Test your knowledge of the Picts with this new brain-teaser devised by Dr Neil McGuigan.
* * *Also try this quiz from last year:
Scotland in the Early Middle Ages
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Neil McGuigan is a historian and author, specialising in early medieval Northern Britain. Find him on Twitter at @neilmcguigan
His biography of King Máel Coluim III (‘Malcolm Canmore’) was published last week by Birlinn Books of Edinburgh:
Máel Coluim III, ‘Canmore’: The World of an Eleventh-Century King
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Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans, The King in the North: the Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce. Birlinn: Edinburgh, 2019, xiv +209 pp. £14.99 pbk. ISBN 978 1 78027 551 2
Much progress has been made in the past 30 years to bring the Picts into the mainstream of early medieval European history, yet they are still often regarded as enigmatic and puzzling. This is perhaps understandable, given that – for many people – the most vivid evidence of the Pictish contribution to Scotland’s past is a unique set of mysterious symbols carved on standing stones. Any book that attempts to de-mystify the Picts is therefore timely and welcome. In this case, the reader is presented with a volume of what are essentially separate academic essays, the majority previously published in scholarly journals or monographs but here updated and newly edited. All are linked by a shared focus on northern Pictland, an area generally understood as lying north of the Grampian Mountains and encompassing Aberdeenshire, Moray, Inverness-shire and Easter Ross. The essays are linked by authorship, having been produced by scholars involved in the Northern Picts project at the University of Aberdeen. Like the project itself, the volume is interdisciplinary, covering a range of archaeological and historical topics.
One of the book’s stated objectives is to highlight the importance of northern Pictland and, in so doing, to redress the balance between this area and its southern counterpart. It is certainly true that historians and archaeologists have traditionally placed a focus on southern Pictland, roughly the area between the Grampians and the Forth-Clyde isthmus. In addition to being the core of the later kingdom of Alba, southern Pictland was until recently assumed to include Fortriu, a powerful kingdom whose rulers wielded overkingship over a large swathe of Pictish territory. Northern Pictland, by contrast, was long regarded by scholars as something of a backwater, in spite of its containing some of the most impressive examples of Pictish sculpture. These old perceptions of political geography shifted dramatically in 2006 with the publication of Alex Woolf’s proposal that Fortriu should be seen as a northern realm centred on lands around the Moray Firth. Widespread acceptance of Woolf’s argument encouraged historians and archaeologists to direct more attention to the area north of the Grampians and, in 2012, the Northern Picts project was established. An exciting programme of archaeological surveys and excavations at key sites north of the Grampians has continued in the ensuing years, with analysis and interpretation of the data being presented in this collected volume.
The main contents comprise eight chapters, of which seven are edited versions of previously published studies while the eighth was written specially for this book. A shorter final chapter, giving a summary and overview, is followed by a list of places to visit and an extensive, up-to-date bibliography. Looking at the chapters in sequence, the first sees the archaeologist Gordon Noble introducing a number of key themes: the geographical extent of northern Pictland; the impact of Woolf’s 2006 paper; the subsequent recognition of Fortriu and another kingdom – called Ce – as the main northern Pictish polities; and the work of the Northern Picts project. In Chapter Two, historian Nicholas Evans discusses the surviving primary source material relating to northern Pictland, noting the difficulties presented by the texts and the care that should be exercised when trying to interpret them. Far too much trust has indeed been placed in their testimony, which until quite recently was often accepted at face value. As Evans observes, it is essential that the contexts in which these sources were written are acknowledged, especially those texts produced long after the end of the Pictish period by authors for whom the past was something to be adapted and repackaged. Evans also examines the rise to prominence of the kings of Fortriu, their association with Pictish overkingship and the eventual disappearance not only of the name of their kingdom but of Pictish identity as a whole.
