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each donor arrives, they wait to be checked in. This, we jointly decided, was the best time for us to
introduce ourselves and to ask for their consent to having us analyse their DNA. I was extremely
fortunate in having a team of researchers in my group at the time who were absolutely brilliant in
the art of persuasion. To the waiting donors, we explained that we were creating a new genetic map
of Britain and trying to work out from it our Celtic, Pictish and Viking roots. That was about all the
explanation anyone needed before agreeing to take part, especially when they realized we would
only be taking a sample of blood from their donation, so there was no need for another needle.
Donors told us where they were from, as far back as their grandparents. Those who didn’t know,
generally the men, took a purple form home with them to ask someone in the family, invariably a
woman, and sent it on to us.
By the end of the session in Auchterarder we had collected 187 blood samples, a wonderful
start. Over the next two years we visited almost all of the donor sessions throughout Scotland, from
Galashiels and Thornhill in the Borders, to Thurso at the very top of Caithness, to Stornoway in the
Western Isles, to Campbeltown on the tip of the Kintyre peninsula. Everyone in my research lab
joined in, even if they were working on different projects. Itineraries were prepared so that, with
luck, several different sessions in different regions could be covered in one trip. We travelled to
Scotland by road, by air or by the Highland sleeper from Euston. We set aside a small office at the
Institute as a planning room, with donor-session schedules on the wall and a large map of Scotland
next to them. By the time we went to our last Scottish session, two years later in Fort William, we
had collected over 5,000 blood samples and clocked up over 50,000 miles between us. It is a
testament to the team’s powers of persuasion that we only ever had one person decline to take part
in the project – a farmer from Callander in the Trossachs, north of Stirling – who had to rush off
because one of his cows was about to give birth and he didn’t have time to fill in our form. It says a
lot about him, and donors in general, that they take their blood donations very seriously. None of
the donors is paid a penny and the sessions have a tangible atmosphere of selfless community
service. Most sessions are entirely run by women, with the only men present being the drivers of
the vans that bring the teams and the equipment. It was friendly, calm and efficient. Very impressive
all round.
To begin looking for the genetic signatures of the Picts on the mainland I began by dividing
Scotland into regions. It was easy to decide where to draw the line on Orkney, Shetland and the
Hebrides – they were islands – but on the mainland I needed to draw boundaries. These are shown
on the map on page 15. Pictland was covered by two of these: the Grampian region and Tayside
and Fife, which for convenience we will henceforth refer to simply as Tayside.
Since we began our analysis of the Northern Isles with the Y-chromosome, and also in
deference to the Pictish tradition of matrilineal inheritance, we began the search with
mitochondrial DNA. The clan proportions for both Pictish regions were remarkably similar to one
another – again you can see this in the Appendix. When I put the results through a statistical test, the
only clans that had a significantly different frequency in the two regions were Jasmine, higher in
Grampian, lower in Tayside, and Tara, higher in Tayside, lower in Grampian. Otherwise there was
no difference. It looked, at this level of scrutiny, as if the maternal ancestry of the two Pictish
regions was almost indistinguishable one from the other.
When it came to analysing the detailed sequences, though, I could see plenty of differences.
That is always to be expected, because a large proportion of mitochondrial sequences are unique to