ies which elapsed before the Catholic
Church reached the extreme north of Scotland, the Pictish and Columban
churches held the field, as rivals, there, and probably never wholly
perished in Norse times even in Caithness and Sutherland.

During these centuries there were constant wars among the Picts
themselves, and later between them and the Scots, resulting,
generally, in the Picts being driven eastward and northward from
the south centre of Alban, which the Scots seized, into the Grampian
hills.

After this very brief statement of previous history we may now attempt
to give some description of the land and the people of Caithness and
Sutherland as the Northmen found them in the ninth century.

CHAPTER II.

_The Pict and the Northman._

The present counties of Caithness and Sutherland A together made up
the old Province of Cait or Cat, so called after the name of one
of the seven legendary sons of _Cruithne_, the eponymous hero who
represented the Picts of Alban, as the whole mainland north of the
Forth was then called, and whose seven sons' names were said to stand
for its seven main divisions,[1] _Cait_ for Caithness and Sutherland,
_Ce_ for Keith or Mar, _Cirig_ for Magh-Circinn or Mearns, _Fib_ for
Fife, _Fidach_ (Woody) for Moray, _Fotla_ for Ath-Fodla or Athol, and
_Fortrenn_ for Menteith.

Immediately to the south of Cat lay the great province of Moray
including Ross, and, in the extreme west, a part of north Argyll; and
the boundary between Cat and Ross was approximately the tidal River
Oykel, called by the Norse Ekkjal, the northern and perhaps also the
southern bank of which probably formed the ranges of hills known in
the time of the earliest Norse jarls as Ekkjals-bakki. Everywhere
else Cat was bounded by the open sea, of which the Norse soon became
masters, namely on the west by the Minch, on the north by the North
Atlantic and Pentland Firth, and on the east and south by the North
Sea; and the great valley of the Oykel and the Dornoch Firth made Cat
almost into an island.

Like Caesar's Gaul, Cat was "divided into three parts"; first, _Ness_,
which was co-extensive with the modern county of Caithness, a treeless
land, excellent in crops and highly cultivated in the north-east, but
elsewhere mainly made up of peat mosses, flagstones and flatness, save
in its western and south-western borderland of hills; secondly, to
the west of Ness, _Strathnavern_, a land of dales and hills, and,
especi