To some extent these features must have still characterised the Scotland of Alexander the Third. The aspect of the country became gradually altered by the hand of man as he advanced in civilisation. The introduction of Christianity, and its rapid spread over the country, would fill it with those rude Celtic monasteries which were everywhere established, and with small Christian colonies, who practised a rude agriculture; forests would be cut down and mosses drained; and in place of ‘those marshy parts of the country, constantly flooded by the tides of ocean,’ would appear those rich carses which border the estuaries of her great rivers. The climate would become ameliorated, towns and villages would spring up, and a more settled mode of life become established among the Celtic tribes which formed her population. An old description of Scotland north of the Firths, written in the first year of the reign of William the Lion, exhibits of course the same great physical landmarks, which do not alter, as still forming the leading territorial boundaries. ‘This region is said to exhibit the form and figure of a man. The chief part of the figure, that is, the head, is in Arregaithel, or Argyll, in the west part of Scotland, on the Irish Sea. His feet are upon the German Ocean. The mountains and deserts of Arregaithel form his head and neck, and his body is the range of mountains called Mound, or the Mounth, which extends from the western to the eastern sea. His arms are the mountains which separate Scotia from Arregaithel. His right side is formed from Moray, Ross, Marr, and Buchan. His legs are these two great and principal rivers the Tay and the Spey. Between the legs are Angus and Mearns, on this side of the Mounth, and other districts on the other side,’ that is, Marr and Buchan, ‘between the Spey and the Mounth.’[8] This description, which is fanciful enough, would place the head of the supposed figure at Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Scotland. The body is formed by the great range of hills which separated Inverness-shire and Aberdeenshire from the counties of Perth, Forfar, and Kincardine, and which forms, as it were, the backbone of the Grampians, and these are the mountains obviously alluded to by Bede as separating the northern from the southern Picts. The arms are formed by the range of hills which run at right angles, and are the great watershed dividing the eastern and western waters. The southern part forming the left arm now separates Argyllshire from Perthshire, and the northern part, or right arm, divides the western seaboard of Inverness-shire and Ross-shire, which then formed part of Argyllshire, from the eastern districts of these counties, and these are equally plainly the Drumalban range, which in Adamnan’s time divided the Scots from the Picts.