Scotland: The Story of a Nation

What happened to the Picts?

The Scots and the Picts, after they had been driven back behind the Roman wall, quarrelled and fought between themselves; and at last, after a great many battles, the Scots got completely the better of the Picts. The common people say that the Scots destroyed them entirely; but I think it is not likely that they could kill such great numbers of people.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER I

The fate of the Picts has become the great enigma, the great puzzle of Scottish history; and as a result they are probably the most written about of all the Dark Age peoples, simply because they apparently disappeared, and disappeared very suddenly. Scholars used to write darkly of a terrible chapter of genocide.

It is now accepted that there was no wholesale massacre or enslavement of the people known as the Picts; they simply ceased to exist in the historical record as a separate political and ethnic entity. The old Pictish language was swamped by the Gaelic of the Scots, all the Pictish written records perished over time, and the use of the characteristic Pictish symbols on monumental sculptured stones fell into disuse. It was a question of assimilation, of integration, not the kind of ‘ethnic cleansing’ which is such a horrid aspect of some conflicts of modern times.

Ted Cowan has a typically robust attitude to the so-called ‘Problem of the Picts’:

By Page Three of almost any one-volume History of Scotland, the Picts disappear. And it always used to amaze me that nobody asked what on earth happened to them. After all, we are talking about three-quarters of the population of north Britain.

In fact, the Picts did not disappear on Page Three. There must have been intermarriage between the Picts and the Scots, there must have been a process of assimilation through the Church and through the common medium of Latin. And this, to my mind, explains the demise of the Picts, their language and their culture better than anything else. What they did leave behind was the magnificent and unique legacy of their sculptured stones.

There is no better introduction to the exquisite and enigmatic art of the Pictish sculptured stones than the little museum at Meigle, just off the arterial A93 trunk-road near Blairgowrie. The museum is a converted schoolhouse which now contains a marvellous collection of twenty-seven locally-carved stones dating from the ninth and tenth centuries: prayer crosses, symbol stones, sculpted cross-slabs with hunting scenes, animal stones, public war-memorials and personal tombstones. Most of them are decorated with the enigmatic shapes and symbols which no one has yet been able to decipher satisfactorily.

One of the last testimonials of the Picts is the majestic sculptured red sandstone monolith known as ‘Sueno’s Stone’, which stands six metres tall at the eastern edge of the town of Forres, on the Moray Firth, in the heartland of the ancient Pictish kingdom.

‘Sueno’s Stone’ was another of the great problems which the Ancient Monuments Board for Scotland had to tackle in the 1980s. It is a magnificent piece of statuary, with a wealth of intricate carving (pictorial as well as stylised) on all four of its faces. The front bears a relief carving of a great ring-headed cross whose shaft is filled with interlace spiral knotwork; the reverse side depicts an immense battle scene in four panels of unequal length. It is an extraordinarily vivid and complex sculptural gallery: the top panel presents the leader and his guard arriving on horseback for the battle. The great central panel shows ranks of warriors fighting on foot, then rows of the decapitated bodies of prisoners (their hands still tied) and the executioner holding a severed head, while the enemy flee in disorder. The third panel shows another pile of ruthlessly beheaded corpses and severed heads, while the fourth, partially obscured by the modern base, shows the dispersal of the vanquished army.

By the 1980s it was becoming increasingly difficult to make out the images on the stone (for instance, the heaps of severed heads were barely discernible to the naked eye without recourse to earlier sketches of the stone). Modern atmospheric pollution was creating galloping erosion, which was eating away at the vulnerable sandstone and blurring the detail of the sculptor’s art. Something Had To Be Done: Sueno’s Stone either had to be moved into safe housing (the Old Tolbooth at Forres?) or given a protective covering in situ. The need for a decision was made urgent by plans to alter the line of the A96 from Inverness to bypass the town of Forres: the new road was going to run just a few metres to the north of Sueno’s Stone.

It was not an easy decision. The stone had been discovered, fallen and buried under peat, in 1726, and re-erected in its present position on a new circular pedestal. It had become a prominent part of the landscape of Moray.

