Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time | Page 6

in crops and highly cultivated in the north-east, but
elsewhere mainly made up of peat mosses, flagstones and flatness, save
in its western and south-western borderland of hills; secondly, to the
west of Ness, Strathnavern, a land of dales and hills, and, especially in
its western parts, of peaks; and, thirdly, to the south of Strathnavern,
Sudrland, or the Southland, a riviera of pastoral links and fertile
ploughland, sheltered on the north by its own forests and hills, and
sloping, throughout its whole length from the Oykel to the Ord of
Caithness, towards the Breithisjorthr, Broadfjord, or Moray Firth, its
southern sea.[2]
Save in north-east Ness, and in favoured spots elsewhere, also below
the 500 feet level, the land of Cat was a land of heath and woods[3] and

rocks, studded, especially in the west, with lochs abounding in trout, a
vast area of rolling moors, intersected by spacious straths, each with its
salmon river, a land of solitary silences, where red deer and elk
abounded, and in which the wild boar and wolf ranged freely, the last
wolf being killed in Glen Loth within twelve miles of Dunrobin at a
date between 1690 and 1700.[4] No race of hunters or fishermen ever
surpassed the Picts in their craft as such.
The land, especially Sutherland, is still a happy hunting-ground not
only for the sportsman but also for the antiquary. For the modern
County of Sutherland is outwardly much the same now as it was in
Pictish times, save for road and rail, two castles, and a sprinkling of
shooting lodges, inns, and good cottages, which, however, in so vast a
territory are, as the Irishman put it, "mere fleabites on the ocean." Much
of the west of the land of Cat was scarcely inhabited at all in Pictish or
Viking days, because as is clearly the case in the Kerrow-Garrow or
Rough Quarter of Eddrachilles, it would not carry one sheep or feed
one human being per hundred acres in many parts. The rest of it also
remains practically unchanged in appearance from the earliest days till
the present time, as it has been little disturbed by the plough save in the
north-east of Ness and at Lairg and Kinbrace, and in its lower levels
along the coast. But Loch Fleet no longer reaches to Pittentrail, and the
crooked bay at Crakaig has been drained and the Water of Loth sent
straight to the sea.
The only buildings or structures existing in Cat in Pictish and early
Norse times were a few vitrified forts, some underground erde-houses,
hut-circles innumerable, and perhaps a hundred and fifty brochs, or
Pictish towers as they are popularly called, which had been erected at
various dates from the first century onwards, long before the advent of
the Norse Vikings is on record, as defences against wolves and raiders
both by land and sea, and especially by sea. Notwithstanding
agricultural operations, foundations of 145 brochs can still be traced in
Ness and 67 in Strathnavern and Sudrland, but they were not all in use
at the same time, and they are mostly on sites taken over later on by the
Norse,[5] because they were already cultivated and agriculturally the
best.

A well-known authority on such subjects, the late Dr. Munro, in his
Prehistoric Scotland p. 389 writes of the brochs as follows:--"Some
four hundred might have been seen conspicuously dotting the more
fertile lands along the shores and straths of the counties of Caithness,
Sutherland, Ross, Inverness, Argyll, the islands of Orkney, Shetland,
Bute, and some of the Hebrides. Two are found in Forfarshire, and one
each in the counties of Perth, Stirling, Midlothian, Selkirk and
Berwick."
If one may venture to hazard a conjecture as to their date, they probably
came into general use in these parts of Caledonia as nearly as possible
contemporaneously with the date of the Roman occupation of South
Britain, which they outlasted for many centuries. But their erection was
not due to the fear of attack by the armies of Rome. For their remains
are found where the Romans never came, and where the Romans came
almost none are found. Their construction is more probably to be
ascribed to very early unrecorded maritime raids of pirates of unknown
race both on regions far north of the eastern coast protected later by the
Count of the Saxon shore, and on the northern and western islands and
coasts, where also many ruins of them survive.
In Cat dwelt the Pecht or Pict, the Brugaidh or farmer in his dun or
broch, erected always on or near well selected fertile land on the
seaboard, on the sides of straths, or on the shores of lochs, or less
frequently on islands near their shores and then approached by
causeways;[6] and the rest of the people