Scotland in the Early Middle Ages to be adopted for house building, often combining layers of stone with turf. Place-name evidence, particularly the use of the prefix "pit", meaning land or a field, suggests that the heaviest areas of Pictish settlement were in modern Fife, Perthshire, Angus, Aberdeen and around the Moray Firth, although later Gaelic migration may have erased some Pictish names from the record. Early Gaelic settlement appears to have been in the regions of the western mainland of Scotland between Cowal and Ardnamurchan, and the adjacent islands, later extending up the West coast in the 8th century. There is place name and archaeological
Scotland in the Late Middle Ages married Margaret of Denmark, receiving the Orkney Islands and the Shetland Islands in payment of her dowry. However, in 1482 Berwick, a border fortress and the largest port in medieval Scotland, fell to the English once again, for what was to be the final change of hands. Because medieval Scotland lacked the intrusive government and growing bureaucracy that can be found in contemporaneous England, there is very little evidence on which to base reliable estimates of population before the early 18th century. On the basis that it had roughly a sixth of the farmable land of England, it has been