he ford of Dumbuck had their quern, and ground their own
corn." {52a} This idea has therefore passed through Dr. Munro's mind,
though I did not know the fact till after I had come to the same
hypothesis. The habitable area was therefore, adequate to the wants of
these festive people. I conjecture that these "keepers of the
watch-tower at the ford" were military "watchers of the ford," for that
seems to me less improbable than that "a round tower with very thick
walls, {52b} like the brochs and other forts of North Britain," was built
in the interests of the navigation of Clyde at a very remote period.
{52c}

But really all this is of no importance to the argument. People lived in
these sites, perhaps as early as 400 A.D. or earlier. Such places of
safety were sadly needed during the intermittent and turbulent Roman
occupation.

X--THE LAST DAY AT OLD DUMBUCK

Suppose the sites were occupied by the watchers of the ford. There they
lived, no man knows how long, on their perch over the waters of Clyde.
They dwelt at top of a stone structure some eight feet above low water
mark, for they could not live on the ground floor, of which the walls,
fifty feet thick at the base, defied the waves of the high tides driven
by the west wind.

There our friends lived, and probably tatooed themselves, and slew _Bos
Longifrons_ and the deer that, in later ages, would have been forbidden
game to them. If I may trust Bede, born in 672, and finishing his
History in 731, our friends were Picts, and spoke a now unknown language,
_not_ that of the Bretonnes, or Cymri, or Welsh, who lived on the
northern side of the Firth of Clyde. Or the occupants of Dumbuck, on the
north side of the river, were Cymri; those of Langbank, on the south
side, were Picts. I may at once say that I decline to be responsible for
Bede, and his ethnology, but he lived nearer to those days than we do.

With their ladder of fifteen feet long, a slab of oak, split from the
tree by wedges, and having six holes chopped out of the solid for steps,
they climbed to their perch, the first floor of their abode. I never
heard of a ladder made in this way, but the Zunis used simply to cut
notches for the feet in the trunk of a tree, and "sich a getting up
stairs" it must have been, when there was rain, and the notches were wet!

Time passed, the kitchen midden grew, and the Cymri founded Ailcluith,
"Clyde rock," now Dumbarton; "to this day," says Bede, "the