Eventually, after much heart-searching, the decision was made to leave the stone where it was, and to give it its own protective canopy of reinforced glass and steel – a bit like Snow White in the Disney film (although no prince was expected to come to the rescue). The glass case was erected in 1992, complete with immaculate landscaping, useful interpretive panels and all the technological gizmos needed to provide an environment which would ensure Snow White’s survival. Not everyone liked it – it looks incongruous at first glance – but it grows on you. The glass case makes photography difficult, but Historic Scotland is happy to accommodate anyone with a special interest.

Sueno’s Stone is clearly a memorial to some momentous encounter, but there is no ‘label’ on the stone, and there has been endless speculation about the conflict it was set up to commemorate. The stone cannot be dated, on stylistic grounds, more precisely than the end of the Pictish period (ninth or tenth century); it has none of the characteristic Pictish symbols on it, which suggests that the Pictish sculptors were then working for new masters. The spurious name ‘Sueno’ was an antiquarian invention of the eighteenth century, referring to some viking leader with the generic name of ‘Svein’, and cannot give any clue to the battle depicted on the stone. But to me it seems not unlikely that Sueno’s Stone does, indeed, celebrate a real battle, probably some momentous victory against the Picts’ and Scots’ most formidable adversaries, the vikings. According to the Annals of Ulster there was just such a battle in the year 909, when the ‘men of Alba’ (Albanaich), fighting under their miracle-working standard, the crozier of St Columba, won the day. That date falls within the early years of the reign of Ted Cowan’s favourite early king of Scotland, Constantin II, and the battle seems to have led to a treaty whereby the Norsemen were confirmed in their control of Caithness in exchange for a promise to leave the rest of Alba alone.

Academic speculation about the provenance of the stone and the battle it was designed to commemorate will doubtless continue. Whatever the truth of it, I like to think that Sueno’s Stone is the last recorded signature of the people who left their mark on history by carving it on stone.

1 The idea that the Picts painted or tattooed their bodies is older than the reference to Picti in AD 297 by the the poet Eumenius. Herodian of Syria, who wrote (in Greek) a history of the Roman emperors from AD 180 to 238, said of the Picts: ‘They tattoo their bodies not only with likenesses of animals of all kinds, but with all sorts of drawings.’

1 I am indebted to Graeme Cruickshank, director of Edinburgh Historical Enterprises, for an enlightening guided tour of the presumed battle-site and its environs; it was due to his dedicated and scholarly researches that the true significance of the Battle of Dunnichen began to be acknowledged.

1 For safety’s sake, the Aberlemno stone in Aberlemno churchyard is covered in winter by stout wooden crating to protect it from bad-weather erosion. A faithful fibre-resin cast of the stone is now in the Museum of Scotland; it was formerly on display in the Meffan Museum in Forfar.

1 The traditional version of an Irish colonisation of Argyll is no longer accepted as uncritically as before: scholars like Ewen Campbell, lecturer in archaeology at Glasgow University, point to the lack of archaeological corroboration of any migration of ideas or artefacts from Ireland to the western mainland of Scotland. Dr Campbell argues that the evidence all points the other way – that there was no change in the population in Argyll and that there was considerable influence in the opposite direction.

2 Kilmartin House won the 1998 Scottish Museum of the Year Award and the 1998 Gulbenkian Prize for Museums and Galleries. Kilmartin Glen contains one of the richest assemblages of prehistoric ritual and ceremonial monuments in Scotland: more than 150 sites within six miles of the village of Kilmartin; an extraordinary collection of cup-and-ring rock carvings; a unique linear cemetery of Neolithic and Bronze Age burial cairns; a fine stone circle at Temple Wood and dozens of other ancient stone monuments, dating back almost to the start of human habitation in Scotland. Kilmartin House, which was opened in 1997, provides a focal point for pilgrims who want to visit the sites, and also houses a research centre for archaeology and landscape interpretation.

1 The footprint into which visitors place their feet is not quite the original one. In 1979, when erosion and increasing wear and tear were beginning to cause damage to the carvings, an exact mould was made up of reconstituted crushed stone, which matched the texture and colouring of the original in every detail; this replica ‘cap’, weighing more than fifteen hundredweight, was helicoptered in by the RAF in 1979 and then manhandled into place to fit snugly and unobtrusively over the stone slab.

