Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Celts and the Picts
Conflict in Scotland intensified in the first millennium BC as successive waves of
Celtic
settlers, arriving from the south and using iron, competed for land. hese fractious
times witnessed the construction of hundreds of
brochs
or fortified towers.
Concentrated along the Atlantic coast and in the northern and western isles, the brochs
were dry-stone fortifications often over 40ft in height; the best-preserved can be found
on the Shetland island of
Mousa
.
At the end of the prehistoric period, immediately before the arrival of the Romans,
Scotland was divided among a number of warring Iron Age tribes, who, apart from
raiding, were preoccupied with wresting a living from the land, growing barley and
oats, rearing sheep, hunting deer and fishing for salmon. he Romans gave them their
collective name Picti, or
Picts
, meaning painted people, after their body tattoos.
The Romans
he
Roman conquest
of Britain began in 43 AD. By 80 AD the Roman governor,
Agricola, felt secure enough in the south of Britannia (Britain) to begin an invasion of
Caledonia
(Scotland), building a string of forts across the Clyde-Forth line and
defeating the Caledonian tribes at the
Battle of Mons Graupius
. he long-term effect of
his campaign, however, was slight. Work on a major fort - to be the base for 5000
soldiers - at Inchtuthill, on the Tay, was abandoned and the legions withdrew. In 123
AD
Emperor
Hadrian
sealed the frontier against the northern tribes and built
Hadrian's
Wall
, which stretched from the Solway Firth to the Tyne and was the first formal
division of the island of Britain. Twenty years later, the Romans again ventured north
and built the
Antonine Wall
between the Clyde and the Forth. his was manned for
about forty years, but the Romans largely gave up their attempt to subjugate the north
and instead adopted a policy of containment.
he Romans produced the first
written
accounts of Scotland. Dio Cassius, writing in
197 AD, captures the common Roman contempt of their Pictish neighbours:
They live in huts, go naked and unshod. They mostly have a democratic government, and are much addicted to
robbery. They can bear hunger and cold and all manner of hardship; they will retire into their marshes and hold out
for days with only their heads above water, and in the forest they will subsist on barks and roots.
The Dark Ages
Following the departure of the Romans, traditionally put at 410 AD, the population of
Scotland changed considerably. By 500 the
Picts
occupied the northern isles, and the
north and the east as far south as Fife. Today their settlements can be identified by place
names with a “Pit” prefix, such as Pitlochry, and by the existence of carved symbol stones,
like those found at Aberlemno in Angus. To the west, between Dumbarton and Carlisle,
was a population of
Britons
. Many of the Briton leaders had Roman names, suggesting
that they were a Romanized Celtic people, possibly a combination of tribes maintained by
the Romans as a buffer between Hadrian's Wall and the northern tribes, and peoples
pushed west by the Anglo-Saxon invaders landing on the east coast. Both the Britons and
the Picts spoke variations of P-Celtic, from which Welsh, Cornish and Breton developed.
43 AD
100 BC-100 AD
83
The Roman conquest of
Britain begins.
Fortified Iron Age brochs
built across Scotland.
The Romans defeat the British tribes
at the Battle of Mons Graupius in
northeast Scotland.
