Why do people mostly talk about ‘Britain’ or ‘Britain and Ireland’ and not ‘Scotland’ when discussing the neolithic period? It’s complicated.

You’ll hear the experts and me in the podcast Stone Me talk about the neolithic place these monuments are in as ‘Britain’ or maybe sometimes ‘north Britain’ rather than Scotland, and usually they’ll say ‘Britain and Ireland’. Why is that?

All the names we have for these places now are anachronistic - they didn’t exist at the time we were talking about so are in some ways inaccurate. So why choose one anachronism, ‘Britain’, rather than another, ‘Scotland’? And why always include Ireland?

We have no evidence about the language of neolithic people in this part of the world, nothing to suggest if and how it was written down and obviously nothing to record how it was spoken. So we have no idea what they called places. 

So we use later names - Britain derived from the Briton people who lived in various parts of Wales, England and southern Scotland in the Roman period and up to about 500AD. They were first given the name by a Greek geographer in 320BC but of course they didn’t spring into being just because some Greek guy gave them a made up name. They had been Iron Age people living a culturally rich life on these islands for thousands of years. 

So the name Britain is the name for this place that most closely relates to the oldest name for the place or people that we have. If we’re going to pick an anachronous name it makes sense to pick the oldest one. 

It also helps that Britain is quite close to being a geographical, rather than a political, name. The geographical name for the islands occupied by the UK and Ireland is ‘The British Isles’ and ‘Great Britain’ is the name for the bigger of the two islands.

Nobody actually says ‘Great Britain’ any more so ‘Britain and Ireland’ has the character of a geographical, rather than national or political, description.

But why always tag on ‘Ireland’ at all? Can’t we just talk about the neolithic period in the bigger island? 

We can’t because neolithic culture in Ireland and Britain were so similar. They were the same people; they arrived in the same wave of population movements at the same time, bringing the same farming culture with them. 

Sure, monuments in Sligo are different to those in Argyll. But monuments in Argyll are different to those in Wessex. Each area developed its own culture, but that culture came from the same source and connections were maintained for thousands of years through the kind of travel, trade and shared ritual that we see evidence of at the sites examined in the Stone Me podcast. 

It’s worth remembering that travel through a road-less and heavily forested landmass of 800 miles was close to impossible, so people travelled by sea. This meant that travelling from Wales to Orkney was indistinguishable in terms of duration or difficulty from travelling from Ireland to Orkney. Going from the Boyne Valley to Arran was a similar journey in nature, length and complexity to going from Arran to Lewis. The border that we imagine in the sea just doesn’t appear to have existed. 

So: Britain and Ireland it is.