Chapter Three diverts our attention from textual to archaeological evidence with Gordon Noble’s study of fortified settlements in northern Pictland. Noble discusses sites such as the massive coastal promontory fort at Burghead – the largest Pictish fortress so far known – and the multiple enclosure hillfort of Mither Tap, Bennachie, together with less imposing enclosed settlements like the one recently identified at Rhynie. A broader context is the emergence of fortified settlements across early medieval northern Britain as places where elites exercised and displayed their authority, hence the association of hillforts – including a couple of Pictish ones – with contemporary references to kingship and royal warfare. In Chapter Four we are offered a more detailed look at the ‘enclosure complex’ at Rhynie, a fascinating location where excavations by the Northern Picts project have enabled archaeologists to identify a landscape of power and ritual. Evidence of metalworking and jewelsmithing, together with shards of imported Mediterranean pottery, confirm this site’s high status. This new data also provides a context for two unusual and well-known sculptured monoliths – the Craw Stane with its Pictish symbols and ‘Rhynie Man’ with its fierce-looking, axe-wielding human figure.
The archaeological theme continues in Chapter Five, where cemeteries and single graves provide evidence for the burial practices of northern Pictland. Across the region, evidence from aerial survey and excavation suggests a burial tradition involving square or circular barrows, with an apparent absence of the stone-lined ‘long cist’ graves observed south of the Grampians. Interestingly, some barrows were made bigger or more elaborate as time went by, implying that successive generations of the living community deliberately altered the appearance of graves for reasons of their own, perhaps to support claims of authority or ancestry or to retrospectively enhance the status of the dead. Also in this chapter we see how new interpretations of archaeological data are changing older perceptions of Pictish society, namely the important observation that Pictish symbol stones do not – after all – appear to have a strong association with Pictish graves.
Chapter Six describes the hoard discovered in 1838 at Gaulcross – a collection of Late Roman hacksilver buried near two ruined stone circles in an Aberdeenshire field. The hoard is likely to have been deposited in the fifth, sixth or seventh century. Almost all of the original collection of finds subsequently disappeared. However, a new programme of surveying and metal detecting in 2013 unearthed more than 100 additional items, enabling the Gaulcross hoard to be studied alongside two more – one from Traprain Law in East Lothian and another from Norrie’s Law in Fife – these three being the only known hoards of pre-Viking hacksilver from Scotland. Possible contexts for their acquisition and deposition are here usefully considered by analogy with similar hoards from elsewhere in Europe, notably from Denmark. A plausible theory is that the Gaulcross hoard may have been ritually interred by members of a local Pictish elite eager to link themselves to an ancestral or sacred aura represented by the ancient stone circles.
Moving on to the book’s seventh chapter we encounter the Pictish symbol system, undoubtedly the most familiar and most controversial topic addressed in this volume. A vigorous debate over the question of what message the symbols were intended to convey has been running for more than 100 years and shows no sign of abating. Among a plethora of theories some are more plausible than others, with the idea that the symbols might represent a form of writing being one of the front-runners. This particular theory is here described as the current academic consensus. It certainly draws support from comparisons with the ogham of Ireland and western Britain and the runes of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The runic script and ogham are now thought to have emerged in the second and fourth centuries AD respectively, each being a form of ‘barbarian’ experimentation with writing on the fringes of the Roman Empire. Inspired by the Roman alphabet, although not devised in imitation of it, both ogham and runes may have enabled ambitious elites to publicly communicate their power and status, in the same way that Latin inscriptions conveyed Roman prestige. Here the argument goes on to propose that, if Pictish symbols did indeed originate as early as ogham or Scandinavian runes, they were probably used by high-status families to reinforce social positions. This explanation offers a plausible context for the stone plaques inscribed with simple symbol designs at the sea-stack of Dunnicaer on the Aberdeenshire coast. Fieldwork on this near-inaccessible site was undertaken by the Northern Picts project from 2015 to 2017 and confirmed an older theory that the site had been a Pictish fort. A stone rampart in which the plaques had been set and displayed has yielded a construction date between the late third and mid-fourth centuries AD. If the symbols were inscribed at the same time, the origin of the system is pushed back by several hundred years from its traditional start-date in the sixth or seventh century. As the authors of Chapter Seven point out, it might be no coincidence that such an early date for the origin of the symbols corresponds with the first appearance of the term Picti in contemporary Roman texts. The possibility that the symbols, with their remarkable consistency of form, were devised simultaneously with the forging of a new ‘Pictish’ identity in the far northern regions of Britain is certainly a thought-provoking notion to add to the age-old debate.
