The central belt of mainland Scotland, stretching roughly across the country from modern Glasgow to Edinburgh, was also an arena of Norse operations, though the evidence has mostly survived as burials and remnants of plunder. Here are the northernmost finds of a special kind of stone grave marker known as hogbacks, a uniquely colonial monument that seems to have been commissioned by the Norse elites. There is also a group of elaborate Viking-Age burials at Loch Lomond, near Dumbarton, and a spectacular tenth-century hoard of silver, gold, and jewellery in Galloway. The ecclesiastical nature of
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