Scotland.
The country where I was born and still live.
I've spent years as an archaeologist
unearthing all sorts of treasures from her past.
For me, it's an ancient and magical place,
and I always find the beauty of this country
overwhelming, even humbling.
I've often thought that Scotland's popular history
is a bit like that landscape - always changing, impossibly romantic,
often hidden by mists and low cloud.
And above all, packed with legends and heroic characters.
But that's not history, it's mythology.
And it's cursed Scotland's past and present.
How we think about the past shapes our view of today,
so I want to look beyond the legends
to find the real story of Scotland, and it's every bit as thrilling.
This first episode is about the birth of Scotland -
a birth that was far from inevitable.
For many centuries, the mountains and lochs behind me
were home to a patchwork of disparate peoples and tongues.
It was a land invaded again and again.
So how was it that a loose collection of tribes
living in the northern third of Britain
came together and built a kingdom
with its own distinct culture and identity -
a kingdom that would change the shape and the destiny of Britain forever?
So, where to begin?
The first people of Scotland to be described in the written record
are the tribes of the Caledonians.
2,000 years ago, they'd joined forces
to defend their homeland from a Roman invasion.
In the shadow of a great glen,
they faced the Roman army.
The Caledonians fell silent.
From their ranks,
out strode the earliest named character of Scottish history.
Calgacus, the "swordsman".
He is the first to speak to us from the past.
Calgacus was the chosen one.
He was the warrior whom the Caledonii tribes of Northern Britain
hoped would lead them to victory.
Defiant, proud, unbowed,
he struck the first blow against Roman tyranny.
He made a speech.
"We, the choicest flower of Britain's manhood,
"were hidden away in her most secret places.
"Out of sight, we were kept from the defilement of tyranny.
"We, the most distant dwellers upon Earth, the last of the free."
There's just one problem.
They're not his words.
They were put into his mouth by a Roman historian, Tacitus,
writing 20 years later.
Even if someone like Calgacus ever existed,
he would have spoken a language similar to Welsh,
and certainly not in the measured Latin phrases of a Roman.
This is where the mythologising of Scottish history starts.
Be warned, almost everything recorded from those early times
is seen through the eyes of others.
Tacitus had an agenda.
General Agricola and his three Roman legions
had marched into north Britain in the late summer of AD 84.
But to make Agricola appear as brave and heroic as possible,
it was important to give him a formidable foe.
Which Tacitus duly did.
At a battle site in the Grampian Mountains,
he described the Roman encounter with the Caledonian hordes
and their fierce leader...Calgacus.
"The fighting began with exchanges of missiles
"and the Britons showed both steadiness and skill
"in parrying our spears with their huge swords, or catching them
"on their little shields while they themselves rained volleys on us."
He called it the Battle of Mons Graupius, though beyond his account,
there's no other record of it ever taking place.
But I think there was a battle in the Scottish Highlands,
because of one telling detail that Tacitus couldn't have invented.
Agricola was given a triumph back in Rome,
the bombastic welcome for a victorious general.
And one other thing we know for certain - the Caledonians lost.
"The next day, an awful silence reigned on every hand.
"The hills were deserted, houses smoking in the distance,
"and our scouts did not meet a soul."
Most of the Caledonians, including Calgacus, survived
and escaped into the trackless mountains.
The Romans failed to tame the elusive warriors of north Britain.
Frustrated by their hit-and-run tactics, the Roman legions withdrew to the south.
By the next century, Hadrian '5 Wall,
built from coast to coast, had become the line in the sand.
To the south lay Romanised Britain - roads, towns, villas.
To the north, a myriad of tribes like the Caledonians.
The wall wasn't just a simple stone boundary,
it was an ideological frontier.
It was the end of the world.
It drew the line where civilisation ended and barbarism began.
Not that the Caledonians were interested in the so-called benefits of Roman rule.
To them, it represented tyranny.
They had their own civilisation.
For over three centuries,
the Caledonians kept their independence secure and the Romans at bay.
Then in AD 409, as the empire collapsed,
they helped expel them from British shores altogether.
The Romans left behind crumbling ruins
and a new name for the Caledonians - the "Pictii".
We know them better as the Picts.
The word means "the painted ones",
for these were the last of the peoples of Britain
to cover their bodies with tattoos.
The term started as a nickname, but came to mean much more,
a powerful northern people, synonymous with pride.
