As well as the pushy Northumbrians, the Piets also had to cope with the territorial ambitions of the Scots. Confusingly, the Scots came from Ireland. The name was first used by Irish pirates and meant simply ‘raiders’ (rather as Scandinavian pirates would later describe themselves as Vikings), but the word came to be applied to all the Irish, whether or not they were pirates. The decline of Roman power gave the Scots great opportunities for raiding and settlement along the west coast of Britain. The Britons had little difficulty in assimilating these Irish immigrants but for the Piets it was another story. Pictland became Scotland. Traditionally, King Fergus MacErc (d. 501) of the northern Irish Dal Riata dynasty was regarded as the leader of the first Scottish settlement in Pictland. Some time in the late fifth century, Fergus was said to have conquered the Kintyre peninsula, while his brothers Loam and Oengus conquered Lorn and Islay. The story is likely to have been invented to explain the traditional division of Scottish Dal Riata (modern Argyll) into the three tribes of Cenel Loairn, Cenel nOengusa and Cenel nGabrain (named for Fergus’s grandson Gabran). Fergus and his successors ruled both Irish Dal Riata and Argyll as a single kingdom until 637 when the two parts of the kingdom became independent of one another. Some modern historians have questioned this traditional account of Scottish settlement, doubting that Argyll really was Pictish territory when Fergus won control over it. They point out that, at its nearest point, Argyll is only about 12 miles (19 kilometres) from northern Ireland, a very short sail in favourable conditions. While Argyll was linked to Ireland by the sea, it was separated from the rest of Pictland by the Highlands, which would have been a real barrier to communications in ancient times. It is therefore possible that Argyll had been essentially Irish in culture and language - that is, Gaelic speaking - for a long time before Fergus took over. The hypothesis is attractive but probably beyond proof.
The Scots chose as the site of their capital the hill of Dunadd, which rises abruptly and craggily from the flat mossland at the mouth of Argyll’s Kilmartin valley. The site had many advantages: it was a natural stronghold that could be easily fortified and it was on a narrow isthmus at the neck of the Kintyre peninsula with easy communications to the Atlantic to the west and the Firth of Clyde to the east. However, what may have made Dunadd even more attractive to the Scots was its position in the heart of one of the most remarkable prehistoric landscapes in Britain. An amazing concentration of standing stones, stone circles, henges, carved stones, burial cairns and barrows, spanning a period of3,000 years, marked the Kilmartin valley out as a site of extraordinary significance, a place of power that, as newcomers, the Dal Riata dynasty will have wanted to associate themselves
Plate 22 Royal inauguration site, Dunadd Source: John Haywood
With as a means of establishing their legitimacy. Dunadd was not a spacious site but, as well as the royal household, it housed a colony of skilled metalworkers that made brooches and other jewellery. Large amounts of imported pottery and glass discovered in excavations show that Dunadd had regular trade contacts with Gaul. On rocks on the summit of the hill are carvings, ogham inscriptions and a foot-shaped depression, which was used in rituals for the inauguration of kings.
For a long time, the Scots were confined to Argyll, but their cultural influence was spread into Pictland by the Irish missionary church on the Hebridean island of Iona, founded by St Columba in 563. This eventually came to be seen as a threat, and King Nechton (r. 706-24) mended fences with the old enemy Northumbria and brought the Pictish church into line with practices of the Roman church. One result of this shift was a fusion of Pictish, Irish and Northumbrian decorative styles that produced some of the most distinctive Christian sculpture known in early medieval Britain. The Piets reached the peak of their power under Oengus mac Fergus (r. 729-61). Oengus captured Dunadd in 736 and conquered the Scots before turning his attentions to the Britons of Strathclyde in 750. In alliance with the Northumbrians, Oengus besieged the British capital at Dumbarton in 756 and was disastrously defeated. Pictish power began to wane, and some time before 768 the Scots under Aed Find not only regained their independence but also began to attack Pictland. In the decades that followed, southern Pictland came more and more under Scottish control. Several kings of Fortriu had Gaelic names and were probably of Dal Riatan origin. The final straw for the Piets appears to have been the Vikings, who began raiding the British Isles at the end of the eighth century. The Vikings conquered and settled the Pictish territories of Shetland, Orkney, Caithness and the Outer Hebrides. The Piets here - those that survived at least: genetic studies suggest that 40-60 per cent of the population of Orkney and Shetland are of Scandinavian origin - were completely assimilated by the newcomers. A few symbol stones are the only reminders of the Piets there; not even place names survive.
World History
