Hunting the Pictish Beast

Brian Dunning (0:03)

We're the Scottish Moors, once the realm of a strange and magical beast, unlike any other creature. It is known not from bones, nor from legend, but from countless detailed renditions carved into the Pictish Standing Stones, which have stood guard over Scotland for some 1500 years. Whatever histories they may tell is lost to time, but the memory of the Pictish Beast will live forever, hewn into the living rock.

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Hey, everyone, Brian here. This December, join me for another great Skeptoid adventure. This one to New Orleans, where we'll take a deep dive into the history, pseudo-history, myths and legends of one of America's most storied cities. We'll explore French Quarter ghost, voodoo, and vampire lore with local expert Chris Pearley and walk through the historic St. Louis Cemetery No. Did you catch my recent episode on the legendary Honey Island swamp monster? We'll be heading out to tour that very swamp, one of the most pristine and least altered river swamps in the US. Perhaps we'll catch a glimpse. We'll also catch live jazz on Bourbon Street, run a Bourbon Street scavenger hunt, tour the historic mansions of the Garden District, and stop in at the Mardi Gras Museum, the Pharmacy Museum, an oddities shop, and much more. And of course, we'll eat real Creole and Cajun cuisine, plus beignets and cafe au lait. It's a full weekend of true stories, tall tales, and the city that inspired both. Get the full itinerary and book your spot now at skeptoid.com/adventures.

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Brian Dunning (2:43)

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from skeptoid.com. Hunting the Pictish Beast. Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not. I first came upon the Pictish Beast while doing a bit of personal research on the village of Dunning in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Dunning being my own family name. It is said to be the place where St. Cerf once slew a huge, loathsome dragon, whose look no mortal could endure, with but a single blow of his pastoral staff. And the 12th century St. Cerf's church now sits in the center of the village. It now houses the 9th century Duplin Cross, which turns out to be one of the more important of the few hundred Pictish standing stones across Scotland. I found myself going down something of a rabbit hole of these beautifully carved standing stones from an ancient culture about which little is known, and thence to a creature which appears on more of them than any other animal. It is called the Pictish Beast, obviously of tremendous importance to the Pictish culture, a creature unlike anything you may have seen anywhere else. Today, we're gonna see what we can learn of this fantastic animal, one of the most mysterious in all of archaeology.

No discussion of the Pictish Beast is complete without first laying the foundation for who the Picts were, as their depiction in pop culture has long been heavily mythologized. This has often been as a race of savage, face-painted barbarians from some exotic place like Scythia or Thrace, who took over Scotland and then mysteriously vanished. In fact, the Picts are simply the name for a group of peoples who inhabited much of the northern two-thirds of what is now Scotland during the early Middle Ages. We now know that genetically, they descended from the Iron Age tribes who lived there before them, and that they are among the ancestors of the people who still live there now.

Tradition holds that there were probably seven Pictish kingdoms, and probably also other minor ones. The names of several of these survive in real regions today. Records of these kingdoms go back to about 300 CE, which is arguably a fair place to call the beginning of the Picts. They converted to Christianity during the sixth and seventh centuries. Their decline began with the Viking raids in the ninth century, and within a few decades, surviving Picts and local Gaels merged and became the kingdom of Alba. Pictish culture never vanished. Instead, it became part of the cultural tapestry that eventually became Scotland.