Atholl or Athole (Scottish Gaelic : Athall; Old Gaelic Athfhotla) is a large historical division in the Scottish Highlands, bordering (in anti-clockwise order, from Northeast) Marr, Badenoch, Lochaber, Breadalbane, Strathearn, Perth, and Gowrie. Historically it was a Pictish kingdom, becoming one of the original provinces of the Kingdom of Alba before being incorporated into the sheriffdom and later county of Perthshire. Today it forms the northern part of Perth and Kinross, Scotland. [1]
In Scottish Gaelic the name is Athall, which traditionally has been interpreted as deriving from the Old Irish Ath-fhotla, or 'New Ireland' ( Fotla being a traditional name for Ireland). The explanation given for this relates to the Gaelic settlement of Scotland, which was previously inhabited by the Picts.
James E. Fraser has called the 'New Ireland' interpretation into question. On the basis of the early spelling Athochlach, the first element has been proposed as representing ath, meaning 'ford, way through', and the second fochla, 'north', thus giving a full meaning 'way to the north' (exactly as in the English name for Norway). Ath-fochla may have represented a Gaelic equivalent of a Pictish name (c.f. Welsh Ad[wy] Gogledd). [2]
The first documented record of Atholl is an 8th-century mention in the Annals of Ulster , [3] but three placenames in Atholl – the town of Dunkeld and the mountains Schiehallion and Rohallion – preserve the name of the Caledonians, a tribe or tribal confederation recorded by Roman writers including Tacitus and Cassius Dio. [4]
Atholl is listed in the 9th century poem Seven Children of Cruithne and the longer Pictish King Lists as one of the seven Pictish territories founded by eponymous children of the mythical Pictish founder Cruithne son of Cinge. [5] Atholl is the only one of these territories, apart from the dominant northern kingdom of Fortriu, to be historically documented as having its own king. [3] The Northumbrian Bede, writing in the early 8th century, described how the Picts were divided by the Mounth and the Grampian Mountains into northern and southern groupings, with the southern Picts having their "seats among the mountains". [6] It is therefore possible that Atholl was the dominant royal region of the southern Picts, as Fortriu was in the north, before coming firmly under the grip of Fortriu during the 8th century Verturian Hegemony. [6]
Atholl emerged as one of the core provinces of the early Kingdom of Alba. [7] The first known Mormaer of Atholl was Dubdon of Atholl, recorded in the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba as having been killed during the battle between King Dub and his challenger Cuilén at Dorsum Crup in 965. [8]
The first recorded Earl of Atholl was Matad, Earl of Atholl sometime in the 12th century. In 1703 the title was made a Dukedom by Queen Anne. The title also holds numerous subsidiary titles. These include: Marquess of Atholl (created 1676), Marquess of Tullibardine (1703), Earl of Atholl (1629), Earl of Tullibardine (1606 and 1676), Earl of Strathtay and Strathardle (1703), Viscount of Balquhidder (1676), Lord Murray of Tullibardine (1604), Lord Murray, Balvenie and Gask (1676) and Baron Percy (1722). The Barony of Percy forms part of the peerage of Great Britain; all other titles belong in the peerage of Scotland.
The right of the Earls of Atholl to hold courts for the area were ended in 1746 by the Heritable Jurisdictions Act, and the province was subsequently only subject to the jurisdiction of the sheriff of Perth. In the mid 19th century, local government reforms replaced the ancient provinces by new Counties (shires), aligned to sheriffdom boundaries; hence, Atholl formed the northern portion of the new Perthshire.
Towns and villages in Atholl include Aberfeldy, Ballinluig, Blair Atholl, Dunkeld, Kirkmichael, Logierait, Pitlochry and Weem.
Causantín mac Cináeda was a king of the Picts. He is often known as Constantine I in reference to his place in modern lists of Scottish monarchs, but contemporary sources described Causantín only as a Pictish king. A son of Cináed mac Ailpín, he succeeded his uncle Domnall mac Ailpín as Pictish king following the latter's death on 13 April 862. It is likely that Causantín's reign witnessed increased activity by Vikings, based in Ireland, Northumbria and northern Britain. He died fighting one such invasion.
Causantín mac Áeda was an early King of Scotland, known then by the Gaelic name Alba. The Kingdom of Alba, a name which first appears in Constantine's lifetime, was situated in modern-day Northern Scotland.
Kenneth MacAlpin or Kenneth I was King of Dál Riada (841–850), and King of the Picts (843–858) of likely Gaelic origin. He inherited the throne of Dál Riada from his father Alpín mac Echdach, founder of the Alpínid dynasty. Kenneth I conquered the kingdom of the Picts in 843–850 and began a campaign to seize all of Scotland and assimilate the Picts, for which he was posthumously nicknamed An Ferbasach. He fought the Britons of the Kingdom of Strathclyde and the invading Vikings from Scandinavia. Forteviot became the capital of his kingdom and Kenneth relocated relics, including the Stone of Scone from an abandoned abbey on Iona, to his new domain.