Fish symbol and triangle on a stone from Dunnicaer.
Chapter Eight, the last of the main essays, has been newly written for the book. It looks at the transition from paganism to Christianity in northern Pictland, a process barely visible in the surviving sources. A lack of authentic information on what Pictish paganism actually looked like has allowed fanciful modern ideas about ‘Celtic’ religious beliefs to fill the gaps. The few genuine contemporary references of direct relevance to the topic were, to compound the difficulties, written not by pagan Picts but by non-Pictish Christians keen to highlight the superiority of their own religion. For a more objective view of Pictish paganism we turn once again to archaeological evidence and to the inferences that can be drawn from it. Thus, at the Sculptor’s Cave at Covesea in Moray, recent work suggests that the place was a ritual venue where human sacrifice was performed in the third to fourth centuries AD. Similarly, one interpretation of the Rhynie Man carved figure is that his axe-hammer was not a weapon of war but a tool for the ritual slaughter of cattle. Dating the pagan-to-Christian transition in northern Pictland is no easy task but the texts imply that the process began in the sixth century and was virtually complete before the end of the seventh. By 697, a bishop called Curetán appears to have been based at Rosemarkie in Easter Ross, perhaps serving the northern Pictish territories while a more southerly counterpart held a separate bishopric on the other side of the Grampians. Also in Easter Ross lies the monastic site of Portmahomack, the focus of extensive modern excavations that have confirmed its importance during the fifth to eighth centuries AD. A number of smaller ecclesiastical sites identified by the Northern Picts project as potentially significant await investigation in the future. The chapter reminds us that there remain many unanswered questions, such as to what extent northern Pictland was evangelised by missionaries from St Columba’s monastery on Iona – as claimed by Bede – rather than by a more diverse range of personnel.
In the closing chapter, Gordon Noble observes that ‘we have gone from a lack of identified and dated Pictish sites in northern Pictland to one of the best dated sequences from early medieval Scotland’. It is a credit to the work of all those involved in the Northern Picts project that such an observation can now be made. This collection of essays, available in paperback, brings the project’s detailed findings to a wider audience than before, giving the general reader easy access to an important corpus of specialised research. For scholars of Pictish history and archaeology, it provides a useful compendium of data and analysis on a number of current topics. It is an excellent book and I have no hesitation in recommending it.
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Described by one reviewer as “a major landmark in Pictish studies” and by another as “a stunning achievement”, this detailed report on the archaeological excavations at Portmahomack is a must-read for anyone who wants to know more about the Picts. It is particularly useful for what it reveals of Pictish Christianity, giving insights into the daily lives of monks who inhabited this site in Easter Ross more than a thousand years ago. Published in 2016 by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the report has been made available as a free full-text download. It is one of two scholarly monographs on the Society’s Open Access Digital Books platform, the other being The Scottish Antiquarian Tradition , a collection of essays edited by A.S. Bell.
Portmahomack, situated on the Tarbat Peninsula overlooking the Dornoch Firth, was the location of a major Pictish monastery that reached its high point during the eighth century AD. The monastery was burned in the ninth century, possibly by Viking raiders, and ceased to function around the same time, although the site was re-developed as a trading settlement. This, too, eventually fell out of use. In the early 1100s, long after the end of the Pictish period, the site’s former religious character was revived with the founding of St Colman’s parish church.
A programme of archaeological excavation began in the mid-1990s and continued for more than ten years, unearthing clear evidence of the monastery’s importance as a centre of writing, stone-carving and metalworking. Some of the finds, including fragments of Pictish sculpture, are now displayed at the Tarbat Discovery Centre housed in St Colman’s Church. The Centre is well worth visiting and can also be followed on social media (see links below).
Fragments of a Pictish cross-slab from Portmahomack (from The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland, 1903).
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Links
Martin Carver, Justin Garner-Lahire & Cecily Spall (2016) Portmahomack on Tarbat Ness: changing ideologies in North-East Scotland, sixth to sixteenth century AD (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland) [e-book free download]
Tarbat Discovery Centre is open from April to October. It can be followed on Facebook and Twitter
Joining the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland is an excellent way to keep up-to-date with all the exciting news from Scottish archaeology. Members of the Society are known as Fellows and are entitled to use the post-nominal letters FSA Scot. Fellowship is open to anyone who has a keen interest in Scotland’s past. More information on how to apply can be found at the Society’s website.
