[MUSIC PLAYING]
CLIVE ANDERSON: Scotland the brave, home of the free
or, rather, the freezing.
And it feels like an unchanging landscape.
It's rougher, much more exciting than somewhere
milder in the southeast of England.
CLIVE ANDERSON (VOICEOVER): But it just
takes me a few moments standing on a hillside
in the bracing Scottish weather to bring
home to me why my family decided to move further south.
You've got to be tough to thrive in Scotland.
And around 2,000 years ago, northern Scotland
was home to one of the toughest, fiercest,
frankly hard as nails-est tribes that's ever
walked the earth, the Picts.
In fact, they were so hard, they even
fought off one of the greatest armies the world had ever seen,
the Romans.
But 800 years later, the Picts just vanished.
No more historical records, no new monuments.
It's like they ceased to exist.
The disappearance of the Picts has been debated for centuries.
Over time, the reasons for the sudden demise
got more and more mysterious.
Medieval historians claimed they'd been cursed by God.
As a lawyer, I can tell you that curses
don't cut it in a court of law.
So we're on the hunt for the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth or the nearest "Mystic
Britain" can get anyway.
CLIVE ANDERSON: Excuse me?
You don't happen to be a Pict, do you?
CLIVE ANDERSON (VOICEOVER): This is either a carefully produced
coincidence or I've just picked up a wet and armed hitchhiker.
So Nick, what do I call you?
You're Nick the Pict.
I am Nick the Pict.
Yeah.
CLIVE ANDERSON (VOICEOVER): OK, Nick is not an actual Pict.
But as a living historian, he does this for a job.
CLIVE ANDERSON: Called a Pict rather than a Scot?
Yes, a Pict more a Scot.
I'm from the Northeast myself--
Yes.
--which is where the Picts would have originated from.
CLIVE ANDERSON (VOICEOVER): In the First Century AD,
the Romans tried to take over the far north of Britain
or, as we now call it, Scotland.
You did pretty well.
The Picts did pretty well at resisting the Roman invasion.
Oh, they did.
They did.
We had these Romans who came in to occupy
Scotland and govern it.
And then the Picts went no, just no.
And suddenly, they're putting up resistance,
they're fighting back, and they have no fear.
These Picts, they don't back down.
You take your life into your own hands when you face the Picts.
MARY-ANN OCHOTA (VOICEOVER): We don't
just have the word of Clive's Pictish hitchhiker to go by.
Because even though they were mostly writing propaganda,
the Romans seemed to agree.
There's a brilliant description from a Roman poet
called Claudius Claudianus.
He was writing in the late 300s.
He describes the nations to be found at the edges of the Roman
frontier as different kinds of women,
and this is the description he gives for Britain.
"Britain clothed in the skin of some Caledonian beast,
her cheeks tattooed."
He describes a kind of a wild people clothed in animal skins.
It's not particularly flattering,
and it says a lot about the Romans' attitudes
to the people up in the north of the British Isles.
The name Pict is a Roman term.
It means "painted people."
But it seems likely that even though it might have been kind
of slang derogatory name for the people living up here,
the Picts took it on as a kind of a defiant name.
"Yeah, we are the painted people.
Don't mess with us."
[SWORDS CLANGING]
[CROWD ROARING]