Attention will have to be paid to the Pictish family of Moldan of Duncansby, of Moddan, created Earl of Caithness by his uncle Duncan I, and of Moddan "in Dale," each of whom in turn succeeded to much of the estates of the ancient Maormors of Duncansby, but whose people had been driven back from most of the best low-lying lands into the upper valleys and the hills by the foreign invaders of Cat. For, when the Norse Vikings first attacked Cat and succeeded in conquering the Picts there, they conquered by no means the whole of that province. They subdued and held only that part of Ness or modern Caithness which lies next its north and east coasts, and the rest of the sea-board of Ness, Strathnavern and Sudrland, forcing their way up the lower parts of the valleys of these districts, as their place-names still live on to prove; but they never conquered, so as to occupy and hold them, the upper parts of these river basins or the hills above them, which remained in possession of Picts and Gaels throughout the whole period of the Norse occupation. Further, the Picts and Gaels extended the area which they retained, until Norse rule was expelled from the mainland altogether. In Strathnavern and in the upper valleys of its rivers, and also in Caithness in the uplands of the river Thurso, and in a large part of Sudrland the Pictish family and clan of Moddan in its various branches subsisted all through the Norse occupation, and it is hoped to show good reason for believing that the family of Moddan, with the Pictish or Scottish family of Freskyn de Moravia in later times, was the mainstay of Scottish rule in the extreme north until the shadowy claims of Norse suzerains over every part of the mainland were completely repelled, and avowedly abandoned. Meantime to Norway Orkney and Cat were essential. For their fertile lands yielded the supplies of grain which Norway required; and when the Norse were driven from the arable lands of the Moray seaboard, Orkney and Cat became still more necessary to them and their folk at home. Cat the Scots could not then reach, for the Norse held the sea, while on land Pictish Moray, a jealous power, hostile to its southern neighbours, lay in its mountain fastnesses between the territory of the Scots in the south and the land of Cat in the extreme north, and formed a barrier which stretched across Alban from the North Sea to the shores of Assynt on the Skotlands-fiorthr or Minch. CHAPTER IV. _Thorfinn--Earl and Jarl._ Malcolm II, with whom Scottish contemporary records may be said to begin, ascended the Scottish throne in 1005, and defeated the Norse at Mortlach in Moray in 1010, and drove them from its fertile seaboard, probably with the help of Sigurd Hlodverson, Jarl of Orkney. The men of Moray, however, and their Pictish Maormors remained ungrateful, and irreconcilably opposed to Scottish rule; and Moray, then stretching across almost from ocean to ocean,[1] barred the way of the Scots to the north.