Besides the Goidels, or so-called Celts, and the Brythonic Celts or Britons, we find traces in Scotland of an earlier race who are known as “Picts”, a few fragments of whose language survive. About the identity of these Picts another controversy has been waged. Some look upon the Pictish tongue as closely allied to Scottish Gaelic; others regard it as Brythonic rather than Goidelic; and Dr. Rhys surmises that it is really an older form of speech, neither Goidelic nor Brythonic, and probably not allied to either, although, in the form in which its fragments have come down to us, it has been deeply affected by Brythonic forms. Be all this as it may, it is important for us to remember that, at the dawn of history, modern Scotland was populated entirely by people now known as “Celts”, of whom the Brythonic portion were the later to appear, driving the Goidels into the more mountainous districts. The Picts, whatever their origin, had become practically amalgamated with the “Celts”, and the Roman historians do not distinguish between different kinds of northern barbarians.
In the end of the fifth century and the beginning of the sixth, a new settlement of Goidels was made. These were the Scots, who founded the kingdom of Dalriada, corresponding roughly to the Modern Argyllshire. Some fifty years later (c. 547) came the Angles under Ida, and established a dominion along the coast from Tweed to Forth, covering the modern counties of Roxburgh, Berwick, Haddington, and Midlothian. Its outlying fort was the castle of Edinburgh, the name of which, in the form in which we have it, has certainly been influenced by association with the Northumbrian king, Edwin.[30] This district remained a portion of the kingdom of Northumbria till the tenth century, and it is of this district alone that the word “English” can fairly be used. Even here, however, there must have been a considerable infusion of Celtic blood, and such Celtic place-names as “Dunbar” still remain even in the counties where English place-names predominate. A distinguished Celtic scholar tells us: “In all our ancient literature, the inhabitants of ancient Lothian are known as Saix-Brit, i.e. Saxo-Britons, because they were a Cymric people, governed by the Saxons of Northumbria".[31] A further non-Celtic influence was that of the Norse invaders, who attacked the country from the ninth to the eighteenth century, and profoundly modified the racial character of the population on the south and west coasts, in the islands, and along the east coast as far south as the Moray Firth.