The Picts were a group of peoples who lived on Great Britain north of the Forth–Clyde isthmus in the Pre-Viking, Early Middle Ages. Where they lived and details of their culture can be inferred from early medieval texts and Pictish stones. The term Picti appears in written records as an exonym from the late third century AD, but was adopted as an endonym in the late seventh century during the Verturian hegemony. This lasted around 160 years until the succession of the Alpínid dynasty, when the Pictish kingdom merged with that of Dál Riata to form the Kingdom of Alba. The concept of "Pictish kingship" continued for a few decades until it was abandoned entirely as a contemporary signifier during the reign of Caustantín mac Áeda.
Óengus mac Fergusa was king of the Picts from 820 until 834. In Scottish historiography, he is associated with the veneration of Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland. Although, this has not been proven.
Causantín or Constantín mac Fergusa was king of the Picts, in modern Scotland, from 789 until 820. He was until the Victorian era sometimes counted as Constantine I of Scotland; the title is now generally given to Causantín mac Cináeda. He is credited with having founded the church at Dunkeld which later received relics of St Columba from Iona.
Pictish is an extinct Brittonic Celtic language spoken by the Picts, the people of eastern and northern Scotland from Late antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. Virtually no direct attestations of Pictish remain, short of a limited number of geographical and personal names found on monuments and early medieval records in the area controlled by the kingdoms of the Picts. Such evidence, however, shows the language to be one of the Insular Celtic languages related to the Brittonic language then spoken in most of the rest of Britain.
The Mormaer or Earl of Atholl was the title of the holder of a medieval comital lordship straddling the highland province of Atholl, now in northern Perthshire. Atholl is a special Mormaerdom, because a King of Atholl is reported from the Pictish period. The only other two Pictish kingdoms to be known from contemporary sources are Fortriu and Circinn. Indeed, the early 13th century document known to modern scholars as the de Situ Albanie repeats the claim that Atholl was an ancient Pictish kingdom. In the 11th century, the famous Crínán of Dunkeld may have performed the role of Mormaer.
Óengus son of Fergus was king of the Picts from 732 until his death in 761. His reign can be reconstructed in some detail from a variety of sources. The unprecedented territorial gains he made from coast to coast, and the legacy he left, mean Óengus can be considered the first king of what would become Scotland.
John Murray, 1st Marquess of Atholl, KT was a leading Scottish royalist and defender of the Stuarts during the English Civil War of the 1640s, until after the rise to power of William and Mary in 1689. He succeeded as 2nd Earl of Atholl on his father's demise in June 1642 and as 3rd Earl of Tullibardine after the death of his first cousin the 2nd Earl in 1670.
De Situ Albanie is the name given to the first of seven Scottish documents found in the so-called Poppleton Manuscript, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. It was probably written sometime between 1202 and 1214, in the reign of the William the Lion, by a French-speaking resident of Scotland, as an introduction to the compilation.
Moray was a province within the area of modern-day Scotland, that may at times up to the 12th century have operated as an independent kingdom or as a power base for competing claimants to the Kingdom of Alba. It covered a much larger territory than the modern council area of Moray, extending approximately from the River Spey in the east to the River Beauly in the north, and encompassing Badenoch, Lochaber and Glenelg in the south and west.
Fortriu was a Pictish kingdom recorded between the 4th and 10th centuries. It was traditionally believed to be located in and around Strathearn in central Scotland, but is more likely to have been based in the north, in the Moray and Easter Ross area. Fortriu is a term used by historians as it is not known what name its people used to refer to their polity. Historians also sometimes use the name synonymously with Pictland in general.
Uuen son of Onuist, commonly referred to by the hypocoristic Eóganán, was king of the Picts between AD 837–839.
The origins of the Kingdom of Alba pertain to the origins of the Kingdom of Alba, or the Gaelic Kingdom of Scotland, either as a mythological event or a historical process, during the Early Middle Ages.
Gowrie is a region in central Scotland and one of the original provinces of the Kingdom of Alba. It covered the eastern part of what became Perthshire. It was located to the immediate east of Atholl, and originally included the area around Perth, though that was later detached as Perthia.
Cé was a Pictish territory recorded during the Early Medieval period and located in the area of modern-day Aberdeenshire, Scotland.
The Provinces of Scotland were the primary subdivisions of the early Kingdom of Alba, first recorded in the 10th century and probably developing from earlier Pictish territories. Provinces were led by a mormaer, the leader of the most powerful provincial kin-group, and had military, fiscal and judicial functions. Their high degree of local autonomy made them important regional powerbases for competing claimants to the throne of Alba.
Seven Children of Cruithne is a quatrain written in Old Irish that forms the earliest known record of one of the origin myths of the Picts. In this myth, the Pictish kingdom's legendary founder Cruithne divides his territory into seven districts for each of his seven sons, each of which succeed him sequentially in ruling the entire kingdom.
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