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Carved stone · Pictish & early medieval · Aberdeenshire

Lang Stane of Auquhollie

Open access · About 45 min · Moderate walking

Photo: Stanley Howe / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0Got a better photo of Lang Stane of Auquhollie?

Carved in Ogam — an alphabet devised for Irish, not Pictish, speech — the stone has anchored more than a century of scholarly argument over how far Irish influence reached into Pictish Scotland.

Straight and diagonal Ogam strokes run along one edge of the grey gneiss Lang Stane of Auquhollie, a nearly three-metre monolith rising from the south-facing slope of Meikle Carew Hill. The stone was never dressed or shaped: it was set upright with its inscription cut into the edge rather than across its face.

No record explains when the stone was raised or who cut its inscription. What is documented instead is more than a century of scholarly attention paid to those markings. In 1885 the Earl of Southesk published the first detailed study of the stone’s Ogam in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, discussing it alongside the Brodie Stone in Moray as evidence of the same script reaching separate corners of Pictish territory. Nearly forty years later the philologist Francis C. Diack returned to the inscription, setting it within a full survey of every Ogam-carved stone then known in Scotland.

The debate those two papers opened has continued since. Irish and Scottish scholars — Eoin MacNeill, Jürgen Uhlich, Katherine Forsyth and Dauvit Broun among them — have each returned to the same handful of carved strokes, using the Auquhollie stone as evidence in a wider argument over how far Irish literacy and influence reached into Pictish Aberdeenshire. Historic Environment Scotland now records the stone as monument NO89SW 10, and the Celtic Inscribed Stones Project holds it in a database built to keep such arguments answerable to the stones themselves.

What follows is drawn from published sources, with each claim labelled by how firmly it is established.

History

No record survives of when the stone on Meikle Carew Hill was raised, or of who cut the row of notches and lines along its edge. What survives is the monolith itself, an untrimmed block of gneiss shaped only by nature, standing above the ground toward Stonehaven long before any antiquarian took an interest in its markings. In 1885 the Earl of Southesk published the first detailed study of the inscription, pairing it in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland with the Ogam-carved Brodie Stone in Moray, the two monuments treated together as evidence of the same script reaching separate parts of the Pictish north-east.

Nearly four decades later, between 1924 and 1925, the philologist Francis C. Diack returned to the stone in a paper for the same Proceedings, titled "The Old-Celtic Inscribed and Sculptured Stone at Auquhollie, Kincardineshire, and Ogam in Scotland," placing the monument within a wider survey of every known Ogam inscription in the country.

Between 1929 and 1931 the Irish scholar Eoin MacNeill examined the Auquhollie inscription's letter forms alongside other early Ogam texts in a study of archaic spellings for the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, using the stone as part of the evidence for how the script had first been adapted to record Irish speech. In 1989 Jürgen Uhlich revisited the same letters in the journal Ériu, focusing on a single disputed sound value in the inscription and showing how much of the wider debate over Ogam in Scotland still turned on the reading of individual strokes cut into stones such as this one long before any consensus had been reached.

The argument reached a wider audience in 2005, when the historian Dauvit Broun cited the stone in a paper asking whether early Scotland, Alba, should be understood as a Pictish homeland or an Irish offshoot, drawing on Katherine Forsyth's then-unpublished doctoral research into Scotland's Ogam inscriptions to weigh how far Irish literacy had penetrated Pictish territory.

Today the stone is recorded by Historic Environment Scotland as monument NO89SW 10 and separately catalogued by the Celtic Inscribed Stones Project, keeping it within reach of researchers still working through the readings first proposed by Southesk and Diack more than a century ago.

People

  • Earl of Southesk

    Published the first detailed study of the stone's Ogam inscription in 1885, in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

  • Francis C. Diack

    Philologist who reassessed the inscription and its Kincardineshire context in a paper published across 1924 and 1925.

  • Eoin MacNeill

    Irish scholar who examined the stone's letter forms as part of a wider study of archaic Ogam spellings between 1929 and 1931.

