I was researching the enigmatic world of the Picts for my next novel when I came across this striking face. It is the face of a Pict who lived at the end of the Iron Age during the first millennia in northern Scotland.
The face has been reconstructed by the University of Dundee from a skeleton found in a cave at Rosemarkie, in Ross-shire, Scotland. The skeleton tells us that the man did not die peacefully but was brutally killed by severe blows to his head. Questions remain as to whether or not this was murder or ritualistic killing. What we do know is that our Pict was a well-built man with a powerful upper body. The cave he was found in had been used by ancient iron workers.
The finding has raised more questions than answers. I have heard the theories. The Romans gave their subjective and condescending description – that the Picts were little more than blue-painted barbarians. That is certainly the way they are often described in contemporary literature and media (the TV series Brittania and novel, The Eagle of the Ninth, for example).
Bede the scholarly monk wrote about the Picts’ distinctive language in his Historia Ecclesiastica.
Recent research by the University of Aberdeen is uncovering much more about their culture and living arrangements. They were a warrior culture who embraced Christianity during its early days in Britain. Picts were also builders of monasteries and vast forts, makers of religious books and ecclesiastical objects, sailors, and cultivators of large farms (barley corn and wheat, for example). They ran herds of livestock – cattle and sheep. It is clear Picts had a rich spiritual life, as attested to by their complex engravings on standing stones, and they also traded with other communities. They had their own kings. The title character in Shakespeare’s Macbeth is loosely based on one of them.
The man with the striking face had a high protein diet, and there is also scientific evidence that he was not a manual labourer. Some researchers speculate that our Pict could be of royal blood. He was placed in the cave with some consideration, a cave which could have been considered as an entrance to the underworld.
It has been a fascinating experience allowing the evidence and my imagination to place me in the Pictish world and to experience a novel unfolding. I will notify you of the publication date when I have it.
© Mhairead MacLeod 2026