Where did Welsh people come from?

Credit: Unsplash Kit Ko

Welsh people are very proud of their origins and those who speak Welsh speak a version of the earliest tongue spoken in Britain. There was a time when the ancestors of the Welsh lived and ruled right across Britain yet what do we know about this ancient culture?

In DNA studies some years ago, Professor Peter Donnelly of Oxford University claimed that the Welsh carried DNA which could be traced back to the last Ice Age, over 10,000 years ago. People from North Wales were found to have similarities with the ancestry of people from France and Ireland and yet were genetically distinct from the rest of mainland Britain.

We know that there was a time when it was so cold in Britain that life for humans would have been impossible but some 11,6000 years ago the temperatures rose and hunters started pursuing the reindeer and horses across grasslands and later cattle, deer, and pigs inhabiting the woodlands. Genetic studies at Oxford University showed that of all people in the UK, the Welsh appeared most similar to the first settlers after the Ice Age. Studies also showed that settlers who arrived after the post-ice age settlers but before the time of the Roman invasion had little impact on Wales.

 A skeleton found in a cave near Paviland on the Gower Peninsular, however, suggests that people were living in Wales long before the hunters who came with the warmer climate. In the early 19th century geologists found a ceremonially buried skeleton, decorated in shell and ivory, covered in red ochre, and watched over by the skull of a mammoth. They thought this was a lady and the skeleton became known as the Red Lady of Paviland. The cave was full of stone tools and burnt animal bones and the assumption was that this cave had been used for many thousands of years. Recent investigation and radiocarbon dating showed that the Red Lady was a young male hunter and that his bones were between 33-34,000 years old.

Some studies claim that the Wesh descended from the Beaker people who came to Britain from central Europe somewhere around 2000 BC but other theories suggest that this Celtic culture came from the West with trade routes along the Atlantic. What we do know is that by 1000 BC there were forts all over Wales with mines and farms scattered throughout the country. In Llandudno, for example, there was a huge copper mine at the Great Orme. There were also substantial lead, gold, zinc, and silver mines throughout Wales.

By 600 BC it is thought there had been two further migrations of Celts to Wales: one taller group from northern Europe settling in North Wales and a second wave of darker, shorter peoples settling in South Wales. By the time the Romans came to Wales in AD50, there were four tribes in Wales: Silures and Demetae in the south and Ordivices and Deceangli in the north. There was fierce resistance to the Romans yet eventually, the Roman culture infiltrated Wales and left many traces, even in the language spoken today. Early Welsh or Brittonic absorbed over 800 words from Latin. In Latin, the word for a bridge is ‘pont’ as it is in Welsh today and the Latin ‘fenestra’ for window is ‘ffenestr’ in Welsh.

When the Romans left Britain was invaded by Saxons, Vikings, and Normans but their influence on Wales, while substantial, was not as invasive genetically as in other parts of Wales. Modern Wales is a melting pot of many people yet there remains a strong thread back to ancient peoples, times that the Welsh can be truly proud of.

If you are interested in things Welsh and enjoy historical fiction you might like Arianwen Nunn’s ‘The Welsh Traitor’s Daughter ‘ and its sequel, ‘The Welsh Warrior’s Inheritance’.