The Picts tattooed themselves with the same designs and symbols
used on their jewellery and stones.
Artistic skills that showed them to be no wild barbarians.
More evidence of early Pictish culture
has come from the peaty waters of Loch Tay.
Here, four metres down,
archaeologists came across the remains of an ancient stronghold,
fragments of a thatched roof and stumps.
They were the stilts of a building that once stood above the water.
A dwelling in which people loved, lived and fought.
By reconstructing the crannog, as it's called,
archaeologists realised just how skilled
and well-organised Pictish society must have been.
- NEIL: How do you build one of these? - WOMAN: We had to learn from scratch,
because obviously we hadn't got a tradition of building like this
handed down to us from generation to generation.
So you've got to line up your supplies,
you've got to know how to cut down the trees, you've got to know
how to get them in the right place,
you've got to have the right manpower and skilled labour workforce.
The people who built crannogs like this were affluent.
They enjoyed a great diet,
probably communicating and trading further afield.
Some of the little objects that we found do not come from here,
such as jet, which is commonly found from Whitby, northeast England.
One of the theories is that it's a big house, this house could sustain
maybe a family of 20, or even up to 40 people.
So maybe if there were times of trouble,
any other people supporting the community
who were living on the shore in less secure housing
could all come in and be secure in what effectively is a water castle.
NEIL: Crannogs have been found all over Scotland,
Many from the Pictish period.
Their civilisation had put down roots.
But then, centuries later, the Picts become the subject
of one of the most intriguing mysteries of Dark Age Europe.
They seem to disappear from history forever.
This vanishing act has given the Picts an aura of romance.
They've become a legendary, almost alien people,
inhabiting a limbo world, part historical and part mythological.
But like any good mystery story, there's a twist.
The Picts seem to disappear
at the exact moment when the kingdom of Scotland is born.
Understanding why the Picts vanished
will give us the answer to how Scotland was created.
Back in the fifth century, this is what Scotland looked like,
a patchwork of disparate ethnic groups.
The Picts dominated the north and east.
Welsh-speaking tribes, called the Britons,
lived along the River Clyde and the south.
And to the west, a new people had arrived, the Gaels.
They were seafarers, originally from Ireland,
who stayed and carved out their own territory.
The Gaels are the other key player in the birth of Scotland.
The turbulent relationship between them and the Picts,
sometimes allied but more often at war, form the backbone of our saga.
Right at the heart of the Gaelic kingdom
was the spectacular hillfort of Dunadd,
rising up out off the great flatness of Moine Mhor, which means "the big bog".
Brooding, menacing, Dunadd provided the perfect site
for defending against attacks from the sea.
This is the entrance to the fort
and once upon a time this place was defended by walls ten metres thick.
It wasn't just one wall.
There was a ring of four, each protecting
the rising tiers of the fort up to a stone citadel at the top.
Though the Gaels were as warlike as the Picts,
there were clear differences.
They had a separate culture and spoke a different language.
And something even more striking.
Gaelic art had a distinctive and delicate beauty all of its own.
At Dunadd, crucibles for melting gold have been unearthed
along with the moulds to cast brooches.
The abundance of such fine jewellery
could mean just one thing - Dunadd was home to the kingdom's elite.
The Gaelic kingdom was run from here
and its kings were inaugurated in this place
in a ceremony that literally married them to the land they ruled.
For the crowds gathered below,
the king would appear in silhouette against the sky,
and then at the appointed moment,
he would place one foot
into this rock-cut footprint,
demonstrating to his subjects
that this land was both
his servant and his master.
It's the end of the sixth century, and this royal inauguration
is unlike any that have gone before.
Although the Picts continue to worship pagan gods,
the Gaels have turned to Christianity, a spiritual invasion
driving a wedge between them.
And the monk who ordains the king?
Columba.
Columba, son of an Irish Chieftain,
had travelled from Ireland ten years earlier.
For his support of the Gaelic leaders, Columba was gifted
a small but very beautiful island to the west of Dunadd.
It's called Iona, and here Columba was to found a monastery.
St Columba is widely credited
as the first missionary to bring Christianity to Scotland.
And from here, on his new base on Iona,
he's supposed to have converted all the peoples of this land
and beyond to the new religion.
But was it really that simple?
What we know about Columba has come down to us
from a later abbot of Iona, Adomnan, who wrote a hagiography entitled
The Life of St Columba about 100 years after his subject died.