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Sculptured portrait of a Roman lady, believed to be Julia Domna.
Anyone who seeks to discover Scotland’s early history through textual sources written more than a thousand years ago soon realises that ‘fake news’ isn’t a modern phenomenon. It has always served a useful purpose for its creators, as much in the first millennium AD as in our own era of digital communication and social media. Recognising false information for what it is, rather than taking it at face value, is likewise as much of a challenge when we’re reading an ancient chronicle as when we encounter an attention-grabbing headline on the internet. In some instances, even after having dismissed something written in the remote past as fake information – such as a legend masquerading as real history – we find it so fascinating that we want it to be true. This is what happened to me many years ago when I came across what seemed, at first glance, to be a curious fact – namely that the oldest known words attributed to a woman from Scotland were spoken to a woman from Syria.
The conversation in question supposedly took place sometime in the early third century AD, around the years 209/210. Our source is the Historia Romana (‘Roman History’), a multi-volume work penned by the contemporary historian Cassius Dio. At that time, the Roman emperor Septimius Severus was on active service in northern Britain, leading a military campaign beyond the Antonine Wall – the great turf barrier stretching between the firths of Forth and Clyde. His foes were unconquered native peoples in what are now Stirlingshire and Perthshire, specifically two large groupings or ‘tribal confederations’ – the Maeatae who lived adjacent to the Wall and the Caledonians to the north of them. These two had been causing a great deal of trouble, raiding southward into lands under Roman rule and returning home laden with loot. A recent wave of attacks had been serious enough to persuade the governor of Roman Britain to appeal directly to Septimius Severus for aid. The emperor had duly taken personal charge of a major effort to bring the marauders to heel. Arriving in Britain in 208, accompanied by his wife and their two adult sons, he led his huge army northward. His troops suffered considerable losses from guerilla warfare but eventually both the Caledonians and Maeatae negotiated peace treaties with him. Dio identifies one of the key figures on the Caledonian side as Argentocoxos, presumably a senior chieftain, whose Celtic name means something like ‘Silver Leg’. However, the ensuing truce turned out to be short-lived and a new round of hostilities soon began.
Severus in Scotland, AD 208 to 210, showing three of the many forts involved in his campaign.
According to Cassius Dio, it was during the brief period of peace that a conversation took place between the wives of Argentocoxos and Septimius Severus. The name of the Caledonian lady is unrecorded – perhaps Dio himself had no record of it. He certainly had no doubt about the identity of the other woman. She was Julia Domna, the Syrian wife of Severus and one of the most famous of all Roman empresses. Julia’s image was so well-known around the Mediterranean lands in her own lifetime that it can still be seen today on various coins, paintings and sculptures. Born c. 160 in the city of Emesa (now Homs) in Syria, she sprang from a high-status Arab family who seem to have had royal ancestry. Her father was a senior priest at Emesa’s Temple of the Sun, the main cult-centre of the Middle Eastern god Elagabalus. Charismatic and well-educated, Julia was a suitable bride for Severus when, as a childless widower in his early forties, he decided that he should be married again.
Septimius Severus, Roman emperor from AD 193 to 211.
Dio had a particular fascination with Julia and has left us a fair amount of information about her. As a career politician who served as senator and consul he was well-placed to obtain interesting snippets of information about members of the imperial family. He had rather less interest in barbarians like Argentocoxos, even when he could be bothered to name them. Like most Romans he no doubt regarded the inhabitants of ancient Scotland as a mob of wild, uncouth savages prowling beyond the Empire’s borders. As an author he nevertheless found them useful as caricatures of the stereotypical barbarian – simple, uncorrupted folk whose primitive ways of living could be amusingly contrasted with the immorality and hypocrisy of sophisticated Roman society. Drawing on such stereotypes, he informed his readers that the Caledonians and Maeatae ‘possess their women in common, and in common rear all the offspring’. It hardly needs saying that such a strange custom probably never existed among the contemporary inhabitants of Perthshire and Stirlingshire, nor are they likely to have viewed adultery and marital fidelity much differently from the citizens of Rome. The idea that they practised a kind of ‘free love’ may have originated as a joke or rumour among Roman soldiers stationed near the northern frontier – or perhaps Dio simply made it up. It appears in his narrative shortly before the meeting between Julia Domna and the wife of Argentocoxos and provides the essential moral backdrop to their conversation.
