Sometimes I find the internet very furstrating. Sometimes you find a fascinating subject and a snippet of information but there is no internet trail to help you learn more. Instead all you find is a barrage of marketing info.

I decided to read a little more about the Picts. The lovely Mel has a fascination with them so I thought I would learn more. I guess specifically because I have a thing about blue hair and I wondered if their liking for dying themselves blue included their hair to. It seems scientific opinion has changed and they no longer think they used woad but copper or iron based pigments.

Woad took me to Pict and Pict took me here (got to love Wikipedia). Painted pebbles.... ooooh! This caused an um in my soul. I have been thinking of painting pebbles recently and here I am discovering that some of my ancestors would have used them for,.... well something.

I have an ancestor who left the Cairngorms for work In East Anglia, dropped the Mc from his surname and married a local farmers daughter. We Brits may have been a tribal folk but those tribes have long since forgotten their boundaries and moved around. A hodge podge. But knowing I have Scottish blood in my veins pretty much ensures I had at least one Pictish ancestor.

I also have Welsh and a good deal of fenland blood (or thereabouts) on both sides of my tree. Maybe this is why I love swamps, mires, meres, bogs, marsh, willow carr.... any of those landscaapes which are gently half water, half land....?

Anyway, the pebbles. They suspect they were used as charms. They have lines, wiggly and otherwise and dots in the main but also pentacles, crescents, circles and triangles. I failed to find out much else except that some work has been done on these symbols and there is now a believe that these are the writing of the Picts, a tribe believed to be illiterate.

The charm thing seems particularly likely as they have been used as such in this area in living memory.... Soooo cold stones or charm stones, kinda interesting!

A slightly better search shows that a charm stone has been found and registered by the Cornwall Archeaological Unit. This kind of suggests that their use was widespread across the British Isles but was more persistent in Scotland - maybe because of the link to language there?

I found an interesting old book that had been scanned and placed on the internet here. It seems there was a history of curing stones that would be placed in water and on drinkign the water the patient would be healed. Apparently they were also used in Wales (did I mention I also have Welsh ancestry?) and called Adder Beads or Snake Stones.

I might have to paint some stones, rather than just think about it....