A History of Ancient Britain

by Neil Oliver

The World Without Us American journalist Alan Weisman wrote about what would happen in a world suddenly devoid of human beings.

Life was a circle and the circle was life. ‘Round like a circle in a spiral like a wheel within a wheel/Never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel.’

‘War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.’ Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

It was Roman historians and geographers who first used the label Celt – but they applied it only to tribes they encountered on Continental Europe. Those writers actually borrowed ‘Celt’ from the Greeks, who used their own word Keltoi to describe any foreigner, so that it meant anyone who was not Roman.

‘Britanni’.

So the Celts as the Romans understood them were land-locked, separate not just from the Britanni but also from another northern European population, known to the same writers as the ‘Germani’.