1 The name Kentigern means ‘hound-lord’. The diminutive Mungo means ‘hound’.

1 In his Tales of a Grandfather (Chapter I), Walter Scott referred generally to the inhabitants of Scotland encountered by the Romans as ‘British’, or ‘Britons’. The term ‘Britons’ properly applies specifically to the people of Strathclyde.

Chapter 4 MACBETH (r.1040–57)

… the three old women went and stood by the wayside, in a great moor or heath near Forres, and waited till Macbeth came up. And then, stepping before him as he was marching at the head of his soldiers, the first woman said, ‘All hail, Macbeth – hail to thee, Thane of Glamis.’ The second said, ‘All hail, Macbeth – hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor.’ Then the third, wishing to pay him a higher compliment than the other two, said, ‘All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be King of Scotland.’

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER II

The little village of Lumphanan, in Aberdeenshire, lies about fifty kilometres to the west of Aberdeen. It is not as celebrated a name in the Macbeth chronicle as Birnam Wood or Dunsinane Hill in Perthshire, or Forres in Moray, but in fact it is much more significant – because it was at Lumphanan that Macbeth (the historical Macbeth, not the Macbeth of Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish play’) met his death in the year 1057.

What Shakespeare did for Macbeth was to make him perhaps the best known, and certainly the most notorious, character in Scottish history – but at appalling cost to historical veracity. Yet so persuasive is the story, so compelling is the skill of the playwright, so powerful is the characterisation of a noble soul seduced by ambition (and by a ferocious harpy of a wife), that everyone knows it and believes it.

Oddly enough, Sir Walter Scott gave it his imprimatur, too. In his Tales of a Grandfather he related the Shakespeare version wholesale, with some additional embroidery of his own. The puzzle is that Scott knew perfectly well that it was a travesty of events; indeed, in his History of Scotland (1829–30), which he wrote as a spin-off from Tales of a Grandfather, he gave a very different and much more soberly accurate account. Yet in the Tales he preferred to entertain his grandson rather than to educate him. It is a dilemma which faces every ‘popular’ historian.

According to Shakespeare (and the Tales of a Grandfather), Macbeth was a trusted general of the venerable and much-loved King Duncan I of Scotland. With his fellow-general Banquo, Macbeth quells an insurrection and defeats a major viking invasion in Fife. On his way home, on a ‘blasted heath’ near Forres, he encounters three witches. The first addresses him as Thane of Glamis (a title which he has just inherited). The second addresses him as Thane of Cawdor (which Duncan has just named him, although Macbeth does not know it yet). The third, ominously, addresses him as ‘Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter!’ For Banquo, they promise less in the immediate future but much more to come: ‘Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.’

Soon afterwards, messengers arrive to announce that Macbeth is to receive the title and possessions of the Thane of Cawdor, who had been a traitor in the rebellion and is shortly to be executed. Macbeth is thunderstruck: ‘Two truths are told,/as happy prologues to the swelling act/of the imperial theme’.

According to Shakespeare, Macbeth now writes a letter to his wife telling her of his encounter with the witches, and sends notice that the king himself is coming to stay with them at their castle at Inverness. Lady Macbeth works on her husband’s latent ambition and incites him to kill the king – which he does, albeit unnerved by the deed.1 Duncan’s two young sons, Malcolm (the Prince of Cumbria) and Donalbain, fearful of suffering the same fate, flee the country.

Macbeth thereupon assumes the crown. Mindful of the witches’ prophecy that Banquo will be the progenitor of future kings of Scotland, Macbeth sends hired assassins to kill Banquo and his young son Fleance; Banquo is struck down, but Fleance escapes, and his progeny later become the ruling Stewart dynasty of Scotland.

Macbeth now embarks on a reign of terror. He consults the witches again, and they warn him to beware of Macduff, the Thane of Fife. But they also tell him that ‘none of woman born’ will ever harm him, and that he ‘shall never vanquished be, until/Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill/Shall come against him.’

Before Macbeth has time to act, Macduff, suspecting that he is next on the king’s hit-list, flees to England to join Duncan’s son Malcolm. In thwarted fury Macbeth sends his assassins to Macduff’s castle in Fife and has Macduff’s wife and young family slaughtered.

