Though hilltop forts and defensive lines at places like Dunnideer or Tap o’ Noth are perhaps the most obvious evidence of these competitive and warlike times, features such as souterrains (underground storehouses) are a reminder that agriculture continued.

The Romans who encountered these Celtic tribes in Grampian left little evidence of their own - a few defensive ditches from their temporary camps and one still unlocated battlesite, Mons Graupius, (which gave us the name ‘Grampian)

Ancestors of modern Scotland

Later still came the tribal society of the first millennium AD, whose people we know as the Picts. They cut their distinctive symbols into freestanding boulders and slabs - the Pictish symbol stones whose curious animal and geometrical forms still hold a strange fascination.