Interesting email from an Irish fellow about Irish kilts.

[davedove]

As to whether the English are celts, the oldest known inhabitants of England were the Britons, who of course were Brythonic Celts by definition.

Everything I've ever read says that the celts didn't get to britain until around the middle of the 1st millenium BC, which is when celtic type tools and such began to appear.

There were people in Britain for thousands of years before that. They're the ones who built the stone circles. Contrary to popular belief, the celts didn't build the stone circles; they found them, thought they were cool, and used them for their own purposes.

[The Guy in the Kilt at UC]

Everything I've ever read says that the celts didn't get to britain until around the middle of the 1st millenium BC, which is when celtic type tools and such began to appear.

There were people in Britain for thousands of years before that. They're the ones who built the stone circles. Contrary to popular belief, the celts didn't build the stone circles; they found them, thought they were cool, and used them for their own purposes.

There is the idea that Celtic culture migrated to Britain rather than Celtic people.

[davedove]

There is the idea that Celtic culture migrated to Britain rather than Celtic people.

I have also read that. It's wasn't a mass migration or anything like that, more of a trading relationship and the spread of goods and ideas, especially the iron tools of the celtic peoples.

[gilmore]

There is the idea that Celtic culture migrated to Britain rather than Celtic people.

That is now indisputible.

DNA shows that the majority of the inhabitants of the UK and Ireland descend from people who lived in the Iberan peninsula during the last Ice Age, and migrated north up the Atlantic coast as the ice retreated.

Take a look at the first two maps here http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/~mcdonald/Wo...groupsMaps.pdf showing the distribution of the Y DNA R1b Haplogroup in 1500 AD, just before the time of European imperialism.

It was for the most part the same group of people who were formerly thought to be pre-Celtic, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, etc., and were merely changing their language, technology and culture, rather than successive waves of people of different ethnicities invading and conquering the British Isles.