What the Picts Carved Into 350 Stones Before They Vanished | History for Sleep

The church at Aberlemno empties before the sun goes down. By then the light comes in low, almost level with the ground, and it catches the carvings on three stones built into a roadside wall, facing the lane. A fourth stone stands alone among the graves, three hundred yards south, where almost no one walks once it gets dark. This is the whole story: at Aberlemno in Angus, three carved stones stand in a roadside wall and a fourth stands alone in the kirkyard; in 1903 J. Romilly Allen and Joseph Anderson published The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland, sorting the stones into Class I, Class II and Class III; at Forres, Sueno's Stone is dated by charcoal to somewhere between AD 600 and AD 1000, its battle scene sometimes linked to King Dubh mac Ailpin, who died in 966; at Burghead, as many as thirty carved bulls once stood in the ramparts, and only six survive, found in 1809, 1862, 1867 and 1884; on the Tarbat peninsula, a monastery founded around AD 550 burned around AD 800, its workshops uncovered by Martin Carver between 1994 and 2007; at Nigg, a storm in 1727 broke the cross-slab, a later move set it upside down, and a missing fragment was found in 1998; at Dyke, a cross-slab found in the 1780s was raised in 1783 for Admiral Rodney's victory at the Battle of the Saints, its ogham naming EDDARRNON; King Nechtan mac Der-Ilei wrote to Ceolfrid, abbot of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, around 710; King Bridei son of Beli defeated Ecgfrith of Northumbria on the twentieth of May, 685, at Dun Nechtain; and Kenneth mac Alpin became king of the Picts in 842 or 843, dying on the 8th of February, 858. Historians disagree on where Dun Nechtain was fought, with both Dunnichen and Dunachton proposed. Over three hours of quiet narration to fall asleep to. No jump scares, no sudden music, no loud cuts. Turn the light off and let it run. Sleep well. 00:00 A Face on a Churchyard Wall 06:30 Who the Picts Were 13:00 Sorting Stone from Stone 19:33 The Unworked Boulders 24:45 A Vocabulary Without a Dictionary 30:13 The Serpent at Aberlemno 36:19 Five Stones and a Sixth Somewhere Else 41:17 The Battle on the Stone 47:37 A Morning in May, 685 53:43 A King Named Bridei 1:00:03 The King Who Changed the Calendar 1:06:50 Why the Crosses Appear 1:13:09 The Stone That Fell in a Storm 1:18:59 A Woman on a Hunt 1:25:20 A Stone That Traveled 1:31:11 A Tower in Moray 1:37:18 Whose Battle Was It 1:43:58 Thirty Bulls, Six Survivors 1:50:07 Found, Lost, Found Again 1:56:15 The Monastery on the Tarbat Peninsula 2:02:26 A Stone Upside Down 2:08:38 An Eagle, a Beast, and a King with a Lion 2:14:14 A Name Carved Near Arbroath 2:20:36 A Monument to the Wrong War 2:27:04 The Longest Inscription in Scotland 2:32:59 A Category That Stopped Making Sense 2:39:30 Words Carved, Never Spoken 2:46:00 The Hands That Cut the Stone 2:52:11 A King Takes Two Crowns 2:57:48 Where the King-Lists End 3:04:31 The Stones That Outlasted the Word 3:11:05 Back to the Churchyard Wall