The Celts (2006)

We call them the Celts – bloodthirsty warriors who fought naked in battle and took their enemies heads as trophies. They had powerful priests called Druids, who practiced human sacrifice to their gods, and a distinctive artistic style now sold as jewellery across the world. Evidence of Celtic civilizations stretch across Europe, in Germany a huge walled settlement is unearthed, in Switzerland thousands of artifacts illustrate the distinctive Celtic artistic decoration. Excavations in northern Europe uncover a huge engineering achievement. The expanding Roman Empire crushed the Celts in continental Europe and evidence uncovered in Britain and Ireland suggests that migration of a warrior tribe of Celtic settlers occurred, bringing their foreign traditions with them.

A monument in the Shetland Islands is one of the largest and most mysterious of Iron Age Britain. In Wales, a reconstructed hill fort and roundhouses echoes the way of European Celtic society, the people were warriors, but also farmers using iron tools – ones which we still use today. Roman writing tells of Britons who spoke a language similar to the Celts of Gaul and shared a class of religious leaders unique in the Celtic world – Druids. Two million people in Britain and Ireland speak a Celtic Language – the greatest number is Welsh. Does this make an even stronger connection between the people of the British Isles and Celts of Europe? In Ireland a rocky crag soaring vertically seven hundred feet out of the Atlantic Ocean sums up the unique spirit of what became Celtic Christianity.