the Godothin, whose king Mynythog made it his principal seat. He raised an army here whose exploits are the subject of one of the earliest works of Welsh literature; the poem “Y Gododdin”, by Aneirin. This tribe controlled the city from the time of the first Roman histories down to the 7th century, when they were overthrown by the Angles of Northumbria and their territories incorporated into that kingdom.
What is true of the city is true too of the land itself, in its entirety. Before David became king of Scotland, he ruled over the parts of the country south of Forth and Clyde under the title ‘Prince of the Cumbrians’. The word Cumbrian derives from a term the Britons used to describe themselves, meaning ‘fellow countrymen’. The same word is used by the Welsh to describe themselves today; in Welsh, the word for the Welsh is ‘Cymry’. That theirs was the name used for southern Scotland – and parts of northern England too – in the time of David indicates that they remained, at that point, the dominant ethnicity in that land, as they had been for thousands of years before.
The course of events in Edinburhg over the centuries between the fall of the Godothin realm and the era of David is unclear. The region of Lothian formed a frontier territory between Northumbria, the Picts to the north, the Gaelic Scots to the northwest and the surviving Brythonic kingdom of Strathclyde in southwestern Scotland. Placenames linked with the languages of all these peoples are present in the Lothians, suggesting that control passed back and forth on numerous occasions, and in more than one direction. Northumbrian control over much of the earlier period seems the likeliest possibility – but after Northumbria succumbed to the Great Heathen Army of the Danes in 865 anything is possible. The Annals of Clonmacnoise record the English king Aethelstan despoiling “the kingdom of Edinburgh” in 934, suggesting that an independent state arose here; to which people the kings of this state may have belonged is anyone’s guess.
Edinburgh was finally taken over by the Scots in the mid-10th century, in the reign of king Indulf. From this point is seems to have remained a part of the Scottish kingdom, whose territories progressively expanded south and east down to the line of the present border over the next century.
So what significance might the White Stag have held in the culture of the Britons, that would have led to its being included in a foundation legend from the early Middle Ages, several centuries after the Scottish conquest? If the parallel with the stories of the Breton lais is accurate, then the White Stag would originally have appeared as a harbinger of a particular kind of deity; a sovereignty goddess representing the land, whom the first of the Godothin-Brythonic kings would have encountered and wed at the foundation of the kingdom, and to whom all the subsequent kings were then symbolically wed thereafter. This theme of marriage to a divine personification of the tribal territory is regularly encountered in Celtic mythology, and seems to have played a key part in the legendary underpinnings of the native states – so much so that its traditions and legends were in some cases able to survive for centuries into the Christian era.
In the lais, there is regularly an association between the sovereignty-goddess figure and a well; a sacred spring, presumably a holy place of the goddess. Such things are commonplace in the Celtic world; springs were afforded a prominence in the ritual landscape, and regularly made the focus of worship. This practice subsequently extended a long way into the Christian era, often through the conversion of wells into Christian holy places, dedicated to the cults of saints who consecrated them – but also in other cases through the persistence of associations between the wells and a non-Christian spirit-world of elves, fairies or similar creatures.
If we assume that the kingdom of the Godothin Britons had its traditional sovereignty goddess, as did the realms of the Britons to the south, and that goddess was connected to a particular sacred spring, then a most intriguing possibility presents itself. A possible explanation for the presence of the White Stag in the legend of Holyrood Park, and also a possible explanation for the Arthurian connections of the park’s hillsides.
It is certain that Holyrood and Arthur’s Seat were sacred sites, long before the creation of the Abbey. We can say this because the remains of ancient earthworks can be discerned upon almost all of its peaks, and a great many of its slopes besides; an unusual amount of effort was expended on this place in ancient times. From the depths of Duddingston Loch, ritual deposits have been recovered; sacrifices of weapons and artefacts made by the Celtic inhabitants to the spirits of its waters. We know that both hilltops and bodies of water were used as holy places by the Celts; and on Arthur’s Seat we find some of the most visually striking hilltops of the region, in combination with a series of lochs and springs. These springs retained a sacred character long into the Christian era – both as holy wells dedicated to saints such as Anthony & David, and also, as in the case of the Wells of Wearie, through an association with the fairies of Scottish folklore. This is a compelling body of evidence supporting the notion of an ancient sanctity.
Since we know that Edinburgh was a key centre of the Godothin kingdom, functioning at times as its capital, it would not be unreasonable to suspect that a sacred complex on this hill might be dedicated to the sovereignty goddess of the kingdom. Such a place might have functioned as a site for rituals of state; coronations, swearing of allegiance, royal funerals and other such events. Sites like these are well-known from other Celtic lands; the Hill of Tara in Ireland is perhaps the most famous. While the territory of the Godothin is perhaps more likely to have contained multiple cult centres than a single one – there are strong hints that the hillforts on the Eildon Hills and Traprain Law may have functioned in a similar way – here is nothing to say that Edinburgh could not have housed part of such a cult. In later years, the kings of Scotland were crowned at Scone and buried in Iona; dividing the rituals of state between different parts of the kingdom is a well-attested way of making all those parts feel a part of the realm. A sacred well or wells would have been associated with the goddess, playing a central part in her rituals, and associated too with the figure of the White Stag.
When King David encountered the White Stage on Arthur’s Seat and overthrew it with the aid of the holy cross, it fled and disappeared at the Rood Well. The theory I would like to posit is that the association between the stag and the well was not a new one, created for this tale. Rather, the well may instead have been anciently associated with the Stag; and associated too with a sovereignty goddess of the Godothin, the personification of the land of Lothian. If this should have been so, then it would have played a part in the rituals of the Godothin state.
