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The Oldest town in Britain, the Dreghorn was absorbed into the expanding Irvine New Town. However, this village to the east of Irvine is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements to have been discovered in Scotland from about the Middle Stone Age, around 5,500 BC. As was seen earlier, the Celtic - or British, as it came to be known - colonisation of the full width of southern Alba at the expense of the Picts had begun by the 1st century AD and Celtic was spoken by at least some of the tribes north of the Forth by this time.The Roman conquest of southern Britain certainly accelerated the process, and the arrival of the Angles and Saxons added further impetus. As the Angles moved into Northumbria, the Britons, after fierce fighting, retreated to the west. They established the Kingdom of Strathclyde, with its capital at Dumbarton; this consisted of modern Strathclyde and Galloway, and reached down into the English Lake District.
After initial forays by Julius Caesar in 55 and 54 BC, the Romans invaded Britain a century later in AD 43. By AD 78, in spite of resistance from leaders such as Caractacus and Boudicca, they had subdued England and Wales and were free to turn their attention to Scotland. In 121, the Emperor Hadrian visited Britain and built his famous stone wall from the Solway to the Tyne; only 20 years later a turf wall was constructed from the Clyde to the Forth and was named the Antonine Wall after the Emperor Antoninus Pius. This was held for 50 years. In AD 208, the Emperor Septimius Severus led a final advance north of the Forth before dying in York in AD 211. For the next two centuries, Hadrian's Wall was the northern boundary of the Roman Empire. The Romans never invaded Ireland, which they called Scotia, although they traded with the inhabitants, the Gaels, or the Scots as they were also known. Like Britain, Ireland had been colonised by Celts from about 300 BC, and consisted of various tribal kingdoms, whose kings periodically and reluctantly recognised one of their number as high king. The final withdrawal of the Roman legions from Britain in AD 410, following the Rescript of Honorius, ushered in a period of Scottish history which is both complicated and largely undocumented. Within a few years the Picts north of the Forth would find themselves competing fiercely for territory in Alba, as Scotland was then called, with three other peoples: the Angles, the Britons and the Scots. After losing some territory to the Vikings (see below), the four kingdoms would eventually merge to form the Kingdom of the Scots. From about the 3rd century AD, the Scots in Ulster, which was known as Dalriada (possibly meaning "the assembly of the kings"), began to colonise western Scotland north of Strathclyde. To this day the area they occupied is known as Argyll "the coastline of the Gaels". Rather confusingly, some history books refer to this ancient kingdom as Dalriada without specifying Scottish Dalriada. A separate development occurred some centuries later when southern Strathclyde received an influx of Gaels of mixed Irish and Norse ancestry; these people became known as Gall-Ghódil "stranger Gaels" and gave their name to Galloway.
The Roman retreat had been prompted by pressure on Rome from the tribes of central and northern Europe. One of these tribes, the Angles, began settling in northern Britain in the 5th century AD and by the 7th had formed the kingdom of Northumbria, stretching from the Tyne to the Forth. Much of the area, which included Lothian and Bernicia, is now in England, but it is all north of Hadrian's Wall. Other Angles, and their cousins the Saxons and the Jutes, invaded England at the same time, driving the Celtish inhabitants west into Wales and Cornwall and north into Cumbria and Strathclyde. Celtic resistance was at some stage, and in some unknown but much disputed area, led by a king called Arthur - later the subject of legend.
The early church at Kilwinning, established by St Winning around 700AD, was the forerunner of the Abbey founded by Richard de Morville in 1188. The Tironesian monastery of St Winning and the Virgin Mary dominated the life of the surrounding area. After the Dissolution in 1561, it was extensively dismantled, although part of the building was retained as the parish church for the town.
In the 12th century, the lands around Dreghorn were given to the de Morvilles, one of many families of Norman descent who settled in Ayrshire at this time. These lands later passed to the Montgomeries of Eglinton, who by the 16th century controlled much of the land in the area. Wealth generated by exploiting coal reserves around the village allowed the 11th Earl of Eglinton to rebuild the parish church in 1780.
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