You wouldn't watch Braveheart to learn about Scottish medieval history, and you certainly wouldn't read this – the first new Asterix book in eight years – to learn about the iron-age Picts. But it's a good story, some of it drawn from historical fact.

Asterix and Obelix travel to Caledonia after a Pictish man, MacAroon, is washed up in their village. The local women start falling in love with him, so the men are keen to see him safely reunited with his true love back home in Scotland. It's perfectly possible that men from Gaul would have journeyed that far: we know that people in iron-age Europe were well connected, and objects from Gaul have turned up in Scotland. Whether they were dropped by someone like Asterix is, of course, harder to answer.

There's a wonderful section in which all the different kinds of Pict are introduced: the Watery Picts, the Lesser Spotted Picts, the Paunchy Picts. This does reflect the small-scale, competing units you would expect within iron age tribes. They end up joining forces against the Romans, which certainly happened with various warring clans. We get a good sense of the way the Romans sent out emissaries to build connections with people beyond their empire's borders, too. And the writers have fun with Pictish symbols: we see them carved on to cave walls and also – somewhat anachronistically – as road signs and insignia on clothing. The Paunchy Picts wear the symbol of a pot-bellied man.

The book features just about every stereotype about the Scots: red hair, cabers, bagpipes, whisky and kilts. There was an early form of tartan in use by this period, but we've no idea how it was worn – and there's no real evidence they were distilling whisky either. It's certainly no history lesson, but it's not meant to be. I hope it at least gets people thinking about the Picts – and, of course, coming along to museums like ours to find out more.