In the far distant past, some thirty to forty centuries before the birth of Christ and round two thousand years before Moses received the Ten Commandments from God, a race of people were already well established on land that would one day become part of the Quoad Sacra Parish of Lybster. There, at a place more than four millennia later the Viking raiders would name “Camster”, they erected chambered monuments to their dead, long before the ancient Egyptians began to construct the great pyramids as tombs for their Pharaohs.
Those earliest people in our district were settled farmers, growing crops and raising animals. They made use of flint tools and pottery and having constructed the cairns were obviously people of intelligence. However, regarding what language they spoke or what thier names may have been we unfortunately have no knowledge.
The builders of the Camster cairns were followed by the peoples who erected the standing stones, who in turn were following about 2000 BC by iron age settlers who built the various brochs in our district. Also regrettably who those early peoples were remains a mystery.
Similar mystery is attached to the early Celtic tribes. Ptolemy of Alexandria a geographer of the second century AD describes the occupiers of what is now Caithness as the Cornavii. This name is based on “corn” a horn with the ending “-avios”, to give “the People of the Horn” ie. of the promontory or horn-like shape of Caithness. They may have been the same people as the enigmatic Picts first mentioned by the Roman poet Eumenius around the year 297 AD. The Picts remain a mystery to this day and we do not even know what language they spoke, but the fragmentary evidence we have in the Latheron stone with its Ogam inscription and the numerous “wags” to be found in the parish of Latheron would suggest that they were settled in and around our area.
[Extract from The Book of Lybster by Donald A. Young]
Waterlines — The Story of Lybster