Dio tells us that the empress teased her companion by saying that Caledonian women indulge in a sexual free-for-all, sharing their beds with different men while making no attempt to conceal their adultery. To a respectable aristocratic lady like Julia, such brazen promiscuity would indeed have seemed worthy of comment. We then see the wife of Argentocoxos swiftly responding with what Dio calls ‘a witty remark’ of her own:
“We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.”
As with all ancient and medieval authors, we should be wary of taking Dio at face value. Although Julia Domna was very much a real person – and indeed one of his contemporaries – this did not deter him from portraying her in a way that suited his literary purposes. Modern scholars who analyse his writings believe that the Julia he presented to his readers was, to some extent, moulded to fit his narrative. There is no doubt that she plays a special role in the Historia Romana, particularly in those sections where Dio seeks to pass judgement on the moral and political issues of his time. In this instance, his target was not the allegedly shameless promiscuity of Caledonian women but the clandestine adultery of fine Roman ladies. The consensus view among present-day historians is that he simply invented the speech quoted above. Like a modern peddler of fake news, he took a piece of made-up information about a group of foreigners and ‘spun’ it to make a specific point. His readers – the wealthy, educated elite of the Roman world – would have got the message very clearly. Some of them probably raised a wry smile; others may have felt stung by the barbed jibe attributed to an anonymous northern barbarian.
I think it would be good if we could accept the story as true. Some parts of it possibly _are_ true, even if the conversation reported by Dio never happened – or at least not in the way he describes. It is not unrealistic, for example, to imagine Julia Domna visiting the imperial frontierlands in what is now Scotland. She was certainly no stranger to dangerous war-zones. One of her honorific titles was Mater Castrorum, ‘Mother of the Army Camps’, bestowed in recognition of her willingness to accompany her husband on military campaigns. Whether she met the wives of any barbarian leaders on such occasions is debatable, although not implausible. I’m inclined to think we can consider the possibility that she not only visited Scotland 1,800 years ago but had a face-to-face encounter with the wife of a local chieftain. Musing even further, we can perhaps imagine these two high-status women – one a Syrian, the other a Caledonian – exchanging a few words, not directly but through an interpreter. Whatever they said to one another, it is more likely to have consisted of polite greetings rather than the mockery and ‘witty remarks’ placed into their mouths by Cassius Dio.
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Epilogue
Julia Domna outlived not only her husband but also their sons, Caracalla and Geta. The brothers became joint emperors following the death of their father in 211 but their relationship was mutually hostile. Within months, Geta was murdered by Caracalla’s soldiers, dying in his mother’s arms. Julia detested Caracalla but relished the power and influence she acquired during his reign and chose to maintain a public image of maternal loyalty. The complicated relationship between mother and son even prompted rumours of incest, but Cassius Dio makes no mention of this and modern historians dismiss it as malicious gossip emanating from the imperial court. Caracalla turned out to be an unpopular emperor and his assassination in 217 came as no surprise, but his death deprived his mother of political status. Julia, by then in her fifties, suddenly found herself at risk of being exiled from Rome and ending her days in obscurity. This bleak prospect filled her with dread, especially as she had begun to nurture ambitions of ruling the Empire herself. She died soon afterwards, allegedly starving herself to death but – according to Dio – finally succumbing to the breast cancer that had afflicted her for many years.
The emperor Caracalla with his mother Julia Domna.
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Notes & references
Julia’s second name or ‘cognomen’ Domna derives from an ancient Arabic word meaning Black. It distinguished her from her elder sister Julia Maesa, a woman of ruthless ambition whose own story is no less remarkable.
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The conversation between Julia Domna and the Caledonian lady is reported in Book 77, section 16, of Cassius Dio’s Historia Romana.
For this blogpost I used the Loeb Classical Library edition, available online at Lacus Curtius.