His book is more fairytale than history
and it has to be taken with a very large pinch of salt.
(WOMAN SINGS)
The Gaels were Christian long before Columba arrived.
The hard graft had been done by numerous missionaries,
who'd travelled from Ireland and the Roman Empire.
They remain unheralded and largely anonymous.
But Columba's monastery on Iona,
then just a collection of timber huts,
soon became one of the most important Christian beacons
in the whole of Dark Age Europe.
MAN: The stability that he brought to the region,
the fact that Christianity began to spread
quite quickly through Scotland,
I think was testimony to the fact that he had friends in high places.
And he could also convey
to the king and to other clan chiefs
not just that his new religion was important,
but the benefits of it were worth having.
The benefits of writing, this new technology,
the benefits of scholarship, and that if the king embraced this,
then there was something in it for him.
You think the pure ability to write would have been a magic
that would have been central to what they were able to do?
Well, it might have attracted your clan chief.
Yes, OK, here is this guy wanting to talk about the new religion,
but if you've got writing,
if you can articulate in a more permanent way
what you've said or what you've agreed,
you've got the basis of a legal system,
you've got a basis of treaties with neighbouring clans or kingdoms.
You've got a clarity about thought and about what you want.
And again it's about a power thing.
If you say something, here it is, it's in writing.
I don't think it was quite as simple
as simply saying that he was going on a penitential journey.
There was something in it for Columba
but also for the people of this part of the world.
- It sounds so opportunist in a way. - I think it was, I think it was.
Far from being an isolated island on the fringe of Europe,
Iona lay at its spiritual heart.
At its zenith, the monks of Iona created The Book of Kells.
The workmanship was exquisite -
over 10,000 tiny red dots around a single capital letter.
And the dyes came from halfway around the world,
the blue of lapis lazuli from Afghanistan,
yellow orpiment from the Mediterranean.
A 12th-century scholar praised the artistry of the Book of Kells.
He wrote, "You might believe it was the work of an angel
"rather than a human being."
Not everyone was so impressed by the word of God.
While the Gaels had embraced Christianity even before Columba,
their Pictish neighbours had remained resolutely pagan.
They'd put their faith in druids rather than monks
and relied on an oral tradition rather than the written word.
Cue the most famous of Adomnan's tales -
the account of St Columba's epic journey
into the heart of darkness to convert the Picts.
The Picts were notorious for headhunting.
Columba must have known he was risking his.
Undeterred, he made the perilous journey up the Great Glen and Loch Ness
to meet one of the Pictish kings.
Adomnan notes that Columba needed an interpreter even to speak with them.
A battle of supernatural wills followed.
On one side, Columba and his powerful voice,
said to sound like thunder.
In opposition, the druid of the Pictish king.
It proved to be an uneven contest.
Columba brought the druid close to death,
and then, in true Christian fashion, relented.
Adomnan tells us that the druid lived.
What he doesn't make explicit
was that the Picts stubbornly clung to their pagan beliefs.
It would take many decades and many more missionaries
before the Picts would begin to accept Christianity.
The progress of their conversion can be read in their stones.
Some of the best Pictish carvings
have been taken to a research building in Edinburgh.
Here, they're being preserved and studied using the latest technology.
Individual marks in the stone can be isolated, telling us more
about how they were carved, the technique and the tools used.
The symbols on one stone are particularly fascinating
for what they reveal about their changing beliefs.
MAN: You can see how the stone carver
has taken tremendous care, not just in accurate modelling
of the animals,
but the way they're coming out at us in sharp relief as well.
He's done this by working away at the stones to reduce the background
and to bring the figures out into the front.
Just look at this hind here, with the fawn interwoven through the legs.
He didn't have to do that, he made it very difficult for himself
in doing that, but it gives it a little bit of perspective.
This is something they were very skilled at doing
and they obviously took great pleasure in doing it.
- And what about the other side, then? - Well, this is...
NEIL: This carver didn't confine his work to the secular.
He also demonstrated his love of God.
PETER: This is, really... to my mind, this is the front.
The cross, representing the embodiment of Christ, the promise of salvation.
It's the key, central messages of Christianity being broadcast.
So we have this wonderful interlaced decoration
filling the body of the cross.
How unusual is it to get a stone that has everything in one package?
You know, there's the classic Pictish symbols,
the hunting scenes and all the rest, and the cross.
PETER: By this period, we're getting to the later Pictish period,
we've had maybe three or even four generations of large-scale conversion
to Christianity by this time.
