Wemyss Caves

Wemyss Caves occupy a rare cave setting for Pictish symbols on the edge of Pictland. Comparable symbol-bearing cave sites include Sculptor’s Cave in Moray and Caiplie Caves in Fife. The comparison rests on the carvings themselves rather than on any documented link between the three places: what they share is a symbol vocabulary and a preference for a cave rather than a standing stone, which is what makes the grouping interesting and also what keeps it provisional.

The caves belong to a wider network of coastal places associated with Pictish settlement and practice, including Dunnicaer. A cup-marked cross in Court Cave Passage also resembles early Christian crosses at St Columba’s Cave in Knapdale. That resemblance is a matter of form rather than of recorded contact, and it points at a wider pattern along this coast in which older carved places were reused for Christian marking rather than abandoned or defaced.

Jonathan’s Cave may have been used as a shrine or hermitage, while Well Cave contains a natural spring. Bronze Age activity is suggested by a cup-and-ring mark at Michael Cave and worked stone outside Sliding Cave. Both readings rest on the physical traces alone, since nothing written survives to date either, and they would push use of the caves back well before the symbols that give the site its name — an earlier chapter inferred from marks in stone rather than documented.

Until the nineteenth century Well Cave was the focus of a local custom on Handsel Monday. Visitors drank from St Margaret’s Well, left gifts and carved names into the cave wall, preserving a substantial collection of historic graffiti. The custom is recorded up to the point at which it lapsed, though when or why it stopped is not documented. The graffiti it left behind is now part of what is protected here: names and dates cut by visitors are evidence of the caves' later life, not damage to an earlier one.