rantee and his heirs
by metes and bounds, in return for specified military service, and his
heirs male were exhausted before any female could inherit.

In Ness and in the rest of Cat there were many Norse and native
holders of land within the earldom, and much tribal ownership. Duncan
of Duncansby or Dungall of Dungallsby, as he is variously called,
allowed part at least of his dominions to pass by marriage to the
Norse jarls; but both Moddan and Earl Ottar, whose heir was Earl
Erlend Haraldson, who left no heir, owned land extensively in Ness and
elsewhere, while Moddan "in Dale" had daughters also owning land, one
of whom, Frakark, widow of Liot Nidingr, had many homesteads in upper
Kildonan in Sudrland and elsewhere, and possibly it is her sister
Helga's name that lingers in a place-name lower down that strath near
Helmsdale, at Helgarie.

What is worthy of notice is that it is clear from the place-names that
after the Norse conquest the Norse held and named most of the lower or
seaward parts of the valleys and nearly all the coast lands of Cat and
Ross as far south as the Beauly Firth, and the Picts occupied and were
never dispossessed of the upper parts of the valleys or the hills all
through the Norse occupation. In other words, as conquerors coming
from the sea, the Norsemen seized and held the better Pictish lands
near the coast, which had been cultivated for centuries, and on which
crops would ripen with regularity and certainty year after year. But
as time went on the Pictish Maormor pressed the Norse Jarl more and
more outwards and eastwards in Cat.

We must also remember the enormous power of the Scottish Crown through
its right of granting wardships, especially in the case of a female
heir. Under such grants the grantee, usually some very powerful noble,
took over during minority the title of his ward and all his revenues
absolutely, in return for a payment, correspondingly large, to the
Crown. If the ward was a female, the grantee disposed of her hand in
marriage as well.

After these preliminary notes, we may now again glance at the Scots,
who were destined, from small beginnings, by a series of strange turns
of fortune and superior state-craft, in time to conquer and dominate
all modern Scotland north of the Forth, then known as Alban.

The Scots, as already stated, had come over from Ulster and settled in
Cantyre about the end of the fifth century, and for long they had only
the small Dalriadic te