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Scotland - Making a Kingdom

The raw materials from which Scotland was constructed were three Kingdoms - Pictland, Dalriada and 'Strathclyde' (as the northern lands of the Britons came to be known), with the addition of outlying parts of two larger kingdoms - Lothian (part of English Northumbria which lay between Tweed and Forth); and the Hebrides, the Western Isles, which were part of the great sea borne empire of the Norwegians.

Pictland was the largest of the Kingdoms and, one would have thought, the most populous and powerful. But the Picts had had the ill-fortune to be victims of attacks by all their neighbours at one time or another.

Their resistance to the encroaching Scots, and the defeat which the growth of Dalriada implied, must have contributed to the weakening of Pictish power. As if the Scots were not problem enough, the Picts were later the target for English incursions. They proved strong and resolute enough to destroy the English threat for many years to come by winning, in 685, the great battle of Nechtansmere at Dunnichen near Forfar. The most deadly blows to the Picts however, came from the greatest fighting force in Northern Europe - the Norsemen or the 'Vikings'.

Sometimes the Vikings came as raiders, sometimes as settlers, and the grip which they established around the northern extremities of Britain and its adjacent islands was so strong and enduring that in place names and surnames the memory survives to this day. The towns and villages of Caithness - Scrabster, Lybster, Ulbster - bear names which testify to their Norse antecedents. Sutherland was 'Southern land' to the men from the North; and throughout the Hebrides place names ending in '-bost' or '-nish' or '-val' tell us that the Vikings lingered here. Among the people of the Western Isles to this very day, Norse surnames ending in '-son' are fully as common as Gaelic 'macs'.

All through these northern and western seas, firths and lochs prowled the Norse galleys, bringing at one time civil and good-humoured trade, at another permanent settlement and frequently destruction and slaughter. 'From the fury of the Northmen O dear Lord deliver us,' was one prayer long-used along the western shores. The Norse were pagan during the early years of their marauding, and churches and churchmen suffered cruelly at their hands - or at least feared they might. This fear undoubtedly prompted the departure from Iona of many of its people and the transfer of relics, treasures and religious focus from Iona to, especially, Dunkeld, in Perthshire and even to Kells in Ireland.

The Britons of Strathclyde and the Scots alike had learned to flee from the raven banners, but the brunt of these attacks was borne by the Picts. In 839 they suffered a particularly disastrous defeat at the hands of the Norsemen, and the King of Scots, Kenneth MacAlpin, took the opportunity to attack the afflicted Picts and, by 843, make himself their King.

It is possible - even probable - that Kenneth was in the line of descent from Pictish kings, as inter-marriage linking the two royal lines appears to have happened on numerous occasions over the generations. It is probable that the role of Kenneth has been emphasised rather more than it should, but the tradition which has come down through centuries, that he was the first king of a united Pictland and Dalriada is unlikely ever to be entirely rejected.