h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Now that this page has been "Gnomonified", I thought it might be of interest to some of you that there's going to be a programme about an attempted Roman invasion of Ireland tonight at 9pm on the History Channel I think. It will probably be repeated over the coming days / weeks.

Sounds interesting. Unfortunately I don't have the History Channel, but maybe it'll come to one I do have.

Did you see it?

"Tonight at 9pm" hasn't arrived yet.

Sorry. Brain not working properly.

The Tubridy show a few days ago spoke of a Roman grave having been discovered in Bray during the 19th century. I'll try to dig up the radio link for this: it's pretty fascinating.

http://dynamic.rte.ie/quickaxs/209-rte-tts-thetubridyshow-2007-06-15.smil

(Real Player required).

Ach.

I've just realised it's on tomorrow night (Wed 27th) instead. Apologies.

Does sound interesting. You never really hear of much Roman stuff here, or is it just me? Always seems to be in England.

The traditional view is that the Romans never came to Ireland.

Our roads would be a good indicator of their non-arrival!

However, we did get their religion, lock, stock and barrel. Are we to seriously accept it was just one 5th Century Welshman who converted the whole country? Methinks there's a lot more to the story than meets the eye.

Yeah, I'd always thought the Roman guys never made it here. But got confused whether it was the Romans or the Vikings. But I'm sure we've iherited stuff from when the English guys came over.

There was meant to be a big genetic survey taking place that would give us an indication of our origins. I'm not sure what the status is of it at the moment.

Obviously the most important inheritance from British/English occupation has been the language we speak. They also turned us into a nation of tea-drinkers!

True. And possibly a lot of the troubles as well. I've nothing against anyone, but if the English guys had decided not to come over, life here may be very different to what it is today.

Hello all, just doing my usual ing hours and I stumbled upon this convo.

Interestingly the Irish genetic history has cocked up a lot of theories. We are a tiny bit Spanish, a teeny bit Anglo-saxon, a smige of "Latin" (This could be from Roman Legionnaires of an attempted invasion or Italian/French/Spanish/Romanian DNA of an almost pure breed roman DNA source), a nice bit of Viking and, surprisingly, we are not as Celtic as we think. While Celtic is the second biggest part of our DNA our main part is Cro Magnon i.e. Bronze Age Irish. This disproves the whole "Celtic Invasion" theory, in which the Celts invaded Ireland slaughtered everybody or assimilated into the aboriginal population. Instead it looked like we did the most Irish of things, looked across at Britain and France and say "Balls, I suppose we better pretend to be Celtic so they'll leave us alone." and so we did. This explains a lot of cultural differences between "Celts" from Ireland and mainland Celts, par example our fondness for pants, a big nono everywhere else...

Interesting. But it doesn't explain why Ireland ended up entirely speaking one type of Celtic while Britain spoke a different sort.

Good point. I'd heard that Scottish Gaelic's different to Irish Gaelic.

*btw - the program on the Roman Civ was only so-so. The so-called Irish invasion only occupied about 2 minutes of the program overall. It seems it was Vespasian's plan to centre his conquest of Britain and Ireland in Chester, but he died before his plan could be enacted and the plan of invasion was then shelved.

Hi LLR - are there any weblinks or books you can point me to regarding our genetic history?

Actually, the differences between Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are minor - they are basically the same language. The Scots were Irish who invaded Scotland in the 5th to 8th Centures.

I was referring to the difference between Gaelic and the Brythonic languages: Welsh, Cornish and Breton.

I'd forgotten there was a Celtic link with Wales.