remain unknown to the Picts generally in the north. But, as Professor
Hume Brown also tells us in the first of the three entrancing volumes
of his History, "In Scotland, if we may judge from the meagre accounts
that have come down to us, the Roman dominion hardly passed the stage
of a military occupation, held by an intermittent and precarious
tenure." What concerns dwellers in the extreme north is that although
the Romans went into Perthshire and may have temporarily penetrated
even into Moray, they certainly never occupied any part of Sutherland
or Caithness, though their tablets of brass, probably as part of the
currency used in trade, have been found in a Sutherland Pictish tower
or broch,[7] a fact which goes far to prove that the brochs, with
which we shall deal later on, existed in Roman times.[8]

As the Romans never occupied Sutherland or Caithness or even came near
their borders, their inhabitants were never disarmed or prevented
from the practice of war, and thus enfeebled like the more southerly
Britons.

After the departure, in 410, of the Romans, St. Ninian sent his
missionaries over Pictland, but darkness broods over its history
thenceforward for a hundred and fifty years. Picts, Scots of Ireland,
Angles and Saxons swarmed southwards, eastwards, and westwards
respectively into England, and ruined Romano-British civilisation,
which the Britons, unskilled in arms, were powerless to defend, as the
lamentations of Gildas abundantly attest.

In 563 Columba, the Irish soldier prince and missionary, whose Life
by Adamnan still survives,[9] landed in Argyll from Ulster, introduced
another form of Christian worship, also, like the Pictish, "without
reference to the Church of Rome," and from his base in Iona not only