Ayrshire > Volume 1

EARLY AYRSHIRE 5
and the embittered struggling that preceded the
consolidation of the kingdom under one common head,
and the long wars with England, and the striving for
rights of unfettered faith and free conscience, down to
the present time, it is possible to recognise the steadiness
and the inevitableness of the development. We have
therefore nothing whatever to regret in leaving the past
behind us. For in no material respect whatever were
the former days better than these.
There does not seem to be any reasonable occasion
for doubting that at the opening of the Christian era
Ayrshire was inhabited by a Celtic race. There is
mystery indeed, and room for considerable diversity of
opinion as to whether the inhabitants were Picts, or
Caledonians, or Britons, and as to when the Scots first
appeared upon the scene. There is no such consistency
in the nomenclature of the tribes of the period as to
warrant any hard and fast conclusion on the matter.
Strictly speaking, Ayrshire was not within the definitely
Pictish area, which extended southward no further than
the Firth of Clyde, but it was near enough to the
borderland to have been leavened by the Pictish
influence, and to have received many settlers from
beyond the frontier.
But, however that may have been, it is probably
sufficient for any practical purpose to know that the
Damnii, who were in occupation of the county when the
Romans first visited North Britain in the second century,
were a purely Celtic people. The place names of the
shire afford indisputable evidence that they were. Even
at that early period the Celt was strongly wrought upon
by the natural features of the country. The rivers
appealed powerfully to him, so too did the hills and the
dales and the forests. He did not call his early
settlements, save in very exceptional instances, after the
men who founded them, or even after the chiefs of the
tribes who were the pioneers of these far off years, but
after their natural environment. He came to the river
that has given its own name to the county, and, finding