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
Firth of Lorn Mull, with widths of from to , inclusive of the islands on the east side, such as Kerrera and the Slate Islands. The west side is an ample deep-water channel leading ultimately inland to the Caledonian Canal. Although the English word firth, the Gaelic equivalent linne (as in Linne Foirthe, Firth of Forth), and all the major firth names, have been in use since proto-historic times in Scotland, the combination “Firth of Lorn” was not innovated until the late 19th century. Lorn is presumed in modern Gaelic dictionaries to be a syncope of its Gaelic form Latharna, as is the