Such then was, in extent, the Scotland of Alexander the Third, and of its physical aspect at this time we can also form a very fair conception. As early as the third century we are told that the Barbarian tribes beyond the bounds of the Roman province in Britain ‘inhabit mountains wild and waterless, and plains desert and marshy, having neither walls nor cities, nor tillage, but living by pasturage, the chase, and certain berries;’ and that ‘many parts being constantly flooded by the tides of the ocean become marshy.’[5] Had the writer of this description ever seen the Scotch mountains, probably ‘waterless’ is the very last epithet he would have thought of applying to them; and though the inhabitants are said to have had neither walls nor cities, yet no doubt every rock and height showed the rude fortification or hill fort, the remains of so many of which are still seen, and every rising ground, with its rude collection of huts, would be surrounded with its rampart of earth and stones. Adamnan, writing in the seventh century, tells us of the fortified residence of the king of the Picts on the banks of the river Ness, with its royal house and gates, of a village on the banks of a lake, and of the houses of the country people. Of the leading physical features of the country he tells us too, of the large inland lakes, Loch Ness and Loch Awe, and of the range of mountains forming the backbone of Britain, or great watershed dividing the eastern and western waters, and separating the Scots from the Picts;[6] and Bede, in the succeeding century, talks of the mountains which separated the southern from the northern Picts, and within which the former had seats.[7]