Christianity was reasonably well embedded,
so we do see this quite happy combination of,
yes, the pure, central message of Christianity in the cross,
coupled with the everyday scenes, with the animal scenes,
with the images of people and symbols as well, of course.
Christianity was the one invader
that not only succeeded, but that outstayed all the others.
The Gaelic religion now spanned northern Britain and acted as glue,
bringing together disparate peoples
Under the umbrella of the Christian religion.
St Columba's biographer, Adomnan, spotted an opportunity.
He succeeded in winning agreement from over 50 kings from Pictland to Ireland
for an ambitious new law called the Law of the Innocents.
It was a Geneva Convention for the Dark Ages,
protecting women, children and monks in times of war.
"Women may not be killed by a man in any way,
"neither by slaughter nor by any other death.
"Nor by poison, nor in water, nor in fire, nor by any beast,
”nor in a pit, nor by dogs, but shall die in their own [awful bed. ”
Life remained nasty, brutish and short, but Adomnan's rules on warfare
were proof of the civilising influence of Christianity.
For the first time,
the Picts had embraced written laws within their society.
The Pictish tribes had it all.
A sophisticated culture, powerful trade links
and the breadbasket of north Britain.
Their fertile, low-lying homeland provided better harvests
and more fighting men, but it also attracted the attention of others.
By this time, the Angles dominated middle Britain.
They were a Germanic people who'd carved out a powerful kingdom
between the Humber and Forth rivers.
But now the Angles decided to push north.
Rather than confront them immediately,
the Pictish army drew the Angles further and further into hostile territory.
The two forces clashed at Dun Nechtain, along the River Spey.
The battle is commemorated here on this Pictish stone.
It's a sort of Bayeux Tapestry.
The fight was between bare-headed, long-haired Pictish warriors
and Angles wearing distinctive metal helmets.
It was a one-sided encounter.
The ranks of Pictish spearmen
drove the Angles into a loch and slaughtered them.
The final relief shows a raven
pecking at the dead face of a fallen prince of the Angles.
To defeat this new enemy from the south,
the Pictish tribes had been forced to unite
under the leadership of one king.
The confederation also had a new name - Pictland.
By pinpointing the location of all the Pictish stones,
it's possible to map out the territory of this young kingdom.
The Picts had successfully driven the Angles back south,
and one by one, they defeated their other neighbours.
In the west, both the Britons and the Gaels were overwhelmed.
Although they retained their identity,
they were forced to pay homage to the Pictish king.
By the middle of the 8th century,
Pictland was the dominant kingdom of northern Britain.
It seemed invincible.
But the next wave of aggressors was a league apart,
warriors with no time for Christian niceties.
They worshipped the gods of war - Odin and Thor.
There's a trend among some modern historians to portray the Vikings
as a misunderstood bunch.
Instead of bloodthirsty killers,
think peaceful traders and farmers in search of new lands to colonise.
But I don't think so. Not all of them, and certainly not all the time.
Accounts by British survivors of Viking attacks are unequivocal.
These guys were after treasure and slaves.
"The pagans came with a naval force to Britain
"and, spread on all sides like direwolves, robbed, tore and slaughtered
"not only beasts of burden, sheep and oxen,
"but even priests and deacons,
”and companies of monks and nuns. ”
That description was a contemporary account of a Viking attack
on a monastery in England.
But the Vikings weren't choosy.
They went wherever the treasure was.
Although the monastery here on Iona was looted on three separate occasions,
it was the northern isles that bore the brunt.
There's a treasure trove from AD 800 that tells its own story.
These beautiful Pictish bowls and brooches were found under the floor
of a medieval church on St Ninian's Isle in Shetland.
Archaeologists believe that monks probably buried the silver in haste
to hide it from a Viking raid.
That no-one returned to retrieve them
is a sobering clue to what befell the monks.
Vikings shipped their captives back to Scandinavia
and then on to Constantinople,
where the slaves were exchanged for silver.
As the Vikings' grip tightened, there were fewer smash-and-grab raids.
They came to stay.
They colonised parts of Ireland, Northumbria,
and further north, the Hebrides and the territory of the Gaels.
On Orkney and Shetland,
it's believed they exterminated the Pictish men.
This was ethnic cleansing, 9th-century style.
Many of Shetland's inhabitants are proud descendants of the Vikings.