At the English court the Scottish refugees, spurred on by Macduff’s arrival, assemble an army with English help and invade Scotland. To hide their advance towards the tyrant’s lair at Dunsinane Castle they camouflage themselves with branches cut from Birnam Wood. Macbeth is shaken by the news that the wood seems to be coming to Dunsinane; he is even more dismayed when he faces the vengeful Macduff, who reveals that he was not ‘of woman born’, but had been ‘from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d’. There is nothing left for Macbeth now but to die valiantly: ‘Lay on, Macduff; and damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”’ Macbeth is duly slain by Macduff, who brings the tyrant’s head to Malcolm – the future Malcolm III, Malcolm Canmore.

Birnam Wood and Dunsinane

A walkway along the River Tay, known as the ‘Terrace Walk’, runs between the neighbouring towns of Dunkeld and Birnam. Just behind the Oak Inn of the Birnam House Hotel a sign highlights the presence of the ‘Birnam Oak’ – a very old, gigantic oak tree, its heavy, brittle branches now propped up on crutches. It is said to be the last remaining tree from the ancient Birnam Wood made famous by the witches’ prophecy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It was from this very tree (it is implied), and others like it, that Malcolm’s soldiers cut branches to disguise their advance on Macbeth’s castle at Dunsinane Hill, in the Sidlaws, some twenty-two kilometres as the crow flies to the south-east, off the Perth to Coupar Angus road (A94).1 Dunsinane is a low hill which is not difficult to ascend. Its flat summit is crowned by the impressive remains of a huge prehistoric hill-fort with triple ramparts which are still clearly visible; unfortunately, it could not have been a castle in Macbeth’s day. However, from the summit one can look north-west along the Tay Valley towards the woods of Birnam and the beautiful Howe of Strathmore, and (with luck and a little imagination) make out the gap in the hills through which a camouflaged army might have advanced towards Dunsinane. Or so they say.

A few miles to the south of Dunkeld, and now bypassed by the A9 to Perth, the little village of Bankfoot provides a ‘Macbeth Experience’ as part of a Visitor Centre which was created in a former motor museum in 1993 by an entrepreneurial local couple, Wilson and Catriona Girvan. A spirited multi-media production offers a view of the ‘millennium of mystery’ surrounding the Macbeth story, or rather two views – the Shakespearean view, and the ‘real’ view. It presents Shakespeare enthusiastically reading his source material – the English chronicler Ralph Holinshed, who compiled The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland in the 1570s – and penning his ‘pretty tale’ of the witch-ridden, bloodthirsty usurper who lost his head to Macduff when Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane; interwoven with this yarn is the story of what is now considered the ‘real’ Macbeth.

In this story, Macbeth was one of the great Scottish kings. His name in Gaelic, MacBeathadh, means ‘Son of Life’. He was the son of Findlaech mac Ruairdri, mormaer (earl) of Moray, who was killed by his nephews in 1020; Macbeth had royal blood in his veins as a member of one of the three kindreds of Dalriada (Argyll) who had extended their power up the Great Glen into Moray. In 1032 Macbeth took vengeance when he burned to death one of his father’s killers, Gillacomgain, along with fifty of his men, and was thereby able to assume his father’s rank of mormaer of Moray. He then strengthened his claim to the throne by marrying the dead man’s widow, Gruoch, who was herself descended from the royal line.

In the same vein, Duncan I was not by any means Shakespeare’s gentle, much-revered king, rich in years and loved by his subjects. He was, in fact, a rash and militarily incompetent youngster, the grandson of a ruthless and despotic king, Malcolm II, who had appointed him Prince of Cumbria and arranged that he should succeed to the throne in 1034. His succession caused widespread anger: ancient custom favoured succession by election, not diktat; besides, Duncan had neither the maturity nor the track-record to merit the throne.

Duncan had clearly inherited his father’s ambition, but not his skill: he invaded the north of England and made a disastrous attack on Durham in 1039; he then made an equally ill-fated attempt to impose his authority in the recalcitrant north of Scotland. Duncan met Macbeth, mormaer of Moray, in battle somewhere near the village of Pitgaveny, near Elgin, on the Feast of the Assumption (10 August) in 1040, and was killed.