This ancient association may have retained some of its vitality down to the time of David among the Britons who yet inhabited the place – and the tale of the stag’s defeat by David represents the final appropriation of that ancient symbol, into the service of a new order. This appropriation served both to justify the conversion of the old sacred landscape into a new Christian one, and also to symbolize the final overthrow of the old Celtic tribal system and its incorporation into David’s new feudal state. The myth was adopted, and subverted – and now paces the walls of the churches of Edinburgh. By adopting the symbol of the White Stag, David paradoxically ensured that it would survive far longer than did most of the other legends of the Britons of the North.
And so, it has come down to us today. In the representations of the Stag found in the contemporary Canongate, there is written beneath him the motto “Sic Itur Ad Astra”. This phrase literally translates as “thus we go to the stars”, but its meaning is best rendered as “thus we find immortality”. The path to eternity is a strange one indeed…
Clearly, no original Brythonic legend confirming the provenance of the White Stag has come down to us; no texts written in the language of the Britons have been recovered in Scotland. In their absence, the notion of a northern equivalent to to the Breton lais remains a theory, and the trail of the stag from the depression of the Rood Well up onto the peaks a notion, rather than a fact.
The trail does not, however, end at the Rood Well. Beyond the slopes of Arthur’s Seat, it can be picked up again on the southern fringes of the city. Here, in the Pentland Hills a further pair of tales are to be found, connecting the origins of the baronies of Penicuik and Roslin to the hunting of a White Stag. The two tales are recognisably of a shared origin; both refer to a hunt in the time of Robert the Bruce, in which a White Stag was brought down by the dogs of a nobleman who was then rewarded with lands in the wild country just south of Edinburgh. In the Penicuik version of the tale, it is one Randolph le Clerc who is thus honoured; his huntsman will thereafter stand atop a rock called the Buck Stone every time the royal hunt rides towards the Pentlands, and signal the hunt will commence by blowing his horn three times. This tale forms a part of the ‘Hunter’s Song’, which is still sung today as part of the rituals of Penicuik’s Common Riding festival. In the Roslin variant, it is William St Clair whose hounds bring down the stag; he is rewarded with the Barony of Roslin, and in thanks erects a chapel to St Catherine in the inner glens of the Pentlands.
In both these tales, there is a connection made between the slaying of the Stag and sovereignty, of a limited sort at least; it is triumph in this hunt that gave both Norman-French lords the right to rule over their subjects. The lands of the Pentland region contain a far larger number of Brythonic placenames than they do Gaelic, and lie a mere day’s journey from the old Brythonic kingdom of Ystrad Clut in the Clyde Valley; the people here may very well have considered themselves Britons in the early Middle Ages, and even if they did not then the Brythonic influence upon their culture must surely have been a strong one. The presence of the White Stag motif here may connect to that same Godothin cult of sovereignty whose ghosts haunt Arthur’s Seat.
Beyond the Pentlands, the trail goes on. To the version of the Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer recorded in the “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border”, Sir Walter Scott appended a series of concluding verses based upon an Earlston tradition that Thomas was, at the end of his life, carried away to the land of the Elven Queen by none other animal than a White Stag. Here, the association of magical animal with a powerful female spirit repeats again – and once again, in association with hills where ancient ruins are present, for it is on the hillfort-crowned slopes of the Eildon Hills that most of the action of the Rhymer’s ballad plays out.
A final tale, older than any of the three listed above, attaches the White Stag to the whole of the upland country of southern Scotland, and Cumbria beyond it. This is the Old French-language tale “Fergus”, likely composed in Scotland during the 12th century. This is an Arthurian epic, which combines multiple elements of Celtic-Arthurian legend into a single narrative set in southern Scotland – but one which does so in order to subvert the traditions of the Britons, and present them as inferior to the Norman-French aristocracy who had come to rule over their former homelands. “Fergus” opens with a lengthy account of hunt for the White Stag, which commences in a forest called Gorriende near Carlisle (perhaps Geltsdale), before crossing the Forest of Jedburgh, Lammermuir, the woods of Glasgow, Ayr, and finally concluding in Galloway. The tale has Perceval slay the beast, and win a ‘gilded cup’ as his prize; perhaps a reference to the quest for the holy grail. Throughout the account the hunt is made vaguely ridiculous; such ridicule is regularly deployed throughout “Fergus” as a means to knock down and demean some of the most potent symbols of the native Britons. That the hunt for the White Stag is treated in such a fashion, and at such a prominent point in the narrative, suggests that it may well have played a major part in their culture throughout the region; the most powerful symbols, for a strategically mocking tale such as “Fergus”, presenting the most important targets.
The trail of the White Stag has now led us from Arthur’s Seat all the way south to the ruins of Hadrian’s Wall. It could go further, into a more complete discussion of the tale of Fergus, and an in-depth exploration of both the Breton lais and the more recent Breton folklore they helped to shape. To do so would, however, see this already lengthy blog post threaten to become a book – and since I have already written a book that explores related themes in great detail, I will take the opportunity to direct readers to that instead. It is entitled “The Ghosts of the Forest: the Lost Mythology of the North”, and more detail on its content can be found here.
The theme of the Stag is one I will inevitably return to online, though; there are further traces of its presence that deserve a fuller examination, and I intend also to explore some of the locations connected to its legend in greater detail – particularly in the Pentlands. If you have enjoyed this post, do give this site a follow through WordPress or Facebook; alternative, you can follow me on Instagram or X. I will also be available at the Wild Writers Book Festival in Peebles on the 26th of January, when I’ll be delivering a talk on the “The Ghosts of the Forest”; if you’d like to discuss the Brythonic legends of Scotland, this would be a wonderful occasion on which to do so, perhaps with a beer in hand. Thanks for giving this piece your attention, and I hope to be able to provide plenty more in due course…
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