At an annual boat-burning ritual called Up Helly Aa,
they still celebrate their bloody heritage.
This is what people living in Shetland today like to imagine
their Viking ancestors looked like - fire-wielding pagan barbarians.
And if you believe the words of the Viking sagas,
it's clear to see where they got that impression.
But take away the air of celebration and the pageantry,
and consider the horror of waking up one morning
and watching this howling horde unload themselves
from their dragon-headed longships
onto the beach below your little stone cottage.
This is what the end of the world looks like.
This is the end of everything you've ever known or held clear,
unless of course, somebody somewhere can find a way to stop it.
In rides Kenneth MacAlpin.
He's one of Scottish history's great heroes,
the champion who in AD 840
is supposed to have driven off the Vikings.
This brave war leader appears to come from nowhere,
stepping into the power vacuum
created after the existing royal line is massacred by the Vikings.
So it is that Kenneth MacAlpin unifies Scotland
and is famously crowned her first king.
If only history was that simple.
The idea that Kenneth MacAlpin was the first king of Scotland is a myth
that's persisted for centuries
and it's certainly one I remember hearing at school as a wee boy.
But the historical records tell a different story.
At the time of Kenneth MacAlpin, Scotland did not exist.
It remained five separate peoples -
the Angles, the Vikings,
the Gaels, the Britons
and the Picts.
Each retained their own distinctive culture.
What is more, records tell us that Kenneth MacAlpin
and his immediate successors
were described as kings of Pictland, not Scotland.
It's not until 40 years after Kenneth died
that we find the first mention of the kings of Scotland.
So how did we get from Pictland to Scotland?
There's one document that reveals the secret.
It's one of the most precious manuscripts of Scottish history
and it's the only contemporary Scottish chronicle that covers the period.
Historians feel that much of the document can be trusted
because it can be cross-referenced with chronicles from other kingdoms.
I'd expected to find it in an archive in Scotland...
...but I was wrong.
Why is the manuscript here in Paris?
(SPEAKS FRENCH)
The archivist Madame Laffitte told me
that a French courtier brought a collection
of important historical papers back from London in the 17th century.
Is it widely known that the manuscript is here?
(SPEAKS IN FRENCH)
TRANSLATOR: It's not very well known - only people who come
and search for this topic matter specifically come.
She says it's even been put on slides so that people can look at it.
I see.
What are the chances of it going to Scotland?
MADAME LAFFITTE: Oh, absolutely no!
The Chronicle is basically a list, a list of 12 kings of the House of Alpin
from the 9th to the 11th centuries.
It's a complex document because it's been compiled
and copied and added to over the years by several unknown hands.
It's important because it covers the moment of transition,
the ten or so years from 878 to 889
when all references to Pictland disappear
and the kingdom of Scotland appears.
This is Scotland's lost decade.
Look at these two names - Aed, and Giricium or Giric.
These characters are going to be key to the formation of Scotland.
Aed was Kenneth MacAlpin's youngest son.
He'd inherited a kingdom in crisis.
At the point he became king, the Vikings conquered Pictland.
For two years, they took cattle, slaves and tribute.
Aed did little to stop them.
When there was no more booty to be had, the Vikings moved on.
Aed's kingdom lay in ruins.
The writer of the Paris Chronicle described his short reign
as bequeathing "nothing memorable to history".
A damning indictment indeed.
So, no surprise then, when his own followers took action.
This is where Giric comes into the story.
Giric was one of a number of Gaelic refugees who'd fled from the Vikings
and headed east into Pictland.
Now he'd climbed his way up into Aed '5 favour.
Giric was not of royal stock,
but what he lacked in blue blood, he made up for in ambition.
Events come to a head at a sacred site in Perthshire.
The year is 878.
Aed is slain by his own henchmen.
All the evidence points to Giric as the killer.
Giric was on the make. His goal?
The takeover of the Pictish kingdom.
And if that meant taking out the useless Aed, then so be it.
Giric instigated a regime change.
He rid the court of his Pictish rivals and replaced them with his own men.
Then he took control of the Pictish Church
by appointing a Gaelic bishop to reform it.
This was a coup. Giric, a Gael,
was turning the Kingdom of the Picts into a Gaelic kingdom.
To reinforce his political takeover,
he rewarded his Gaelic followers with Pictish land.
But Giric's position was far from secure.
Although he'd eliminated Aed,
the two legitimate heirs, Aed's six-year-old son Constantine
and his teenage cousin Donald, still lived.
