#the picts

[scotianostra]

On 20th May 685 The Picts won a decisive Battle , in present-day Angus, known as The Battle of Dun Nechtain or Battle of Nechtansmere.

A wee bit longer post than I normally give you, but it is a great story, the first part tells us how a battle against The Angles helped shape the country we now know as Scotland, the second is a tale from the twentieth century, both stories are connected, read on and enjoy.........

Known as 'Picti' by the Romans, meaning 'Painted Ones' in Latin, these northern tribes constituted the largest kingdom in Dark Age Scotland. They repelled the conquests of both Romans and Angles, creating a true north-south divide on the British Isles, only to disappear from history by the end of the first millennium - swallowed whole by the history of another group, the Gaels. Together they created the Kingdom of Alba.

The Picts took part in one of the most decisive battles in Scottish history - the Battle of Dun Nechtain (Dunnichen). If the Picts had lost, Scotland might never have existed. For the Angles of Northumbria it was simply a disaster - ending their domination of Scotland.

The Battle of Dun Nechtain was fought on this day in 685 AD and is one of the best recorded events in Dark Age Scotland.

The Kingdom of the Angles under King Oswui had rapidly expanded north, moving their frontier from the River Forth to the River Tay. Since 653 AD many of the major groups of people in Scotland - Britons, Gaels and much of Pictland - had been subject to the overlordship of King Oswui. In 672 AD, after the death of Oswui, the Picts rose against their overlords, expelling Drust, their Northumbrian puppet king.

The new King of Northumbria, Ecgfrith, wasted no time in wreaking revenge on the Picts. The Picts were massacred at a battle near the town of Grangemouth, where the rivers Carron and Avon meet. According to Northumbrian sources, so many Picts died they could walk dry-shod across both rivers. By 681 AD Ecgfrith had founded a bishopric at Abercorn on the southern shore of the Forth - a symbol of Northumbria's secure grip over the Picts.

The defeated Picts took Bridei, son of Bili, as the king of a much depleted Pictland. King Bridei was actually the cousin of his mortal enemy, King Ecgfrith of the Angles, but, in true Dark Age fashion, this didn't diminish their mutual desire to destroy each other. An almighty battle was on the cards.

The Chronicle of Holyrood gives us an account of the battle: "In the year 685 King Ecgfrith rashly led an army to waste the province of the Picts, although many of his friends opposed it...and through the enemy's feigning flight he was led into the defiles of inaccessible mountains, and annihilated, with great part of his forces he had brought with him." However, we need to keep in mind this account was written hundreds of years after the event.

The Angles were advancing up Strathmore, probably aiming for the Pictish fortress of Dunnottar, when they fell into Bridei's trap. Sighting a Pictish warband, the Angles set off in pursuit, then, as they came over the cleft in Dunnichen Hill, they found themselves confronted by the main body of the Pictish army. Caught between the Picts and the loch below the hill, the Angles bravely faced their doom.

The politcal map was altered. The Picts, Gaels and many Britons were freed from Northumbrian overlordship. Gaelic poets as far away as Ireland celebrated the battle's outcome. The Pictish frontier returned to the River Forth near Edinburgh and the Bishop of Abercorn fled, never to return. The Angles never fully recovered as major force in Scotland.

It is no coincidence that the Picts mysterious disappearance occurs at the same time as the creation of the kingdom of Alba. For many years Gaelic influence in Pictland had been on the rise. The Gaelic religion of Christianity had spread throughout Pictish lands and with it many Gaelic traditions. Furthermore, through a mixture of conquest and inter-marriage Gaelic or Gaelicised royalty had succeeded to the Pictish throne (a notable example of this being Kenneth MacAlpin).

Finally in 878 AD the Pictish king, Áed, was murdered and replaced by a Gael - Giric. Giric accelerated the Gaelic takeover of Pictish politics during his reign making the Gaelic language and traditions commonplace. Even after Giric was finally deposed in 889 AD future Pictish kings such as Donald and Constantine embraced Gaelic culture. By 900 AD Pictland ceased to exist. The reign of Donald is listed in the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba as a king of Alba. Pictland and Dál Riata had gone and in their place Alba - a Gaelic word for Scotland - was created. In this simple listing in an obscure book Scotland has its origins.

Fast forward over 12 hundred years to the 2nd January 1950, and a woman called Miss E.F. Smith, described as a spinster, was driving home from a party in Brechin at about 2am. Her car had skidded into a ditch 2 miles outside the area due to the treacherous road conditions. She still had another 8 miles to go so she continued her journey on foot. She felt oddly nervous as she walked along the minor road west of the A932, then she saw a number of strange lights in the distance near Dunnichen Hill. Turning south towards the village, she noticed figure in the field to her right, part of Drummietermont Farm. Each figure carried a flaming red torch in its left hand and they seemed to be searching the ground for something.

