Dupplin Cross

Almost everything carved by the Picts is dated by comparison with something else. The Dupplin Cross is the exception, and that is why it matters out of all proportion to its size.

Cut into the stone is an inscription of which very little can now be read. What survives is four words: CUSTANTIN FILIUS FIRCUS. That is the Latin form of Caustantin son of Fergus, a Pictish king who flourished between about 793 and 820, and it means the cross was carved during his reign or shortly after it. One dated monument in a body of undated sculpture becomes the point everything else is measured against.

The inscription carries a second piece of information almost incidentally. The father’s name is given as Fergus — the Gaelic form — inside a Latin text. Gaelic was therefore in use among the people who commissioned this stone, at a place and date where that could not otherwise be demonstrated.

The cross stood on a hillside in Strathearn, a short way north of Forteviot and Dunning and across the River Earn from both. Forteviot was a royal centre, so the monument was raised within sight of the power that paid for it, on ground where it would be seen from the seat of Pictish kingship.

It is a high cross: a free-standing stone cross, as opposed to a slab with a cross cut into its face. That distinction is worth making because it is the rarer form here. High crosses are relatively common in Ireland, in Northumbria and in Dal Riata, the Gaelic kingdom of the western seaboard, but among the Picts they barely survive at all. Broken fragments show that others once stood and were probably thrown down during the Reformation of the sixteenth century. One of them was still remembered in the eighteenth: the Cross of Dronachy, recorded on the lands of Invermay south of Forteviot, already fallen and broken by the time anyone wrote it down. Its base is still in place. No record says what the cross above it looked like.

The Dupplin Cross is carved from Old Red Sandstone and stands about 2.5 metres high and a metre across the arms. The carving runs to three kinds of subject at once — religious, martial, and the animal work that is the signature of Pictish sculpture — and it makes no attempt to keep them apart.

Some of the individual scenes are unmistakable in intent. A mounted figure has a head far too large for his body and wears a ponytail; both are conventions marking a man of authority, not errors of proportion. On the obverse, a man fights bears with his bare hands. One side carries a harper, most probably David, along with hunting dogs. A king, a warrior, a psalmist and a hunt, arranged on the four faces of a single stone, is a reasonably complete statement of what a Pictish ruler wished to be understood as.

Thomas Pennant recorded the cross in 1769 on his tour of Scotland, and it stayed where it was for another two hundred and thirty years. In 2002 it passed into the care of Historic Scotland and was moved indoors, to stand under the eleventh or twelfth-century tower of St Serf’s Church at Dunning. Twelve centuries of Perthshire weather had done what weather does to sandstone, and the inscription that makes the monument valuable is the part most easily lost.