Substantial portions of the original text of the Historia Romana have not survived, the lost material being known from an abridged version written by the Byzantine scholar John Xiphilinus in the eleventh century.
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Some journal articles I have found useful:
Riccardo Bertolazzi, ‘The depictions of Livia and Julia Domna by Cassius Dio: some observations’ Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae vol. 55 (2015), 413-32
Andrew Scott, ‘Cassius Dio’s Julia Domna: character development and narrative function’ Transactions of the American Philological Association vol. 147 (2017), 413-33
Christopher T. Mallan, ‘Cassius Dio on Julia Domna’ Mnemosyne vol. 66 (2013), 734-60
Caillan Davenport, ‘Sexual habits of Caracalla: rumour, gossip and historiography’ Histos vol. 11 (2017), 75-100
Julia Domna and Septimius Severus with their sons Geta and Caracalla (Geta’s face has been deliberately erased).
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I’ve visited Meigle Museum several times (three times, if I recall correctly) but as with so many heritage sites in Scotland three visits isn’t enough and I’m long overdue a return trip.
Many of you reading this blogpost will need no introduction to this excellent Perthshire museum and its fabulous collection of early medieval sculpture. Even if you haven’t had a face-to-face encounter with the 26 Pictish stones you may have seen drawings or photographs of them in books or online.
Below are some photos from my last visit, which was probably a dozen years ago. I offer them here as a gallery of images without descriptive text. For those of you who are planning a first trip to Meigle in 2019 these images are just a ‘taster’ of the treasures that await.
At the end I’ve added a link to the Historic Scotland webpage for the museum, which gives useful information such as opening times.
Meigle 1
Meigle 2 (‘Vanora’s Stone’)
Meigle 3
Meigle 4
Meigle 5 (front)
Meigle 5 (side, showing Pictish symbols)
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Link: Webpage for Meigle Museum
The images in this blogpost are copyright © B. Keeling
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Pictish symbols on a stone at Logie Elphinstone in Aberdeenshire (from J. Stuart: Sculptured Stones of Scotland)
Last month, the journal Antiquity published an article presenting new research on the chronology and purpose of the Pictish symbols. As one of the most significant contributions to the debate in recent years it has rightly received a lot of media exposure. To anyone with an interest in the symbols I strongly recommend reading this article (see the link below). Briefly, its authors propose that the symbols comprise a system of writing comparable to Irish Ogam and Scandinavian runes. It sees all three systems as responses by non-Romanised ‘barbarian’ cultures to the Latin literacy that had taken root among their neighbours inside the Roman Empire. As far as the Picts are concerned, the key point is that their symbols seem to have originated in the third and fourth centuries AD, contemporary with Ogam and perhaps slightly later than runes. This is a couple of hundred years earlier than the conventional chronology which has tended to place the origin of Pictish symbols in the sixth century, long after the end of Roman rule in northern Europe, rather than in a period when the Empire still flourished.
Assigning precise dates to abstract carvings isn’t an easy task but the new chronology is based on scientific dating of archaeological material from recent excavations at a number of Pictish sites. In Aberdeenshire, at the high-status sites of Dunnicaer and Rhynie, the symbol-carved stones appear to be contemporary with material that can be dated to the third and fourth centuries AD. This is the very period when the Picts were first identified as a distinct group by Roman writers. One crucial piece of data from the excavations at Rhynie is that the main occupation phase lay in this early period. If, as seems likely, the symbol carvings are associated with this phase, we can infer that the symbol system was devised when the notion of Pictishness itself was taking shape, both developments being part of a cultural response to the Romanising, Latinising influences to the south. Like Ogam and runes, the Pictish symbols did not replicate the Latin alphabet but instead offered a home-grown alternative to it that was overtly (and probably deliberately) non-Roman in form. On the purpose of the symbols, the article notes their proximity to carved human figures on a number of later stones (from the eighth century) and suggests that they were ‘labels’ representing personal names in a non-alphabetic way. This fits with my own preferred interpretation as outlined above. Others will find that the article challenges rather than validates their ideas. On the chronology, however, there seems little reason to doubt that the new, earlier origin-date for the Pictish symbols is correct.
