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Starts: 19:30
Ends: 21:00
Research into the Picts in Nairnshire and Moray
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Uncovering Ros and Moreb: Two lost early medieval kingdoms on the Moray Firth?
In 2008, Martin Carver hailed the discovery of the eighth-century monastery at Portmahomack in Easter Ross as evidence of “a great maritime Christian kingdom, focussed on the Moray Firth and in touch with the European scene.” But what was this great kingdom, and is there any other evidence of it? While current thinking is that the Firthlands hosted the powerful Pictish kingdom of Fortriu, early textual sources provide tiny glimpses of two territories called Ros and Moreb, ancestors of Ross and Moray.
For her recent History MA, Fiona Campbell-Howes went in search of Ros and Moreb, drawing together textual, archaeological, sculptural, toponymic and material sources to understand what, where and how old these territories might have been. Were they successors to Fortriu, emerging c. AD 900 after the transformation of the Pictish kingdoms into the Gaelic kingdom of Alba, or were they older petty kingdoms in their own right? This paper will present the findings of that research, using distribution maps to illustrate and discuss the political geography of the Moray Firthlands from 700–1000.
Fiona Campbell-Howes grew up in Nairnshire and Moray in the 1970s and 1980s before leaving for university. Having always had an interest in the region’s early medieval past, in 2022 she returned to academia to take an MA in History with Medieval Studies at the University of Birmingham, focusing on the political geography of the later-first-millennium Moray Firthlands. She is now a PhD student at the University of Glasgow, taking an interdisciplinary approach to researching early medieval Nairnshire.
See articles by Fiona at https://fortrenn.substack.com/