Dál Riata
Dalriada · the share or portion of Riata
Dál Riata, in English Dalriada, said dawl REE-uh-tuh. A kingdom.
North Antrim and Argyll. The kingdom that straddled the sea, and the reason Scotland speaks a Gaelic language.
The name
the share or portion of Riata
Where
North Antrim, and across the water in Argyll and the islands of western Scotland.
In today's counties: Antrim (Aontroim).
When it mattered
From roughly the fifth century to the ninth.
Dál Riata is the one kingdom on this list that was never only Irish. It held the Antrim coast and the Argyll coast at once, and on that geography a short crossing is a road rather than a border.
Gaelic went east along it. The language, the church and the dynasties moved into what the Romans had called Caledonia, and over several centuries the Picts were absorbed into a Gaelic speaking kingdom that eventually took the name Scotland, from Scoti, which was simply a Latin word for the Irish.
Colum Cille's monastery on Iona was founded inside this world in 563, which is how an Irish kingdom's politics ended up shaping the church in northern Britain.
Where the usual story goes wrong
The older story of a mass migration from Antrim that founded Scottish Dál Riata in one movement is now argued over, with some reading the sea as a shared world rather than a one way crossing. Either way the Gaelic reached Scotland; the argument is about how.
What is left of the name
The Route, in north Antrim, and Scots Gaelic, which is the Irish of Dál Riata after fifteen hundred years apart.
Names out of it
Families on this site that belong to Dalriada. A surname is not a pedigree, and plenty of people carry these names for reasons that have nothing to do with the old kingdom.
Next to it
- Ulaid (The Ulaid)