  • Jürgen Uhlich

    Revisited the inscription's disputed letter values in a 1989 study published in the journal Ériu.

  • Dauvit Broun

    Historian who cited the stone in a 2005 paper on the relationship between Pictish and Irish culture in early Scotland.

  • Katherine Forsyth

    Scholar of Pictish and Ogam inscriptions whose unpublished doctoral research examined the stone.

Cultural influences

  • Ogam and Irish literacy

    The inscription is part of the wider use of Ogam in early medieval Scotland, a script adapted for Irish whose presence on this Pictish stone has made it central to debates about cultural contact and literacy.

Connections

  • Brodie Stone, Moray

    Studied together with the Auquhollie stone in the Earl of Southesk's 1885 paper on the Ogam inscriptions of both monuments.

  • Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland

    Published both the Earl of Southesk's 1885 study and Francis Diack's 1924-1925 reassessment of the stone's inscription.

  • Celtic Inscribed Stones Project

    Catalogues the Auquhollie stone alongside other Ogam and Celtic inscribed stones from Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the Isle of Man.

  • Historic Environment Scotland national record (Canmore)

    Records the stone as monument NO89SW 10 within Scotland's national database of archaeological sites.

What to look for

  • The Ogam inscription

    A row of notches and lines cut along one edge of the stone, using Ogam, an alphabet built from straight and diagonal strokes rather than conventional letters.

  • The unshaped monolith

    An untrimmed block of gneiss, roughly three metres tall and three-quarters of a metre across, left in its natural rough form rather than dressed or carved.

  • Its hillside setting

    Positioned on the south-facing slope of Meikle Carew Hill at about 140 metres above sea level, overlooking the surrounding Kincardineshire countryside toward Stonehaven.

Plan your visit

Location
57.0053°N · 2.2897°W
Nearest settlement
Stonehaven
Access
Open access
Terrain
Moderate walking
Time needed
About 45 minutes
Best time
Dry, clear daylight, when the carved edge and the hillside setting can be examined safely.
What survives
An upright, unshaped gneiss monolith about three metres high, with Ogam cut along one edge.
Facilities
No visitor facilities are recorded on the hillside.

Opening & admission

No admission charge applies; check Historic Environment Scotland's website for the latest visitor information before travelling.

  • The stone stands on a hillside at around 140 metres above sea level, so reaching it involves a climb over open ground.

Nearby places

The setting

  • Lane and pasture by Rumbleyond Burn, near the Lang Stane of Auquhollie.

    Photo: Stanley Howe / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0

  • Pasture and Rumbleyond Burn near the Lang Stane of Auquhollie.

    Photo: Stanley Howe / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0

Questions people ask

What is the Lang Stane of Auquhollie?
An unshaped standing stone of gneiss, about three metres tall, carved with an Ogam inscription along one edge, standing on Meikle Carew Hill near Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire.
What is Ogam?
An early alphabet developed to write Irish, made up of straight and diagonal strokes cut along the edge of a stone rather than letters carved on its face.
Where exactly is the stone located?
On the south side of Meikle Carew Hill, about 140 metres above sea level, roughly six kilometres north-west of Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire.
Why has the stone attracted scholarly attention?
Its Ogam inscription has fed a long debate over how far Irish literacy and influence reached into Pictish Scotland, discussed from the Earl of Southesk in 1885 to Dauvit Broun in 2005.
Is the stone officially recorded as a monument?
Yes. Historic Environment Scotland records it as monument NO89SW 10, and it is also catalogued by the Celtic Inscribed Stones Project.

Sources

  1. Wikipedia: Lang Stane of Auquhollie
  2. Historic Environment Scotland — Canmore
  3. Celtic Inscribed Stones Project (CISP)
  4. Diack, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1924-1925)
  5. Southesk, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1885)
  6. Broun, "Alba: Pictish homeland or Irish offshoot?" (2005)

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