 Caithness and Sutherland have a combined area of  and the permanent Scandinavian holdings in Scotland at that time must therefore have been at minimum between a fifth and a quarter of the land area of modern Scotland.The Viking invasions may have inadvertently played a role in the creation of modern Scotland.Their destructive raids initially weakened Pictland, Strathclyde and Dal Riata, but these "harassed remnants" eventually became a united front and Norse aggression thus played a significant role in the creation of the kingdom of Alba, the nucleus from which the Scottish kingdom expanded as the Viking influence waned, just as in the south Wessex expanded to become the kingdom of England.