Giric knew his kingship was unsafe
while the two young boys remained potential rivals.
But Constantine and Donald were far beyond the reach of Giric.
Their protectors had escorted them safely to Fort Ailech
in the north of Ireland.
It might seem strange
to send two Pictish princes to a Gaelic country like Ireland,
especially given Giric's Gaelic connections,
but they met a warm welcome at Ailech from their aunt.
She was married to a powerful Irish king, and for her,
this was a matter not of politics, but of kin.
They grew up in the royal household.
It was a Gaelic court
and they became steeped in its culture and language.
They were educated at a nearby monastery
and attended the Gaelic church.
Too young to challenge Giric, too young to be King of the Picts,
the changes taking place in their homeland
must have felt like a world away to the cousins.
But as each year passed and adulthood approached,
the moment to avenge the murder of Constantine's father edged ever closer.
In the year 889, after a decade in exile,
the two cousins were finally old enough to challenge Giric.
Donald and Constantine sailed homeward.
Revenge was in their hearts.
To win back their kingdom, they knew they'd have to depose the usurper.
Giric had seen it coming. So had his supporters.
He fled to his stronghold here at Dundurn, in Perthshire.
In its day, this was a mighty hillfort with huge fortifications.
But not enough to deter the cousins.
The Chronicle tells of an eclipse,
an ill omen of the times.
Typically, the historical records are vague about what happened next.
One chronicle reveals, "In Dundurn the upright man was taken by death."
Archaeological evidence suggests a more violent end for Giric.
Burnt timbers and arrowheads were found here at Dundurn
and it's tempting to imagine that Giric died here in that moment,
killed by Donald and Constantine.
The kingdom was at a crossroads. It could have gone either way -
Pictish, or Gaelic.
Culture, language and Church.
Everything was at stake.
The Picts must have expected Donald and Constantine
to reverse the Gaelic takeover.
After all, Giric's rule had lasted just ten years.
But the royal heirs had changed.
Donald and Constantine left as Pictish boys.
They returned as Gaelic princes.
Now Donald and Constantine
viewed their homeland through different eyes.
The Chronicle of the Kings shows us which way the wind is blowing.
This word here is "Albaniam", a Gaelic word meaning Scotland,
a brand-new name for the kingdom and of immense significance.
With this one word, right here, Scotland is created.
This is Scotland's birth certificate.
This crucial transitional moment is backed up by the chronicle from Ireland.
In the year 900, it has an entry recording Donald's death.
He is King of Alba - the first king ever to be described as such.
And he's followed by Constantine,
also described as a Scottish king.
Scotland became a Gaelic kingdom.
Over the next few generations,
the Pictish way of life, the way they practised their religion,
the stone carvings, and even their language fell out of favour.
Gaelic was the new language of power.
There was no sudden genocide,
but the cultural takeover was just as complete.
In 906, Constantine arrived in Scone near Perth
for an important new ceremony.
"Scone" is a Gaelic word
and what happened here would form the basis of all future coronations.
Blessed by a Gaelic bishop, Constantine sat on a block of stone.
It no doubt harked back to the footprint ceremony of Dunadd from long before.
It's better known as the Stone of Destiny.
For centuries afterwards, and right up to the present day,
it's been used in the inauguration of monarchs.
Now, the original is on display in Edinburgh Castle.
It's just a simple block of red sandstone
and yet it's been fought over, mythologised and romanticised,
and it will crop up again and again in Scotland's story.
Although Constantine now appeared to hold sway over most of north Britain,
the young kingdom's survival was touch and go from the outset.
For just as Scotland was forming, another power bloc to the south
had come of age at almost exactly the same time.
This kingdom would prove to be Scotland's most persistent foe of all.
Angle-land was ruled by an Anglo-Saxon king called Athelstan.
He'd driven the Vikings out of Northumbria
and by incorporating this territory, had secured a new northern boundary.
But Angle-land, or England as it became known,
was not enough for Athelstan.
Admirer of the Romans, he aspired to rule the whole of Britain.
He decided to carry on where the Romans left off.
He marched north.
Like Calgacus nearly 900 years before, Constantine faced a stark choice.
Tackle Athelstan in battle and risk annihilation,
or surrender the kingship of Scotland.
Neither outcome was acceptable, but Constantine came up with a third option.
And this is it, the awesome rock fortress of Dunnottar.
