In more sober mood James lays out his stall in his first chapter with two
basic claims: ‘no one in Britain or Ireland called themselves a “Celt” or
“Celtic” before 1700’ and ‘The Welsh, Scots, Irish and other peoples have
only come to describe themselves and their ancestors as Celts since the
eighteenth century. The notion of insular Celts, past and present, then is a
modern interpretation and an adopted “ethnonym”’. With the small, but
not unimportant, proviso that the first contention should have read ‘no one
in Britain or Ireland is recorded to have called themselves a “Celt” or
“Celtic” before 1700’, these two basic statements are a fair reflection of
the situation. The rest of his book substantiates them and explores how the
widely accepted concept of the Celtic West has come into being.
What all this means, of course, is that the widely asked questions – when
did the Celts arrive in Britain and where did they come from? – become
somewhat redundant. But how is it that the belief in one or more Celtic
invasions into these islands first came about? Some of the details we will
return to later, but the short answer is that the idea really took off after the
antiquarian scholar Edward Lhuyd coined the word Celtic for a group of
languages – Irish, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton – and published an account
of them and their similarities in his great work Archaeologia Britannica in
1707. He noted that a close relationship existed between Gaulish, Irish,
and British and also between Welsh, Cornish, and Breton and then went on
to impose a historical interpretation on these two groups (Q-Celtic and P-
Celtic as they later became known). First, he suggested, Irish Britons
moved from Gaul to settle in the British Isles but then were later pushed
into northern Britain and Ireland by a second wave of Gauls who settled in
the south and west.
This early eighteenth-century hypothesis has driven the debate ever since.