Castennec Hill (ancient Sulis/Sulim), Oppidum of the Osismii
Hermitage of St. Gildas at Castennec
Whenever we treat of Brittany it is important we bear in mind that it was subject to heavy migration from Britain in the 5th-6th centuries. And this means that traditions and place-names could be brought from the latter island to the Gallic pennisula.
Still, I appear to have discovered (?) something odd about a well-known Gildas/Gueltas site in Morbihan.
According to legend, in 538 Gildas and a companion monk found an oratory or hermitage in a cave next to Castennec. Why is this interesting? Well, Castennec Hill is accepted as the location of a Sulis or Sulim hilltop fortification, thought to be an oppidum of the Osismii tribe. The name is this hillfort preserves the goddess name Sulis, who was the tutelary deity of Aquae Sulis in Britain.
There are a great many Websites that discuss this location and St. Gildas' connection with it. What follows is just a quick sampling:
Now, the British Aquae Sulis became known as Bath to the English, and our best linguists are sure that Gildas's Badonicus = Bathum. The same is true of the later Welsh form of the name, Caer Faddon. This is so despite an apparent traditional identification of Badon in the Welsh Annals and The Dream of Rhonabwy with the Liddington Badbury, something I've written about elsewhere in considerable detail. The has always existed the possibility that a Badon/Bathum could have been confused at some point with the Baddan- of Baddanbyrig. Or vice-versa.
What I'm a bit surprised about is that no one seems to have suggested (?) that given a Gildas at a Sulis site - a site on a fortified hill - that it is quite possible the Bath name from the British Aquae Sulis had at some point in the transmission through the centuries of Gildas's RUIN OF BRITAIN been transferred to the Breton Sulis location. This would have been a fairly natural legendary development, I would think. And if this is the way Badonicus came to be, then the original site of the Badon battle was neither Bath nor Badbury in Britain, but Castennec Hill in Brittany. We may recall that Brittany, like Britain, had been subjected to heavy Saxon raids. And, indeed, during the later Roman period Armorica comprised the Tractus Armoricanus et Nervicanus under the command of a dux responsible for defending the peninsula against seaborne Germanic invaders.
On the map at the top of the page we can see another interesting name next to Gueltas and Castennec - Gamblen. While the etymology of this place-name is not the same as that of the Camlan of Welsh sources (my research, not yet confirmed, shows it to be from the same initial element, meaning 'crooked', but a second derived from the Celtic word *lindo- for 'pool'), it is interesting to find such a river-bend name so close to what may have been the original Badon hillfort.
Some time ago I had written about an unusual Breton "Badon" place-name in the same region:
When I wrote that piece I had no idea about the presence of the nearby Sulis oppidum.
There is really no "safe" conclusion to draw from all this. To begin with, the identification of the Breton St. Gueltas and St. Gildas has always been somewhat suspect. And, again, we have the problem of British immigrants bringing their own place-names and traditional histories or folktales into Brittany. But it is hard to ignore the obvious correspondence that exists between two confirmed ancient sites dedicated to the worship of Sulis and their connection with St. Gildas.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.