The Scots tussled with the other groups throughout the centuries in an endless succession of battles and won only with difficulty the lands that Macbeth would rule in the mideleventh century. Among their rivals were the Picts who lived north of the firths of Clyde and Forth and in the northern Hebrides, Orkneys, and Shetlands; the Britons who inhabited today’s Galloway, Cumberland, and Strathclyde (i.e., to the south and west); the Angles, who originated in Germany and Denmark, who lived in Northumbria (to the south and east); and later the Vikings who inhabited the northern and western isles. Having first set foot on the western coast of present-day Scotland (probably around the Mull of Kintyre), the Scots moved into the lands occupied by these other groups. By the mid-ninth century, all these people had been mingling and vying for prominence for centuries.
Under Kenneth mac Alpin (ruled 842-58), the Scots finally completed their conquest of the Picts; the political entity that arose from this situation was the foundation of the later kingdom of the Scots.