Here, Constantine and his war band were hemmed in.
But Athelstan couldn't capture the stronghold itself,
and so he and Constantine came to terms.
Constantine could keep his status as King of Scotland,
but Athelstan would be his overlord.
In agreeing to this, Constantine saved Scotland and his own neck,
but to the young, aspiring leaders at his court, he'd sold out.
So, the next time Athelstan commanded him to submit, he refused to obey.
Subservience wasn't Constantine's style,
particularly when both he and the young kingdom of Scots had come so far.
What he did next would have been unthinkable
a few decades previously - he made peace with the pagan Vikings.
Partly motivated by a sense of "united we stand, divided we fall",
more importantly, the Viking king had lost territories to Athelstan
and he wanted them back.
Together they forged a northern alliance
and in 937, Constantine headed south for a decisive confrontation.
At stake was the very future of the island of Britain.
On one side advanced Athelstan, the Anglo-Saxon ruler of all England.
On the other, the northern alliance.
The king of the Britons, the king of the Vikings from across the Irish Sea,
and the king of Scotland, Constantine.
The many armies, tens of thousands of warriors,
clashed at a site known as Brunanburh, where the Mersey estuary enters the sea.
For decades afterwards it was simply called The Great Battle.
This was the mother of all Dark Age bloodbaths
and would define the shape of Britain into the modern era.
An Anglo-Saxon account of the battle reads, "They clove the shield-wall,
"hewed the war-lindens with hammered blades - the foe fell back -
"the folk of the Scots and the ship-fleet fell death-doomed.
"The field was slippery with the blood of warriors.
"The West Saxons, in companies, hewed the fugitives from behind,
"cruelly with swords mill-sharpened."
The fighting went on from dawn until dusk.
When it was over, the field was littered with the dead and the dying,
picked over by wolves and Carrion crows.
Vikings, Saxons, Britons and Welshmen, Gaels from Ireland,
Northumbrians, even Icelanders.
Amid the corpses of the men of Scotland was Constantine's eldest son.
All slain to settle the matter of Britain.
Although Athelstan emerged victorious,
the resistance of the northern alliance
had put an end to his dream of conquering the whole of Britain.
Constantine, meanwhile, escaped back to his homeland
with the remains of his battered army.
This had been a battle for Britain.
One of the most important battles in British history, comparable to Hastings.
Yet today, few people have even heard of it.
937 doesn't quite have the ring of 1066,
and yet Brunanburh was about much more than just blood and conquest.
This was a showdown between two very different ethnic identities -
a Norse-Celtic alliance versus Anglo-Saxon.
It aimed to settle once and for all
whether Britain would be controlled by a single imperial power
or remain several separate independent kingdoms,
a split in perceptions, which, like it or not, is still with us today.
And as for King Constantine?
From exile to Ireland as a young boy,
the murder of Giric at Dundurn,
his crowning at Scone,
his short subservience to the English king,
the battle of Brunanburh and the saving of Scotland,
there was much for the battle-scarred warrior to reflect upon.
Kenneth MacAlpin founded the Scottish royal line
as an opportunistic Pictish warlord,
but it was his grandson Constantine who secured the kingdom,
and, during his long reign of 43 years, ensured its survival.
Scotland stands as testament to Constantine's political astuteness
and staying power.
And then, remarkably, he relinquished his kingship.
In an age characterised by brutal murders and takeovers, he retired.
(CHOIR SINGS)
Religion had always played an important part in his life as king.
Now Constantine, sharing the name of the Roman emperor
who'd first embraced Christianity, moved it centre stage.
St Andrews had become the religious capital of his new kingdom,
and so he came here in AD 943,
just six years after the greatest battle of his life.
He ended his days leading a humble, almost hermit-like existence,
in a cave near St Andrews, as a holy man.
And what of the Picts?
An English historian, the Archdeacon of Huntingdon,
writing just 200 years later in 1140,
commented that, "we see that the Picts have now been wiped out,
"and their language also is totally destroyed,
"so that they seem to be a fable we find mentioned in old writings."
The Archdeacon was wrong.
As we've seen all along,
so much of these early years was seen through the eyes of others.
The Picts weren't wiped out. With the Gaels, they fused together
in the fires of adversity and rebranded themselves as Scots.
The hybrid kingdom of Alba was now home to a restless people,
and as for the fully formed country we would recognise as "Scotland",
the story had only just begun.