Miss Smith then saw shapes on the ground exactly like dead bodies. The figure nearest to her stooped down and examined several of these ‘corpses’, turning them over and back again, as if looking for recognisable faces. This scene lasted for around ten minutes, with Miss Smith’s dog barking throughout. Eventually she simply walked away. She only realised that the whole event was peculiar when she woke up next day and thought about it. Later she gave details of the experience to the Society for Psychical Research. She reported that the searchers wore garb like body stockings, along with tunics and flattened oval helmets. They appeared to be moving around the edge of the vanished mere, the shape of which was later traced by archaeological investigation.

Although this post battle manifestation has not been repeated. some motorists passing through Dunnichen on misty nights have caught sight of fleeting human forms which vanish before their cars hit them.

There is some skepticism as to how real Miss Smith’s sighting was. She was travelling very late at night and had already walked a number of miles, not to mention suffering a trauma from skidding her car into a ditch. The vision could have been brought about as a result of exhaustion and the effects of the cold. However, the fact that it occurred at the exact site of the Battle of Nechtansmere seems to be too much of a coincidence and it is unlikely that the woman’s dog would react to something that occurred only in his owner’s mind.

The pictures are of Pictish stones from around Aberlemno that perhaps tell the story of the battle.

[archaeolorhi]

A Hidden Gem in The Last Kingdom...

THIS IS VERY NICHE I KNOW but did you know the Hilton of Cadboll Stone was snuck into The Last Kingdom?

The Stone was carved in c.800 CE and portrays an aristocratic FEMALE horse rider with her hunting party (lets go girlies!)

But in The Last Kingdom, the stone has been transformed into a throne fit for a king! King Constantin II of Scotland to be precise x

Find out all about it in this weeks video!

Let me know, how do you feel about archaeology being used in this way? Do you think its harmless and potentially encouraging? Or do you think it's inaccuracies may do more harm than good?

And don't forget to like and subscribe! <3

[billherbert23]

Found after fifteen-or-so years of being lost in boxes of papery limbo: The Pictish Alphabet.

[ancestorsalive]

Mysteries of the Picts | The Last Pagans of Scotland

[thesilicontribesman]

Pictish Stag Symbol Stone, circa 9th Century CE, St. Vigeans Stones and Museum, Arbroath, Scotland

Considered by many to be one of the finest Pictish animal depictions.

[sonic-gallery]

A castle town bustling with the morning sun in the tranquil spring sunshine 🏰

Sir Percival, one of the Knights of the Round Table, is browsing in a stall for travel supplies 🤔 The common people were excited by the sudden visit of the nobleman, wondering what he wanted from him…

Starting tomorrow #Golden Week! Are you fully prepared? May the knight and everyone else have a wonderful start to their journey! 😉

#sonicpict

[niwa-uxx]

[100en]

pkmn SV / Mi Tesoro（私の宝物）

ポストカードになる予定

[0u08]

絶対に人前でいちゃつきたくないKDJといちゃつきたいYJH

KDJ who never wants to lovey-dovey in public and YJH who wants to lovey-dovey in public.

[tailschannel]

This month's Sonic Pict from SEGA of Japan features Ray the Flying Squirrel enjoying the white snow and autumn leaves in Press Garden; and made a portrait of his friend, Mighty the Armadillo.

[ebila]

パンドラミトロンﾁｬﾝ

[vintagegeekculture]

The Evil Little Hairy Cave People of Europe in Pulp Fiction

From the 1900s to the 1940s, there was a trendy theme in occult and horror stories that the explanation for widespread European legends of fairies, brownies, pixies, leprechauns and other malicious little people, was that they were a hereditary racial memory of the extremely small non-human, hairy stone age original inhabitants of Europe, who still survive well into modern times in caves and barrows below the earth. Envious of being displaced on the surface, these weird creatures, adapted to the darkness of living underground and unable to withstand the sun, still mean mischief and occasionally go out at night to capture someone.... usually an attractive woman....to take to their dark caves for human sacrifice.

Displaced by the arrival of Indo-European language speakers at the dawn of the Bronze Age, these original, not quite human stone age people of Europe were driven deep underground into caves and barrows below the earth, where they went mad, adapted to the darkness and acquired a fear of daylight, became extremely inbred, in some cases acquired widespread albinism. It is these strange little people who gave the descendants of Europeans a haunting racial dread of places below the earth like mines and caves, and it also is these strange, hairy troglodytes who originally built the uncanny and mysterious menhir, fairy rings, and stone age structures of England, Scotland, and Ireland that predate the coming of the Celts and Romans.

In some cases, these evil troglodytes are usually identified with the mysterious Picts, the pre-Celtic stone age inhabitants of the British Isles. In some cases, they are identified with the Basque people of Spain, best known as the inventors of Jai Alai, and the oldest people in Europe who speak a unique language unrelated to any in the world.

The original codifier of this trend was Arthur Machen, a horror writer who is less remembered than his contemporary, Henry James, but who may be the best horror writer in the generations between Poe on the one end and Lovecraft/CL Moore/Clark Ashton Smith on the other. His story, "the White People" from 1904 (a reference to their strange cave albinism) was a twisted Alice in Wonderland with a girl who is irresistibly attracted to dark pre-Roman stone age ruins and who is eventually pulled underground.

