Angus or Forfarshire; Forgrund, now Longforgan, on the south-east, is separated by the Tay from a parish in Fife bearing the same name; and Stratherdel or Strathardle, on the north, lies within the barrier of the Grampians, and stretches along the eastern boundary of Atholl. As Meath was the old mensal land set apart for the support of the Crown, so we find Gowry too appears to have been a Crown demesne; and as Teamhair or Tara was not only the place where the Ardri or sovereign of Ireland was inaugurated, and the laws of the kingdom framed and published, but was so completely regarded as the central point of the monarchy that the kingdom was often termed the Kingdom of Tara, so we find the ancient kings of Alban inaugurated and the laws of the kingdom promulgated at Scone; and when Kenneth, the first of the Scottish line, overthrew the Pictish dynasty, he is said in the oldest chronicler who records the event to have acquired ‘the kingdom of Scone.’[154] CHAPTER IV. THE TUATH OR TRIBE IN IRELAND. [Sidenote: Mixed population of Scotland.] The population of Scotland in the reign of Alexander the Third was, as we have seen, of a very mixed character. The southern frontier of the kingdom had by this time been advanced to the Solway and the Cheviots, while the annexation of the Isles in his reign had extended its western boundary to its utmost limits. Over the whole of this extended territory the name of Scotland, originally limited to the country north of the Forth and Clyde, had now spread, and we find the area of this extended kingdom occupied by a population consisting of three different races. These were, in the mountainous region of the north and west, the Gael or Highlanders, the descendants of the Northern Picts of pure Gaelic race, and of the Gaelic Scots who had settled among them. The more fertile and level plains forming the eastern seaboard, extending from the Moray Firth to the Cheviots, had originally been possessed by the Southern Picts, a mixed race partly of Gael and partly of Britons, but the Angles of Northumberland had by degrees colonised the whole of it. On the west the Britons of Strathclyde had extended from the Clyde to the Solway, but had likewise given way to the Anglic colonisation; while Galloway west of the Nith was still occupied by a Gaelic people, who had encroached upon the British territory by occupying the district of Carrick in the south, the Northern Gael having likewise encroached on its northern frontier by spreading over the district of Lennox. [Sidenote: Sources of information as to their early social state.]