Reference and link:
Gordon Noble, Martin Goldberg and Derek Hamilton: The development of the Pictish symbol system: inscribing identity beyond the edges of Empire Antiquity vol. 92, no. 365 (October 2018), pp. 1329-1348
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Pictish symbols: mirror (top), triple disc and notched rectangle.
A Pictish symbol stone has been discovered on the banks of the River Don at Dyce near Aberdeen. This exciting find was publicised today and is understandably attracting a lot of attention on social media. New discoveries of early medieval sculpture are as rare in Scotland as anywhere else, so the unearthing of a previously unknown Pictish stone is a significant event.
Photographs of the new stone published online show the carved symbols to be well preserved and easily identifiable. Archaeologists have recognised a triple disc, a notched rectangle and a mirror. The stone itself is an unshaped boulder with no overtly Christian carvings, so it falls into the category known as ‘Class I’. It was probably carved between the sixth and eighth centuries AD, before the influence of the Church led to Pictish sculpture becoming more sophisticated. Stones from the later classes tend to have regular shapes and Christian iconography. A common form of Class II, for example, is an upright slab with an ornate cross carved on one face and Pictish symbols on the other.
The new stone came to light because water levels in the Don had fallen after weeks of warm, dry weather. A fisherman spotted the stone and informed the University of Aberdeen, where the archaeology department is a renowned centre of research on the Picts. Historic Environment Scotland, the national archaeological body, subsequently became involved, together with the local authority and AOC Archaeology. A specialist team retrieved the stone from the river so that it can be conserved, studied and eventually put on display.
By the time my blogpost appears, the discovery of this stone will no doubt be well known in Scotland and beyond. I look forward to following the story in the weeks and months ahead. More information is sure to appear, with social media a good place to look for updates. With this in mind, I’ve included a useful and relevant Twitter account in the links below.
Finally, it’s worth noting that Dyce is already a familiar place on the Pictish sculpture map. At the ruined church of St Fergus are several stones, two of which stand out as fine examples of Class I and Class II respectively. The former is carved with two symbols while the latter has four. Common to both is the enigmatic ‘crescent and V-rod’ and I wonder if it might be significant that the Class II stone also shares the equally mysterious ‘triple disc’ with the new stone from the river.
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LINKS
The Scotsman newspaper: Stunning Pictish stone discovered in river by fisherman
Twitter: Bruce Mann (archaeologist for several local authorities including Aberdeen & Aberdeenshire) I regularly retweet news from Bruce Mann at my own account Early Scotland
Pictish stones at Dyce, St Fergus’ Church (Canmore database)
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Next week, on Thursday 30 August at 1.00pm, Dr Anouk Busset of the University of Glasgow’s archaeology department will be giving a talk at Govan Old Parish Church. This is an event I would very much like to get to but unfortunately can’t make it. Those lucky enough to attend will hear Anouk speak on the following topic:
The Early Christian landscape of Glen Lyon: investigating sacred movement in the Early Middle Ages
Glen Lyon is a place I’ve visited a few times. It’s a scenic gem – a long valley in the Highlands with picturesque views of the surrounding hills. It’s also an area rich in history and archaeology. Cairns, stone circles and standing stones bear witness to the glen-dwellers of prehistory. Those same folk probably held sacred the majestic old yew of Fortingall at the eastern end of the glen, a tree that is still alive thousands of years later.
The Fortingall Yew in the early 1800s.
Christianity eventually supplanted the local pagan religion, bringing a new package of beliefs and rituals. At Fortingall, the village church has long been assumed to occupy the site of an ancient predecessor, perhaps a monastery founded by missionaries from Iona. Fragments of finely carved Pictish cross-slabs are displayed in the present building while other, simpler Early Christian monuments can be seen outside. In September 2017, to widespread dismay, a Celtic hand-bell dating from the seventh or eighth century was stolen from a niche inside the church.
Further along Glen Lyon, a standing stone known as St Adamnan’s Cross bears the name of the famous abbot of Iona who died in 704. According to local tradition, Adamnan (Adomnán) undertook missionary work among the glen’s pagan inhabitants and performed a miracle that the monolith supposedly commemorates.
