n evidence of
Bede, another Pictish king, still of the name of Nectan (Naitanus Rex
Pictorum), despatched messengers, about the year 710, to Ceolfrid, Abbot
of Bede's own Northumbrian monastery of Jarrow, requesting, among other
matters, that architects should be sent to him to build in his country a
church of stone, according to the manner of the Romans et architectos
sibi mitti petiit, qui juxta morem Romanorum ecclesiam in lapide in
gente ipsius facerent. (_Hist. Eccles._, lib. v. c. xxi.) Forty years
previously, St. Benedict or Biscop, the first Abbot of Jarrow, had
brought there from Gaul, masons (caementarios) to build for him
"ecclesiam lapideam juxta Romanorum morem." (See Bede's _Vita Beatorum
Abbatum_.) Now it is probable that the Round Tower of Abernethy was not
built in connection with the church established there by the Pictish
kings at the beginning of the seventh century, for no such structures
seem to have been erected in connection with Pictish churches in any
other part of the Pictish kingdom; and if at Abernethy, the capital of
the Picts, a Round Tower had been built in the seventh century of stone
and lime, the Abbot of Jarrow would scarcely have been asked in the
eighth century, by a subsequent Pictish king, to send architects to show
the mode of erecting a church of stone in his kingdom. Nor is it in the
least degree more likely that these ecclesiastic builders, invited by
King Nectan in the early years of the eighth century, erected themselves
the Round Tower of Abernethy; for the building of such towers was, if
not totally unknown, at least totally unpractised by the ecclesiastic
architects of England and France within their own countries.[126] The
Scotic or Scoto-Irish race became united with the Picts into one kingdom
in the year 843, under King Kenneth MacAlpine, a lineal descendant and
representative of the royal chiefs who led the Dalriadic colony from
Antrim to Argyleshire, about A.D. 506. (See the elaborate genealogical
table of the Scottish Dalriadic kings in Dr. Reeves' edition of
_Adamnan's Life of Columba_, p. 438.) The purely "Scotic period" of our
history, as it has been termed, dates from this union of the Picts and
Scots under Kenneth MacAlpine in 843, till Malcolm Canmore ascended the
throne in 1057; and there is every probability that the Round Towers of
Abernethy and Brechin were built during the period between these two
dates, or during the regime of the intervening Scotic or Sco