A handful of references in the Irish annals refer to a Pictish kingdom or region called Fortriu. Until recently this area was usually equated with Strathearn, the valley of the River Earn in Perthshire, together with an adjacent district to the south called Menteith. Historians based this identification on a number of assumptions made in the nineteenth century by well-respected scholars such as William Forbes Skene. In his famous three-volume work Celtic Scotland, Skene saw a close parallel between the seven ancient ‘divisions’ of Scotland listed in De Situ Albanie (c.1200) and an earlier vision of Pictish political geography presented by the Irish annalists. He believed the annal references to Fortriu referred to a region described by DSA as situated between the rivers Forth and Tay, an otherwise unnamed area corresponding to the later medieval earldoms of Strathearn and Menteith. Skene and those who shared his views seem to have been influenced by a vague similarity between the names Forth and Fortriu, which are in fact unrelated linguistically.
Outside the annals Fortriu is named as one of seven Pictish provinces in the tale of Cruithne, legendary ancestor of the Picts, which appears in various Scottish and Irish texts. Of these provinces some can be identified fairly securely (e.g. ‘Fib’ = Fife, ‘Fotla’ = Atholl, ‘Cat’ = Caithness) while others, including Fortriu, are more puzzling. The dubious historical value of the Cruithne legend did not, however, prevent historians from trying to match its seven provinces to the seven divisions of Scotland given in De Situ Albanie. The mysterious Fortriu was duly matched to a blank area comprising Strathearn and Menteith, an equation which fitted neatly with Skene’s earlier ideas about Pictish geography.
The name Fortriu derives from, or is closely related to, the Latin name Verturiones which the Roman writer Ammianus Marcellinus applied to one of two divisions of the Picts in the late fourth century. The other division, the Dicalydones, was plainly a manifestation of the Caledones or Caledonians who had resisted Rome’s first invasion of Scotland three hundred years earlier. The place-names Dunkeld, Rohallion and Schiehallion all contain a Gaelic form of the root term ‘Caledon’ and show that the heartland of the Caledonian Picts lay in Perthshire along the Tay valley. A perception that the Verturiones, the Picts of Fortriu, dwelt south of this area in a region between Forth and Tay became part of the bedrock of Scottish medieval studies throughout the twentieth century. Few people paused to wonder if Skene and his contemporaries were wrong in placing Fortriu south of the Caledonian heartlands. Few questioned the wisdom or necessity of trying to match the seven provinces in the Cruithne legend to the seven territories described in De Situ Albanie. A large measure of trust was therefore placed in data of dubious reliability. The guesses and unsupported assertions went unchallenged for more than a century, with only a small number of scholars voicing their unease.
During 2007, while attempting to write a narrative history of the Picts, I followed conventional wisdom by equating Fortriu with Strathearn and Menteith. This was despite having already encountered a 2006 paper by Alex Woolf in which the old perceptions of Pictish geography were rigorously questioned. Woolf’s argument incorporated two related threads, the first being a suggestion that the great battle of Dun Nechtain in AD 685 was not fought at Dunnichen in Perthshire but further north at Dunachton in Badenoch. The second cast doubt on the conventional placement of Fortriu and suggested that it, too, should be moved northward. Woolf made a strong case for locating Fortriu and the Verturiones in Moray. He drew attention to Bede’s belief that the Picts were divided into two parts, a northern and a southern, separated by the Grampian Mountains. If this division corresponds to the one observed by Ammianus Marcellinus three hundred years earlier, it seemed logical to assume that the people dwelling south of the Grampians – the Dicalydones or Caledonian Picts of Perthshire – were Bede’s southerners, thereby leaving us in little doubt that their northern cousins were the Verturiones, the ancestors of the Picts of Fortriu. Using this and other arguments Woolf suggested that historians should relocate Fortriu north of the Grampians in a territory centred on Moray.
Woolf employed other pieces of evidence in support of his ideas, drawing not only on Scottish and Irish sources but also on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to present a convincing case for a major re-think of Pictish geography. It turned out to be so convincing that it has now replaced Skene’s older theory as the new consensus on Fortriu.
I saw Woolf’s paper in 2007 but, at the time, chose not to sign up to the ranks of the converted. Looking back, I think I see the reason for my reticence: I was unconvinced by the argument in the first thread, namely the proposed relocation of the battle of Dun Nechtain (‘Nechtanesmere’ in English sources) to a site north of Perthshire. My scepticism about this part of Woolf’s geographical challenge prevented me from supporting the rest of it. With hindsight, this is the only rational explanation I can come up with for dragging my heels over the relocation of Fortriu. That was in 2007. I finished writing my narrative history of the Picts in the autumn of that year, having stuck resolutely with the old theory which placed Fortriu in southern Perthshire. Within six months, after re-reading the second half of Woolf’s paper and seeing what he (and others) had written since then, I became a belated convert to the new orthodoxy. Although remaining unconvinced by the Badenoch argument for Dun Nechtain my mental map of early medieval Scotland now placed Fortriu north of the Grampian Mountains. This Damascene conversion occurred soon after the publication of my book The Picts: a history in Easter 2008. The book therefore reflected my earlier understanding of Pictish geography, together with another ‘unreconstructed’ viewpoint concerning the ninth-century king Cinaed mac Ailpin. On both issues my views were changing.
Two years later and an opportunity has arisen to publish a new edition of the book. A revised and updated version is scheduled to appear in September 2010. The original was never intended to be a highbrow text and its non-academic flavour has been preserved, although an expanded bibliography gives the new edition a bit more scholarly beef. The title is also the same but other aspects have changed, including the geography of Fortriu which now reflects my conversion to Alex Woolf’s ideas. I intend to deal with my similarly altered perception of Cinaed mac Ailpin and the Gaelicisation of the Picts in the near future, in a separate post on this blog. As far as Fortriu is concerned the new edition abandons a Perthshire location for the Verturiones or ‘Verturian Picts’ in favour of a location in Moray. Dundurn hillfort, the palace at Forteviot and the Dupplin Cross are powerful testaments to Strathearn’s status as a major zone of Pictish royal power but I now acknowledge that the valley itself can no longer be coupled to Fortriu. Menteith, like neighbouring Strathearn, was presumably Pictish too but its royal connections are less evident and the absence of symbol stones suggests an area of less political importance. So, the Verturiones were not a Perthshire-based people after all. They emerge from the writings of Ammianus as the fourth-century inhabitants of Moray and as the ancestors of Bede’s northern Picts. It all seems a much better fit with the scattered references to Fortriu in the Irish annals.
Alex Woolf, ‘Dun Nechtain, Fortriu and the geography of the Picts’ Scottish Historical Review 85 (2006), 182-201