Guest Blog by Kenneth McIntosh

On a clear August day, I set out with my wife and sister from Inverness to Rosemarkie, stopping at the Groam House museum, which houses the Rosemarkie Stone. It’s displayed in the middle of a room, well lit, allowing close inspection, and the watchful eye of an attendant ensures its preservation. This is a common way of preserving Pictish stones—a great many are safe in museums. The one downside to this is that it has been removed from its original setting, and the placement of ancient monuments is often integral to their meaning and artistic form.

We then proceeded to the tip of the Cromarty Peninsula and took the wee ferry boat across the firth to Nigg. This was one of the more exciting bits of the day, because we had to back our rental  car down a narrow ramp without barriers on its sides, in order to set its wheels back onto Terra Firma. Thank goodness we had rented a Mini—I fear anything larger would have wound up in the drink.

The next stone is in the Nigg church—a wing of the sanctuary having been build around the monument where it has stood from ancient times. The church was unlocked and we let ourselves in. The Nigg Stone is an artistic tour-de-force; it’s been called the closest representation in stone to the great illuminated manuscripts of the Early Middle Ages. It is a cross slab, and its place in the chapel speaks of the connections between Christians in that locale for more than 1,200 years. This means of preservation—building a church around an ancient Christian monument—is by no means unique. Again, the stone is well preserved, but is also divorced from its landscape of origin.

From Nigg we drove on to see the Shandwick stone—which is in a field near the roadside, exactly where it has stood for 1,200 years. It is enormous and…encased completely in a huge plexiglass box structure. This does preserve the stone in its original place but it’s hard to view with the glare on the glass, and the modern vessel containing the stone is much more obvious than the ancient monument itself.

We drove just a bit further to Hilton Cadboll. I knew that the original stone is now in the National Museum in Edinburgh, but has been replaced by a stone re-creation in its place. Here, we received a serendipitous delight. Walking down from the carpark to the stone we saw there was a man in motorcycle attire, helmet off, chatting with a small group of very engaged listeners. He was Barry Grove, the artist-mason who spent more than a year of his life in close proximity to the original great monument, carving its re-creation. He probably knows as much as anyone living about the stone, and enthralled us with his interpretations of it, and explanation of stone-cutting artwork. It seems to me that this is a near-perfect way to honor Scotland’s Pictish legacy, preserving the original object indoors while replacing it with a clone in its original location. Unfortunately, it is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor: the replica Hilton-Cadboll stone was made possible by a donation from Glenmorangie distillery, which uses a design from the stone for its signet on whisky bottles.

There is one more bit to this account of Pictish stone preservation, which occurred two weeks later. We made a stop in Aberlemno Scotland, which is about 30 miles north of Saint Andrews, where we viewed five stones—each in its original location—exposed to the elements. Four of these are Type II cross slabs, and one—the ‘serpent stone’—is a more ancient Type I stone carved onto a Neolithic standing stone with cup marks on its back. Another Aberlemno stone, the ‘Roadside Cross Slab’ is remarkably similar on its back side to the Hilton Cadboll stone—with similar figures in similar places and the same arrangement of Pictish symbols. The Aberlemno stones were in a way our most satisfying experience; there’s a real feel of the stones’ power seeing them where they’ve always been, ancient, weathered, bearing witness in the same way they have done for more than a millennium. And yet…I felt almost queasy, seeing places where lichen is growing into the stone (removal would erode the fine carved lines) and realizing that a crazy vandal could destroy over a thousand years of heritage with just a few moments of terrible destruction (there are other sites in the UK which have tragically received such mistreatment).

If you have a day out from Inverness, I highly recommend driving the Easter Ross Pictish trail, and as you view the stones think about the different ways they’ve been conserved. Given the times we live in, I strongly advocate against leaving them in the elements –despite the exchange of energies that I gain from a tete-a-tete with the ancient stones in their ancient place. Otherwise which is better: in a museum, in a church, in a glass case, or a replica in the original location? They each have their reasons—and each of these methods guarantees the survival of Scotland’s Pictish heritage.

Guest blog by:

Kenneth McIntosh

Pastor, Honeoye United Church of Christ

Author, Water from an Ancient Well

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