In addition to being a great horror writer, Arthur Machen was a member of the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn, an occult organization, and was often seen at the Isis-Urania Temple in London. Many of his works have secretive occult knowledge.

H.P. Lovecraft in particular always pointed out Arthur Machen as his single biggest inspiration, though he combined Machen's dread and occultism with Abraham Merritt's sense of fear of the cosmic unknown, seen in "Dwellers in the Mirage" and "People of the Pit."

Another and scarier example of this trend would be "No Man's Land," a story by John Buchan, a Scotsman fascinated by paganism and horror, who often wrote stories of horrific discoveries and evil rites on the Scottish moors. He is often reduced to being described as a "Scottish Ghost Story" writer, a painfully reductivist description as in his career, Buchan wrote a lot of thrillers, detective, and adventure stories as well. In later life, he was appointed Governor General of Canada, meaning he may be the first head of state to be a horror writer.

It was Buchan who first identified the cave creatures with the Picts, something that another Weird Tales writer decades later, Robert E. Howard, would roll with in the 1920s.

Howard is a very identifiable kind of modern person you often see on the internet: a guy who talks tough, but who was terrified to leave his small town. He created manly man, tough guy heroes like Conan the Barbarian, Kull, and El Borak, but he himself never left his mother's house. It's no wonder he got along well with his fellow Weird Tales writer and weird shut in, HP Lovecraft. With 1920s Weird Tales writers, despite your admiration for their incredible talent, you also can't help but laugh at them a little, a feeling you also apply to a lot of Victorians, who achieved incredible things, but who are often closet cases and cranks who died virgins ("Chinese" Gordon comes to mind, as does Immelmann).

With Howard, his obsession with the Picts and the stone age cave dwelling people of Europe started with an unpublished manuscript where at a dinner party, a man gets knocked out and regresses to his past life in the Bronze Age, where he remembers the earliest contact between modern humans and the original inhabitants of the British Isles, the evil darkskinned Picts. This is a mix of both the "little cave people" story and another cliche at the time, "the stone age past life regression novel," another turn of the century cliche.

Still with the Picts on his mind, Howard would later create Bran Mak Morn, a Pict chieftain, who predated Kull and Conan as his Celtic caveman muscle hero. Howard was of Irish descent and proudly anti-Colonial and anti-British, with his Roman Empire and Civilized Kingdoms as a stand in for the British and other Empires, which he viewed as rapacious and humbug, a view shared by his greatest inspiration, Talbot Mundy. His "Worms of the Earth" gets to the heart of why these little cave people scare us so much: they remind us that we live on land that is impossibly ancient and we don't fully understand at all.

It was another Weird Tales Writer a decade later who wrote one of the last stories about the little hairy cave people of Europe, though, Manly Wade Wellman in 1942. Wellman was mainly known for creating the blond beefcake caveman hero Hok the Mighty set in stone age times, and for his supernatural ghost stories of Silver John the Balladeer set in modern, ghostly Appalachia (like many ex-Weird Tales writers, he made a turn to being a regional author in his later career, in the same way Hugh B. Cave became a Caribbean writer), but Wellman also had a regular character known as John Thunstone, a muscular and wealthy playboy known for his moustache who used his great wealth to investigate the supernatural and the occult. Thunstone had a silver sword made by St. Dunstan, patron of Silversmiths, well known for his confrontations with the Devil.

Most John Thunstone stories featured familiar stories, like a demon possessed seance and so on, but one in particular featured a unique enemy, the Shonokins.

The Shonokins were the original rulers of North America, descendants of Neanderthal man displaced by American Indians. This fear that the land we live is ancient and unknowable and we just arrived on it and don't know any of its secrets is common to settler societies, who often hold the landscape with dread, as in Patricia Wrightson's fantasies of the Australian Outback. It was easy enough to transport the hairy cave people from the Scottish Moors to North America. I suspect that's what they are, a personification of a fear shared in the middle class, that in the back of their minds, that everything they have supposedly earned is merely an accident of history, built by rapacity and the crimes of history, and that someday a bill will come due.

A text page in the May 1942 issue of Weird Tales gives strange additional information on the Shonokins not found elsewhere:

Since then, there have been too many examples of evil cave people who predate Europeans. Philip Jose Farmer's "The All White Elf" features the last survivor of a pre-European people who live in caves. A lot of other fiction of course has featured the Picts, but according to our modern scientific understanding, which describes them as much, much less exotically, as a blue tattooed people not too different and practically indistinguishable from the Celtic tribes that surrounded them, and which they eventually blended into.

[akq96618]

[liannnn77]

[crystallinegazer]

Fang's Gang pulls a heist in Sandopolis Zone!

...they're not doing very well, though.

[thesilicontribesman]

The Pictish Wolf Stone, Stittenham, Ardross, Inverness Museum and Gallery, Scotland