I’ve just read Tim Clarkson’s ‘The Picts – A History’, and really enjoyed it. In fact I finished it breathless and wanting more. At 206 pages, before launching into a useful set of appendices, you get a fly through of the key elements of Northern Brittonic history, always with time to take side glances at alternative suppositions and to highlight the uncertainty of sources. It’s a rapid journey from emergence in 3rd century AD through to the creation of Alba and the disappearance of the Picts from records in the very early 10th Century.
There is so much to dive into here: the warlord culture, matrilineal succession, the Scot and Pict interactions, the power of the English Northumbrians and the northern Brittons, and the potent effect of the Vikings in shaping the eventual social and cultural dominance of the Scots over the Picts. It could so easily have been the other way around.
Here’s a tentative reconstruction of the lost Pictish language, it is thought branched from other P-Celtic languages such as Welsh, Cumbric etc:
Time to move on to look at recent archeaology to build out more of a picture and to test the timelines. Mostly though I need to get my walking boots on and go and visit the Tap O’Noth hillfort and breathe it all in.