Macbeth was immediately accepted as King of Scots and crowned at Scone, which suggests that Duncan I’s military failures had antagonised his subjects in the south, too. Macbeth went on to reign for seventeen years (1040–57), and the Chronicle of Melrose noted that ‘in his time there were productive seasons’ (a line borrowed from an early Latin poem – fertile tempus erat). He drove Duncan’s two sons out of Scotland: Malcolm fled to England, where he became a protégé of King Edward the Confessor (r.1042–66); and Donalbain (Donald Bán) fled to the Western Isles.

Macbeth was able to deal effectively with an abortive attempt by Duncan I’s father to oust him in 1046. He was less successful in his confrontations with his half-cousin, Thorfinn the Mighty, the Norse Earl of Orkney.

Thorfinn Sigurðarson, nicknamed ‘the Mighty’, is one of the most compelling figures in the great portrait-gallery of Norse earls presented in Orkneyinga Saga. A huge, powerfully-built, swarthy man, ugly and sharp-featured, beetle-browed and with a prominent nose, he was ambitious, ruthless and very shrewd, a born survivor in an age when survival was always precarious. According to Orkneyinga Saga Thorfinn was one of the sons of Earl Sigurð Hlöðvisson of Orkney, and (like Duncan I) a grandson of a King Malcolm of Scotland (Malcolm II?). He was created Earl of Caithness and Sutherland by King Malcolm at the age of five in 1014; thereafter he fought his way to control of Orkney (by the 1030s), and by the time he died, at some date between 1057 and 1065, he had extended his realm deep into the heartlands of Scotland and over the Western Isles as well, and was recognised as the most powerful ruler in northern Britain. He was a man of compelling personal authority; after the turbulent years of his early piratical reign, he spent the latter part of his life ruling his realms wisely and benevolently from the palace and church he built on the Brough of Birsay, at the northern end of the Mainland of Orkney. His reign was the high point of the golden age of viking power in the north.

This was the man who represented the greatest threat to Macbeth’s authority in the north of Scotland. According to Orkneyinga Saga, Macbeth and Thorfinn had several encounters, all of which ended in Thorfinn’s favour. But it would say that, wouldn’t it?

Macbeth may not have been the most compelling King of Scots in the eleventh century, but he seems to have been a very capable one. He was generous to the Church, which ensured him a good early press (he and Gruoch granted lands in Fife to the Culdees of Loch Leven1). Certainly, he felt secure enough to leave Scotland in 1050 and go on a pilgrimage to Rome where, according to the Chronicon of Marianus Scottus (1028–83), written in 1073, ‘he scattered his money like seed among the poor’.

In the 1050s, however, Macbeth’s reign became clouded. Duncan’s elder son, Malcolm – the future Malcolm Canmore – was cultivating support in England to reclaim the throne of Scotland. Edward the Confessor seems to have backed his ambitions. In 1054 he sanctioned an invasion of Scotland by Earl Siward, the doughty Danish-born Earl of Northumbria. Siward (probably with Malcolm at his side) invaded Scotland with a mixed army of Anglo-Saxon Northumbrians and Scots. Macbeth seems to have conducted a defensive guerrilla campaign at first; the contemporary English chronicle Vita Edwardi Regis claims that the Scots were ‘an uncertain race of men and fickle, and one which trusts rather in woods than on the plain, and more in flight than in manly courage in battle’. Siward reached Dundee apparently unopposed, where his army was reinforced by supply ships. Shortly afterwards he brought Macbeth to pitched battle on the Festival of the Seven Sleepers (27 July).

Where was this battle? Was this Shakespeare’s final ‘Battle of Dunsinane’? It could well have been – there is no documentary evidence either way. But if it was at Dunsinane, it would have been decided on the level ground below Dunsinane Hill, not in the ancient hill-fort on the summit.

Wherever it took place, it was a long and bloody encounter. There were heavy casualties on both sides. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1054 noted:

In this year Earl Siward invaded Scotland with a great host both by land and sea, and fought against the Scots. He put to flight their king, Macbeth, and slew the noblest in the land, carrying off much plunder such as none had previously gained; but his son Osbern and his sister’s son and numbers of his housecarles, as well as of the king [Edward the Confessor], were slain there.