Anouk Busset gained her PhD from the University of Glasgow in 2017 and is one of the new generation of up-and-coming archaeologists whose work is making a difference to our understanding of Scotland’s early medieval past. This year she was part of a team undertaking a project in Glen Lyon, hence the theme of next week’s event at Govan Old. Her talk is sure to be enthralling, and I recommend it to any Senchus readers who want to know more about the Early Christian archaeology of the Highlands. It’s free to all, with no need to book a seat in advance (and with free refreshments too).
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LINKS
Anouk Busset on Twitter
Jo Woolf’s articles on St Adamnan’s Cross and the Fortingall Yew.
Website of the Govan Stones at Govan Old Parish Church
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Carving of a boat in Jonathan’s Cave.
I’ll be sorry to miss what will surely be an exciting afternoon of Pict-related info and discussion. The range of topics can be seen on the leaflet below:
Attendance is free and is open to all. To reserve a place, use the online booking form at Eventbrite via this link.
If you haven’t already visited the Wemyss Caves it’s not too late to have a guided tour. The final tours of 2016 are taking place this Sunday (25th September) as part of Scottish Archaeology Month. Tours start from the SWACS Environmental Centre in the basement of East Wemyss Primary School. The Centre will be open on that day from 2.00pm-4.30pm, but you’ll need to arrive before 3.00pm if you want to join a tour.
SWACS (Save Wemyss Ancient Caves Society) also has a website and a Facebook page.
Photographs of two of the caves, together with illustrations of some of the Pictish carvings, can be found in a blogpost I wrote last year: Pictish carvings at the Wemyss Caves.
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This fabulous monument is a fairly recent addition to Scotland’s corpus of Dark Age sculpture, having been discovered only three years ago. It was unearthed in a field at Dandaleith Farm near Craigellachie in Moray and, after conservation work, is now on display in Elgin Museum.
It stands 1.7 metres tall and is a typical example of a “Class I” stone, being adorned with Pictish symbols but lacking any overtly Christian motifs. The date of carving is probably within the range 550 to 650 AD. Unusually, it has symbols on adjacent faces (or sides) instead of on one face only.
The symbols comprise two pairs: a notched rectangle & Z-rod below a mirror (or mirror-case); and a crescent & V-rod below an eagle. All four symbols are known from other stones elsewhere across the former territory of the Picts. The meaning of Pictish symbols remains a mystery and continues to spark lively debate in various quarters (including several threads at this blog). I’m inclined to interpret these enigmatic designs as names, seeing those in pairs as patronyms or matronyms, i.e. “X, the son (or daughter) of Y”. If this is the correct interpretation, the pairings could represent a Pictish equivalent of the Christian memorial inscriptions (written in Latin) on contemporary stones outside the Pictish lands, examples of which are found in southern Scotland, Wales and England.
I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more about the Dandaleith Stone in the near future. Its discovery raises many interesting questions that archaeologists will want to answer. For whom was it carved and what purpose did it serve? Was it a memorial to the dead or did it mark a boundary? Was there a Pictish settlement nearby or did the stone stand alone in its immediate landscape?
We shall have to wait and see. In the meantime, here are some links to further information:
Elgin Museum archaeological collections [look out for the Dandaleith Stone in one of the photographs]
Aberdeenshire Council: Sites & Monuments Record
National treasure: Museum to unveil rare Pictish Dandaleith Stone
Archaeologist try to unlock secrets of Pictish find
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A note on the illustration
Having not yet visited the Dandaleith Stone I don’t have any photographs to put at the top of this blogpost. I merely offer a very rough sketch, using a simple outline technique (I cannot claim any artistic talent whatsoever). My points of reference were photographs and drawings found online, none of which are in the public domain so I couldn’t reproduce them here. I should add that my intention was to evoke the style of John Romilly Allen (1847-1907) who produced so many fine illustrations of Pictish stones for his and Joseph Anderson’s magisterial ECMS (The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland, published in 1903). The result of my efforts is little more than a homage to Allen’s brilliantly effective artwork. On a personal level it helps me to imagine how the Dandaleith Stone might have appeared in ECMS if it had been discovered in 1813 rather than 200 years later.
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Senchus 