The most troublesome enemies of Roman Britain were the Picts of central and northern Scotland, and the Gaels known as Scoti, who were raiders from Ireland.

Subsequently, a British leader named Vortigern is supposed to have invited continental mercenaries to help fight the Picts who were attacking from the north.

They were sometimes regarded as the work of Danes or Picts.

Around 105, however, there appears to have been a serious setback at the hands of the tribes of the Picts of Alba: several Roman forts were destroyed by fire, with human remains and damaged armour at Trimontium ( at modern Newstead, in SE Scotland ) indicating hostilities at least at that site.

Sufficient Roman silver has been found in Scotland to suggest more than ordinary trade, and it is likely that the Romans were reinforcing treaty agreements by paying tribute to their implacable enemies, the Picts.

By tradition, the pagan Saxons were invited by Vortigern to assist in fighting the Picts and Irish, though archaeology has suggested some official settlement as landed mercenaries as early as the 3rd century.

In the east were the Picts, with kingdoms between the river Forth and Shetland.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for the year 449 records that Hengest and Horsa were invited to Britain by Vortigern to assist his forces in fighting the Picts.

When the Picts were subjugated, Glastian did much to alleviate their lot.

The Picts were probably tributary to Northumbria until the reign of Bridei map Beli, when the Anglians suffered a defeat at the Battle of Dun Nechtain that halted their northward expansion.

When the last inhabitants of Alba became fully Gaelicised Scots, probably during the 11th century, the Picts were soon forgotten.

The kings of the Picts when Bede was writing were Bridei and Nechtan, sons of Der Ilei, who indeed claimed the throne through their mother Der Ilei, daughter of an earlier Pictish king.

Kingly fathers were not frequently succeeded by their sons, not because the Picts practised matrilineal succession, but because they were usually followed by their own brothers or cousins, more likely to be experienced men with the authority and the support necessary to be king.

As with most peoples in the north of Europe in Late Antiquity, the Picts were farmers living in small communities.

Crannóg, which may originate in Neolithic Scotland, may have been rebuilt, and some were still in use in the time of the Picts.

Patrick could not have been referring to the Northern Picts who were converted by Saint Columba in the 6th century because they were not yet Christian, and thus could not be called ' apostate '.

The Picts were famously tattooed ( or scarified ) with elaborate, war-inspired black or dark blue woad ( or possibly copper for the blue tone ) designs.

William Camden's 1607 Britannia records that " the Britans called Castle Myned Agned, the Scots, the Maidens Castle and the Virgins Castle, of certaine young maidens of the Picts roiall bloud who were kept there in old time ".

In ' The Three Holy Families of the Isle of Britain ', there is a story of Caw and his children who had been driven from their lands by the Gwyddelian Picts, and who then came to Wales and were given land in Anglesey by Maelgwn.

In the 7th century it came under the control of the northern part of the Angle Kingdom of Northumbria for a time, but Anglian grip on Lothian was quickly weakened following the Battle of Dun Nechtain in which they were defeated by the Picts.

In the historic period the earliest known settlers were Picts to the north and Gaels in the southern kingdom of Dalriada prior to the islands becoming part of the Suðreyjar kingdom of the Norse, who ruled for over 400 years until sovereignty was transferred to Scotland by the Treaty of Perth in 1266.

According to Adomnán, Columba came across a group of Picts burying a man who had been killed by the monster.

In writings from Ireland, the name Cruthin, Cruthini, Cruthni, Cruithni or Cruithini ( Modern Irish: Cruithne ) was used to refer to the Picts and to a group of people who lived alongside the Ulaid in eastern Ulster.

A small group of these women defied kings Wanius and Melga of the Picts and the Huns, who attempted to have intercourse with them.

The Miathi, mentioned in Adomnán's Life of Columba, probably to be identified with the Southern Picts, appear to be the same ethnic group, their identity seemingly surviving in some form as late as the 6th or 7th centuries AD.

His Picts originated on a group of islands near what was once Valusia, the kingdom of the Atlantean Kull.

Hunter ( 2000 ) states that in relation to King Bridei I of the Picts in the sixth century AD: " As for Shetland, Orkney, Skye and the Western Isles, their inhabitants, most of whom appear to have been Pictish in culture and speech at this time, are likely to have regarded Bridei as a fairly distant presence .” In 2011 the collective site, " The Crucible of Iron Age Shetland " including Broch of Mousa, Old Scatness and Jarlshof joined the UKs " Tentative List " of World Heritage Sites.

