Alba: The Gaelic Kingdom of Scotland: AD 800 - 1124

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By 1124 a powerful feudal kingdom, based in Edinburgh and descended from the Kings of Dalriada, had been established. Gaels and Vikings fought for supremacy in the Western Isles and the kingdoms of the Picts and the Britons had disappeared. The lines between the the kingdom of the Scots and the recently established Norman dynasty to the south and the relationship between them had still to be established but the lines of Scotland's future development were now clear.

This then was a period of revolution which established a new nation. It is arguably the most important of all in Scottish history. And yet it is one of the least known. It is this period of change that Stephen Driscoll describes with a wealth of new evidence and reconstruction illustration. From the royal palaces and burial sites of the kings of Strathclyde to the great inaugurations of Scone, this is an age of now vanished pageantry and power when the imperial ambitions of the new kings of Scots were shown in the names they chose, when those kings travelled on pilgrimage to Rome, and when names of almost mythological stature - Macbeth, Kenneth MacAlpin, St Margaret—lived and breathed in a new nation of Scots .