Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

Kenneth MacAlpin must have been some man to achieve the C9th amalgamation without significant bloodshed - to get a people to willingly give up their language and culture. There are not many examples of that to my knowledge... not without there having been some overwhelmingly beneficial 'carrot' offered. I guess my problem is I can not determine what that carrot was. What was in it for the Picts? Why did they resist Roman incursions so forcibly only to throw in their lot with a group of Irish origin? Another explanation could be that history was written by the victors to suit the victor's political agenda. That wouldn't be the first time. I shudder to think how the history of Britain would read if Hitler had have triumphed.

It is also not clear to me why medieval Scottish scholars such as Boece felt the need to cite a pre-Christian foundation... which, so I understand, involved literally inventing 40 kings to fill in the resultant gap in the King list.... if there was no suggestion of discord, no dark folk memory to overcome. I would describe this as falsifying, to be honest. Not a big deal if notables such as Buchanan had not later cited Boece's work when the decision was taken to remove Mary Queen of Scots.

It is stated as a certainty that the genocide of the Picts is a medieval myth. I obviously need to do a lot more reading since this is a very interesting subject. However there was clearly also much construction of 'pro-Scots' myth by medieval (and later) Scottish scholars suggesting - to me, anyway - that there was some skeleton lurking in the cupboard. Perhaps archaeology will one day unearth the physical evidence to throw more light on the Pict question; perhaps the discipline might also uncover the physical remains of the suggested mass Anglo Saxon invasion to conclusively debunk DNA analysis by the likes of Oppenheimer? The archived records, such as they are, would not seem enough to come to any firm conclusion at the current time.