Being Celts, the Picts would shun the open sea. They feared it, for
they had no chance on it, as their vessels were often merely hides
stretched on wattles, resembling enlarged coracles. Yet with such
rude ships as they had, they reached Orkney, Shetland, the Faroes and
Iceland as hermits or missionaries.[10] In Norse times they never
had the mastery of the sea, and the Pictish navy is a myth of earlier
days.[11]

Lastly, as we have seen, the Picts of Cat had never been conquered,
nor had their land ever been occupied by the legions of Rome, which
had stopped at the furthest in Moray; and the sole traces of Rome in
Cat are, as stated, two plates of hammered brass found in a Sutherland
broch, and some Samian ware. Further, Christian though he had been
long before Viking times, the Pict of Cat derived his Christianity
at first and chiefly from the Pictish missions, and later from
the Columban Church, both without reference to Papal Rome; and his
missionaries not only settled on islands off his coasts, but later on
worshipped in his small churches on the mainland; and many a Pictish
saint of holy life was held in reverence there.

About the eighth century and probably earlier, immigrants from the
southern shores of the Baltic pressed the Norse westwards in Norway,
and later on over-population in the sterile lands which lie along
Norway's western shores, drove its inhabitants forth from its western
fjords north of Stavanger and from The Vik or great bay of the
Christiania Fjord, whence they may have derived their name of Vikings,
across the North Sea to the opposite coasts of Shetland, Orkney and
Cat, where they found oxen and sheep to slaughter on the nesses or
headlands, and stores of grain, and some silver and even gold in the