Note 101 — Chapter III

Dr. Skene, in his preface to the Chronicles of the Picts and Scots, endeavours to prove, by very plausible reasoning, and by comparison of various lists of kings, that for a century previous to the accession of Kenneth to the Pictish throne, Dalriada was under subjection to the Anglian monarchy, and was ruled by Pictish sovereigns. In an able paper, however, read recently by Dr. Archibald Smith before the Antiquarian Society of Scotland, he shows that Argyleshire was invaded but not subdued by Ungus, king of the Picts, in 736 and 741. Dr. Smith supported his conclusion by reference to passages in the annals of Tigernach, of Ulster, and the Albanic Duan, which seemed to him to give an intelligible and continuous account of regal succession in Dalriada, but afforded no countenance to the theory of Pinkerton of the entire conquest of the Scots in Britain by Ungus, nor to the conclusion Dr. Skene has come to, viz., the complete supremacy of the Picts in the Scottish Dalriada, and the extinction of Dalriada as a Scottish nation from the year 741 to the era of a new Scottish kingdom founded by Kenneth Macalpin in the year 843. On the contrary, he was convinced that Aodh-fionn was the restorer of its full liberty to the crushed section of Lorn, and that he was, at the close of his career, the independent ruler of Dalriada as a Scottish nation.