By the 9th century, Forteviot was a Pictish royal centre. Kenneth mac Alpin, the king traditionally credited with uniting the Picts and the Scots into a single kingdom, is said to have died in the palace here in 858. The site stood on Haly Hill, a low terrace on the west side of the present village, overlooking the Water of May where it meets the Earn. Nothing of the palace survives above ground, but in the 19th century farmers ploughing the old riverbed turned up the Forteviot Arch, a single block of early-9th-century sandstone carved with human figures. It is the only surviving piece of monumental Pictish royal architecture in Scotland. Today it sits in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, evidence that the kings buried at Haly Hill once walked beneath carved doorways worthy of any continental court.

The Strathearn Environs and Royal Forteviot project, run by Glasgow and Aberdeen universities, has spent more than a decade peeling back the layers around the village. They have mapped a vast prehistoric ceremonial complex, a henge older than Stonehenge by some measures, and the elite Bronze Age burial whose contents made headlines. The ruler's grave, sealed under a massive capstone, held that bronze and gold dagger along with personal effects almost never recovered in Scottish prehistoric burials, where acidic soil usually devours organic material. Forteviot's particular geology preserved leather and wood that should not exist. The picture emerging is of a place where authority concentrated for thousands of years before Kenneth mac Alpin's palace, as if every generation in turn recognised this bend of the Earn as a seat of power.

The village you see from the road today is the work of one man and one architect. John Alexander Dewar, 1st Baron Forteviot of the Dewar's whisky family, hired Glasgow architect James Miller to rebuild the entire settlement in the 1920s as a Garden City model village. Cottages face inward around a square. The village hall, a category A listed building, sits opposite, an eclectic burst of 1920s ornament that looks almost too theatrical for so small a place. The parish church, dedicated to St Andrew, sits in its 1778 Georgian box-chapel form on foundations from the 13th century, with gravestones reaching back to 1690. Several pieces of early medieval Pictish sculpture, salvaged from earlier churches, are preserved inside. The contrast is startling: walk into the church and you stand in three centuries at once, while a thousand-year-old palace lies beneath the field next door.

The genius of Forteviot is its anonymity. The 1991 population was 160. There are no signposted ruins, no visitor centre, no gift shop. The kings of Alba died here, and the place looks like every other tidy Strathearn village. Drive past on a wet afternoon and you might notice the unusual coherence of the architecture, the way the cottages seem deliberately composed, and miss everything else entirely. The ruins of a castle associated with Malcolm III, who reigned from 1058 to 1093, were still visible in the 17th century before time took them. The henge has been ploughed flat for centuries. What remains is the shape of the land itself: the terrace, the river bend, the rising ground where palace stood, all unchanged since people first decided this was the place where kings should live and die.