clan of the crows
In modern Welsh Bran means crow, a translation attested to by the sculpture perched on the gate halfway up the path to the ruins of Dinas Bran. If you sit there one quiet summer evening, you’ll hear dozens of them cawing to each other in the old trees dotted on the steep slopes. Maybe it was the same some two and a half millennia ago when the Ordovices decided to make the exposed hill above Llangollen their home.
As is usual for places of such aching antiquity there are several theories on where the name comes from. LINK
Dinas Bran today. The image used for the cover of Brethren.
It might have been named after the mythical giant King Brân Fendigaid from the Welsh epic the Mabinogion, the cymraeg equivalent of Beowolf.
On a bit of a tangent, interestingly, there is a link between Dinas Bran and the tower of London, where legend has it that King Bran’s head was buried after a battle in Ireland. It was said that as long as it stayed under the White Tower Britain would be safe from invasion. Today that ages-old legend still lives in the tradition of the ravens of the Tower of London. Maybe it’s just a daft superstition… but just in case, the taxpayer funds the £30,000 salary of the Yeoman Ravenmaster...
I have a different idea though. In the days of the Roman conquest, which in the time Brethren is set had been going on for nearly two generations, this part of the Dee valley on the border of England and Wales would have been a frontier. Just as it is today with the seasonal influx of hoards of tourists, the Dee valley would have been the gateway into the mountains, the Ordovician heartlands where the valuable and vulnerable sheep were kept.
There is evidence the neighbouring tribe, the hard to pronounce Deceangli, came from Ireland and took over a large portion of Ordovician land in modern-day Flintshire and Denbighshire some time in the first cent. They were also friendly to Rome so were quite possibly their bitterest rivals. With constant threats, everyone would have been on alert for signs of danger. A daily struggle to protect crops, cattle and children, life would have been very hard.
I imagine this borderland could have seen the worst of the skirmishes and the well-defended Crow Hill could have housed the tribe’s toughest warriors, those tasked with defending the valley at any cost. Hard bastards, men straight off the pages of the bleakest grimdark novel. Men who would have lived knowing that at any moment they could be called to a battle to the death.
Crows are synonymous with battlefields, feasting on the dead. These clever corvids are known to have followed a marching army for days with the expectation of a feast of flesh. Maybe the hardened warriors of Crow Hill thought of the birds as a talisman, a threat that they bring death to the Deceangli and the Romans? It’s an absolutely baseless theory, of course, and one I can offer absolutely no proof for, but it is one that fits with the landscape and time.
With Brethren I want to connect the past with the present, so Dinas Bran became Crow Hill and those who lived up there and defended it, celebrated festivals like the summer solstice and paid tribute to their dead, became the Clan of the Crows.
If you ever go for a hike up to the spectacular ruins, look past the remains of the castle walls and imagine a time when roundhouses were clustered up here together, wind whistling through the thatch. Then think what it must have been like worrying that any movement you saw in the valley or above the scree on the Panorama was a group of people intent on your destruction. And in the darkness on the night of the longest day, some two thousand years ago, a man on the ramparts, big fire roaring behind him, drums beating to tell everyone that hated them that the Clan of the Crows were still alive and ready to fight...
