Originally Posted by
Watersater79
Surely the Welsh would overlap the most with the southern Scottish considering said population are mostly Brythonic. I also would have thought that they would have overlapped with the Irish more than the English. A lot of the Welsh GedMatch kits seem to cluster heavily with the Irish, anyhow. My pal from North Wales got a shedload of Irish on LivingDNA. Something alone the lines of 40% of his DNA was of the ‘Ireland’ cluster. But I guess that geography ensured some form of genetic drift to take place whereby the Gaels would differ from the Britons, and the English have a significant amount of Brythonic admixture, even if it’s 30%, rather than 60% (as was previously surmised) of the average English genome.
I wish we knew more about Scotland and how extensive the Goidelic settlement was. What is now the east of the country was, ofc, the kingdom of the Picts, but that area now is overwhelmingly chock-a-block with Gaelic names. However, the eastern Scottish don’t seem to cluster with the Irish all that much. Maybe it was a case of an ‘elite’ settlement, with the Pictish locals adopting their ‘Gaelic’ ways. Obviously that appears to be the same for the Britons in the south as well. There is no doubt there was Gaelic settlement in the extreme southwest of Scotland (Galloway), but there is little evidence there was further migration inland (into the likes of Lanarkshire). The main settlements of central southern Scotland all maintained those Brittonic names; Glasgow, Renfrew, Lanark, Linlithgow. Lothian also can’t be derived from anything other than Brittonic.
But it is fascinating that even when Robert Burns was alive, Gaelic was spoken within his vicinity of origin.
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