Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time | Page 5

and may have temporarily penetrated even into
Moray, they certainly never occupied any part of Sutherland or
Caithness, though their tablets of brass, probably as part of the currency
used in trade, have been found in a Sutherland Pictish tower or broch,[7]
a fact which goes far to prove that the brochs, with which we shall deal
later on, existed in Roman times.[8]
As the Romans never occupied Sutherland or Caithness or even came
near their borders, their inhabitants were never disarmed or prevented
from the practice of war, and thus enfeebled like the more southerly
Britons.
After the departure, in 410, of the Romans, St. Ninian sent his
missionaries over Pictland, but darkness broods over its history
thenceforward for a hundred and fifty years. Picts, Scots of Ireland,
Angles and Saxons swarmed southwards, eastwards, and westwards
respectively into England, and ruined Romano-British civilisation,
which the Britons, unskilled in arms, were powerless to defend, as the
lamentations of Gildas abundantly attest.
In 563 Columba, the Irish soldier prince and missionary, whose Life by
Adamnan still survives,[9] landed in Argyll from Ulster, introduced
another form of Christian worship, also, like the Pictish, "without
reference to the Church of Rome," and from his base in Iona not only
preached and sent preachers to the north-western and northern Picts,
but in some measure brought among them the higher civilisation then
prevailing in Ireland. About the same time Kentigern, or St. Mungo, a
Briton of Wales, carried on missionary work in Strathclyde and in
Pictland, and even, it is said, sent preachers to Orkney.

In the beginning of the seventh century King Aethelfrith of
Northumbria had cut the people of the Britons, who held the whole of
west Britain from Devon to the Clyde, into two, the northern portion
becoming the Britons of Strathclyde; and the same king defeated Aidan,
king of the Scots of Argyll, at Degsastan near Jedburgh, though Aidan
survived, and, with the help of Columba, re-established the power of
the Scots in Argyll.
About the year 664, the wars in the south with Northumbria resulted in
the introduction by its king Oswy into south Pictland of the Catholic
instead of the Columban Church, a change which Nechtan, king of the
Southern Picts, afterwards confirmed, and which long afterwards led to
the abandonment throughout Scotland of the Pictish and Columban
systems, and to the adoption in their place of the wider and broader
culture, and the politically superior organisation and stricter discipline
of the Catholic Church, as new bishoprics were gradually founded
throughout Scotland by its successive kings.[10]
Meantime, during the centuries which elapsed before the Catholic
Church reached the extreme north of Scotland, the Pictish and
Columban churches held the field, as rivals, there, and probably never
wholly perished in Norse times even in Caithness and Sutherland.
During these centuries there were constant wars among the Picts
themselves, and later between them and the Scots, resulting, generally,
in the Picts being driven eastward and northward from the south centre
of Alban, which the Scots seized, into the Grampian hills.
After this very brief statement of previous history we may now attempt
to give some description of the land and the people of Caithness and
Sutherland as the Northmen found them in the ninth century.

CHAPTER II.
_The Pict and the Northman._

The present counties of Caithness and Sutherland A together made up
the old Province of Cait or Cat, so called after the name of one of the
seven legendary sons of Cruithne, the eponymous hero who
represented the Picts of Alban, as the whole mainland north of the
Forth was then called, and whose seven sons' names were said to stand
for its seven main divisions,[1] Cait for Caithness and Sutherland, Ce
for Keith or Mar, Cirig for Magh-Circinn or Mearns, Fib for Fife,
Fidach (Woody) for Moray, Fotla for Ath-Fodla or Athol, and
Fortrenn for Menteith.
Immediately to the south of Cat lay the great province of Moray
including Ross, and, in the extreme west, a part of north Argyll; and the
boundary between Cat and Ross was approximately the tidal River
Oykel, called by the Norse Ekkjal, the northern and perhaps also the
southern bank of which probably formed the ranges of hills known in
the time of the earliest Norse jarls as Ekkjals-bakki. Everywhere else
Cat was bounded by the open sea, of which the Norse soon became
masters, namely on the west by the Minch, on the north by the North
Atlantic and Pentland Firth, and on the east and south by the North Sea;
and the great valley of the Oykel and the Dornoch Firth made Cat
almost into an island.
Like Cæsar's Gaul, Cat was "divided into three parts"; first, Ness,
which was co-extensive with the modern county of Caithness, a treeless
land, excellent