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
South West Scotland South West Scotland South West Scotland is an ambiguous term that can include Ayrshire, Galloway, Dumfriesshire, the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, as well as Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire. However the inclusion or exclusion of these areas is to an extent arbitrary: the only unquestionable boundaries of South West Scotland are the border with the nearby county of Cumbria in North West England and the sea, namely the Solway Firth, the North Channel and the Firth of Clyde. The area has a complex cultural history. At one time it formed part of the Kingdom of Strathclyde, the last stronghold of the Britons in what