The Ancient Picts were said to paint themselves " Iron Red " according to the Gothic historian Jordanes.

In his fictional historical essay " The Hyborian Age ", Howard describes how the people of Atlantis — the land where his character King Kull originated — had to move east after a great cataclysm changed the face of the world and sank their island, settling where Ireland and Scotland would eventually be located, Thus they are ( in Howard's work ) the ancestors of the Irish and Scottish ( the Celtic Gaels ) and not the Picts, the other ancestor of modern Scots who also appear in Howard's work.

The kingdom's independent existence ended in the Viking Age, as it merged with the lands of the Picts to form the Kingdom of Alba.

In Howard's artificial legendarium, the Hyborian Age is chronologically situated between two other eras: " The Pre-Cataclysmic Age " of Kull ( c. Upper Paleolithic 20, 000 BC ) and the onslaught of the Picts ( c. 9500 BC ).

Howard endeavoured to connect the fictional peoples of the Hyborian Age with later historical groups, such as the Cimmerians ( depicted as ancestors of the ancient Gaels ), their hereditary enemies the Picts ( compare to the Picts of eastern and northern Scotland ), and Vanir ( sea-roving Danes, i. e. Vikings ) to the west and north respectively and their allies the Aesir ( generally depicted in the Hyborian Age as a fair Nordic-type race, linked by Howard to ancient Britons and Gauls ) to the northeast.

In fact, the character of Brule, the Spear Slayer, in the Kull stories, is a member of the Pre-Cataclysmic Age Picts.

It is set in the pseudo-historical Hyborian Age and concerns Conan fighting the savage Hyborian Picts in the unsettled lands beyond the infamous Black River.

The Picts survived but the cataclysm brought them back to the Stone Age.

Picts came to Orkney during the Bronze Age and extant archaeological data shows that certainly, there were people living there prior to the Vikings who came to Orkney, probably by the latter part of the 8th century although this is up for dispute.

Saint Columba ( 7 December 521 – 9 June 597 AD )— also known as Colum Cille, or Chille ( Old Irish, meaning " dove of the church "), Colm Cille ( Irish ), Calum Cille ( Scottish Gaelic ), Colum Keeilley ( Manx Gaelic ) and Kolban or Kolbjørn ( Old Norse )— was a Gaelic Irish missionary monk who propagated Christianity among the Picts during the Early Medieval Period.

* Foster, Sally M., Picts, Gaels, and Scots: Early Historic Scotland.

* Foster, Sally M., Picts, Gaels, and Scots: Early Historic Scotland.

* Chadwick, Hector Munro ( 1949 ) Early Scotland: the Picts, the Scots & the Welsh of southern Scotland.

* Skene, William Forbes, Chronicles of the Picts, Chronicles of the Scots: And Other Early Memorials of Scottish History ( 1867 ).

* Foster, Sally M., Picts, Gaels and Scots: Early Historic Scotland.

* Foster, Sally M., Picts, Gaels, and Scots: Early Historic Scotland.

Ultimately the Romans prevailed, only to be displaced in the Early Middle Ages by the Picts.

Early in the fifth century AD Claudian, in his poem, On the Fourth Consulship of the Emperor Honorius, Book VIII, rhapsodizes on the conquests of the emperor Theodosius I, declaring that the Orcades ran red with Saxon slaughter ; Thule was warm with the blood of Picts ; ice-bound Hibernia wept for the heaps of slain Scots.

Pictish is a term used for the extinct language or languages thought to have been spoken by the Picts, the people of northern and central Scotland in the Early Middle Ages.

Early kings of Clann Cináeda meic Ailpín are described as kings of the Picts, and the third king, Constantín mac Cináeda appears to have been regarded as the last of the seventy Pictish kings soon after his death.

* Foster, Sally M., Picts, Gaels and Scots: Early Historic Scotland.

* Henderson, George & Isabel Henderson, The Art of the Picts: Sculpture and Metalwork in Early Medieval Scotland.

Picts, Gaels, and Scots: Early Historic Scotland.