A subject I have returned to several times during the lifetime of this blog is the unresolved question of how Irish was the region now know as Angus during the Pictish period, prior to the 9th century.
There are a few tantalising clues, but the facts about the Irish in the area compete hard against the unproven legends and neither side seems to win out completely against the other. Why do we know about the Irish presence in our region? Angus the county, of course, bears a conspicuously Irish name, being named (probably) either after the king Angus mac Fergus or the people known as the Cenél nÓengusa. The mists of time have obscured all certainty about either of these theories. There are tales too that the great Irish warlord Nath-I fought in the province of Circinn (the Pictish name for Angus and the Mearns), though what he was doing here is unknown. Elsewhere I have written about the tale of the Irish hero driven out from his own land and who created a dynasty in the land of the Picts. His name was Conall Corc.
The above stories took place in the twilight just before the advent of written history. Closer to true history perhaps are the events which took place in the late 6th century. I looked at these details again during research for my forthcoming book on the fierce warlord Áedán mac Gabráin, king of Dál Riata. (Available from Pen & Sword.)
One of this king's known battles happened in Circenn, though we are wholly lacking any details about it. Further confusion involves the mention of a battle he fought against a presumably Pictish people or confederation known as the Miathi, which occurs in the Life of St Columba. This tribe was known to have been active in the area around Stirling, known as Manau, several hundred years earlier.
Confusion abounds. Did they migrate north to Angus? Have all these battles been confused, or were they military skirmishes which happened as a prolonged campaign by the Scots of the west against the southern Picts? We can't know for sure. What did Áedán himself want in this region? From what we know of his other campaigns, he was not a ruler who primarily sought to expand his territory. However, he may have given his blessing to campaigns which were waged by his sons. One of his sons was named Gartnait and it has been convincingly argued that he was a king of the Picts. Áedán may have married a royal Pictish woman which gave Gartnait a claim to territory in the east. The historian W.J. Watson, in his classic work History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland (1926), speculated that Áedán was the son of a woman whose father was the legendary hero named Brachan, who gave his name to Brechin in Angus. To bolster this claim, he derived the name of Gowrie, the area immediately to the west of Angus, from Áedán's father.
