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that, along with practically every other European language and others, like Sanskrit from the Indian
subcontinent, their grammatical structure shows that they have evolved from a common root. The
only living exception in western Europe is Euskara, the language of the Basques of north-east
Spain and south-west France. Euskara is totally different from any other European language. The
grammar is different and the words have quite different roots.
Some scholars, keen to mark out the Picts as an ancient people, relics of the Old Stone Age,
have pointed to the few examples of ambiguous runic carvings as evidence that they spoke a
language unrelated to any other Indo-European tongue. The truth is that, unless we have more
evidence, we may never know. Since there are no written Pictish texts, and so very few surviving
stone inscriptions, the language of the Picts enters the realms of the unknowable. Which all adds to
the mystery.
Unfortunately, there is virtually no guidance from mythology as to the origin of the Picts. Unlike
the rich mythologies of the Irish, the Welsh and the English, the mythology of the Picts is almost
non-existent. That does not mean it never existed; it surely must have done. It is more a reflection
of the absence of writing or, more accurately, the absence of anyone else to write it down until it
was too late. In the rest of the Isles, it fell to Christian monks to record, or rather to mould, oral
myths. For some reason, this did not happen with the Picts, even though they were among the first
people in Britain to have been converted to Christianity after Columba arrived from Ireland in the
mid-sixth century. However, the majority of modern scholars now consider that Pictish was closely
allied to the strand of Gaelic spoken throughout the rest of Britain and surviving in modern Welsh.
If Gaelic was the language of the Picts, it would have been the P-Gaelic of Britain and not the Q-
Gaelic of Ireland. If so, then why is the Scottish Gaelic spoken in the Hebrides and now taught in
schools in the Highlands and Islands so closely allied to Irish Q-Gaelic and not to the harsher P-
Gaelic of the Welsh? For the answer we must look to the west, and to the peninsula of Kintyre, the
long finger that reaches almost as far as Ireland itself.
Across the sea from Kintyre, in County Antrim, close to the Giant’s Causeway, the Irish kings
of Dál Riata began to look for new conquests, and the lands visible across the sea were the natural
target. In the first centuries of the first millennium AD, the Dál Riata founded three colonies – on the
islands of Islay and Mull and on the Kintyre peninsula. They called their possessions Ar-gael –
hence Argyll.
The Picts briefly regained Argyll in the sixth century. When Columba arrived we know that it
was a Pictish king who gave him the land on Iona in 563. Shortly afterwards, the Dál Riata got a
new king, Aidan, who set out to reestablish the colonies in Argyll. If this wasn’t enough to upset the
Picts, he made matters worse by attacking their possessions on Orkney and on the Isle of Man. He
also annoyed the Ui Neill High King of Ireland by these unauthorized adventures. Matters came to a
head in 575 when Columba, himself a member of the Ui Neill clan, arbitrated the treaty by which
Aidan agreed to pay the High King a military tribute while keeping his maritime revenue for
himself. To make the most of this outcome, Aidan built up a strong navy, which is just as well,
because he lost most of his land battles. The treaty of 575 kept the peace in Ireland for fifty years,
but the Dál Riata never fully recovered their Irish possessions. Their centre of power switched to
Argyll and their territorial ambitions were directed north and east towards the lands of the Picts.
For the next two centuries the balance of advantage seesawed between the Gaels of Dalriada
(just another spelling of Dál Riata) and the Picts, with each side alternately gaining ground only to