Seeking info about 7th century Picts, specifically Talorc III

If you're already part-way through an enterprise of such ambition, I imagine that you're aware that our knowledge of Pictland in this period is, to put it mildly, hazy. No single native Pictish chronicle or history has survived, which means that our knowledge of the inhabitants of much of Scotland in this period depends very largely on a combination of archaeological discoveries (which, by their very nature, are largely unhelpful when it comes to establishing things such as definitive geographies and chronologies) and the few details available to us in a few disconnected lines from Irish manuscripts and an occasional entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, together with some medieval poetry. All of these written references date to at least a few decades, and often many centuries, after the fact. Talorc, the ruler in whom you're interested, is essentially nothing more to us now than a name on a king-list; we know nothing of either his character or his reign. As for Pictland, the most that non-specialists in the period generally think they understand comes from Bede's reference to a people divided into two main groups: St Columba, in the Ecclesiastical History, went to "preach the word of God in the lands of the Northern Picts," which "are by steep and rugged mountain separated from their southern regions" – suggesting what's become a generally familiar early medieval geography in which the northern Pictish people inhabited what are now the Scottish highlands, while their southern brethren lived in central Scotland alongside the British kingdom long centred on Strathclyde and the Gaels of Dál Riata in Argyll.

Thanks to some important developments in the historiography of the Picts over the past two decades, however, it is now possible to say something worthwhile and fundamentally new in connection with the Pictish geography you're enquiring about, as well as about the Picts' relationship with the Northumbrians. In the former case, the key paper that you ought to be interested in is Alex Woolf's highly influential redrawing of the Pictish kingdoms in an article for the Scottish Historical Review published in 2006. Woolf's chief interest in this work is not the old, crude division of the Picts into northern and southern branches, but rather a finer-grained enquiry into the location of the most important kingdom of this period, a polity referred to in the sources as "Fortriu", which he refers to as "the core territory of Pictavia" and relocates from the lowland location suggested by earlier generations of historians to the vicinity of modern Inverness. Since Woolf wrote, Noble has added the important suggestion that Fortriu was likely centred on a hill-fort stronghold known as Craig Phadrig, which is a little to the west of Inverness. All this, I think, makes Fortriu the most likely location for the Pictish kingdom you are imagining, and the vitrified fort at Craig Phadrig the best candidate for the royal "seat" you are interested in, so it seems well worth recapping Woolf's arguments for you here.

Fortriu, to begin with, remains almost entirely unknown to us. Woolf counts a total of 13 passing references to this name and to its main variants in the Irish chronicle-record, the first of which dates to 664. Almost all of these references are mere notes of the accession or deaths or kings who are described as rex Fortreinn or Fortrenn.

Woolf begins his account with some historiography. He makes the very important point that Fortriu was first located, using place-name evidence, by W.F. Skene in his Chronicles of the Picts (1867). For Skene, it was a state whose name was best associated with medieval "Fothrif" (Fife) and hence with our modern "Forth". The result of all this was that Skene placed Fortriu in Menteith, in southern Scotland – and, over the years, this identification became pretty much set in stone even though closer reading of the evidence suggests some significant problems with it. Woolf goes over all of this forensically, and in the main body of his paper persuasively suggests that Skene's identification is wrong, and that Fortriu should be relocated about a hundred miles further to the north, to the southern shores of the Moray Firth. His identification has since been generally accepted by historians of this period.

If we review Woolf's argument for relocating Fortriu, we can see that it has three main planks. The first is art-historical, and draws on Isabel Henderson's 1958 argument that the focal point of the highly distinctive Pictish sculptural tradition can be located somewhere around the head of the Moray Firth. The second is tied to the location of the most significant battle of this period, one that I expect you are already quite familiar with: the Battle of Nechtansmere, fought between the Picts and the invading Northumbrians in 685, which resulted in a decisive Pictish victory, the death of the Northumbrian king Ecgfrith, and the temporary collapse of his powerful kingdom.

The battle-site of Nechtansmere was long identified, again by place-name evidence, as Dunnichen in Angus, in the Scottish lowlands, but Woolf astutely points out that this location, which is characterised by gently rolling low hills, is an incredibly poor fit for the spot mentioned by Bede, in which the Picts were able to hide an entire army from their opponents in "some narrow passes in the midst of inaccessible mountains". Woolf instead points to a second place-name clearly associated with the contemporary term "Dún Nechtain": Dunachton in Inverness-shire, which lies in the Mondah Ruadh mountain range, south of Loch Ness. I included photos of these two locations in an essay that I wrote on Nechtansmere a few years ago that you might like to review – looking at those, it's hard to imagine that Woolf is not right about the correct location of this battle, and that Ecgfrith and his Northumbrians were invading what is now Moray, in the Scottish highlands, not Angus, in the lowlands.

Thirdly, Woolf also goes into some interesting, if technical, detail about the linguistic and historical evidence for Fortriu provided by other extant sources. The Annals of Ulster, for instance, notes that Bredei son of Beli – a man noted as the "king of Fortriu", and remembered today as perhaps the greatest of the Pictish kings – "destroyed" the Orkney Islands in a raid in 682. Such an expedition, he points out, ties in to Adomnán's brief mention of an Orcadian subregulus at the Pictish court of Bredei son of Meilocon in the 6th century, and certainly seems to make much greater sense if we located Bredei son of Beli's kingdom in the north than it would if Pictland was centred somewhere in the Scottish lowlands.

Next there is the problem of the late (first half of the 12th century) text known as The Prophecy of Berchan. This document contains some gnomic king-lists in which rulers are, frustratingly, identified not by name but simply by a regnal order and a length of reign, neither of which offer good matches for the majority of what is otherwise known about the rulers of this period of Scottish history. However, as Woolf points out, stanzas 164-68 of Berchan do fairly unambiguously match what's known of the Scottish succession between 962 and 971, a period during which the Ulster annals note that "Dub mac Mail Choluim, king of Alba" was killed by his own people. Berchan's version of the same events tells us that

One of the kings goes on a useless expedition

across the Mounth to the plain of Fortriu;

though he may have gone, he does not return,

Dub of the three dark secrets will fall.

Woolf is able to link this fragment to a prototype Scottish regnal list which locates Dub's death at Forres, and states that his body was then hidden under the bridge at Kinloss, both of which are locations on the Moray Firth close to Findhorn, once again fairly close to modern Inverness.