Market Cross, Main Street, Longforgan

For about two hundred years this cross was not in the village at all. Towards the end of the eighteenth century it was removed from Longforgan and set up in the policies of Castle Huntly — the landscaped grounds around the house — where it stood as an ornament rather than as the marker of a burgh’s market rights. It was not returned to Main Street until 1989.

The cross itself is sandstone and belongs to the later seventeenth century: a slim column with a Corinthian capital, standing on a corniced square pedestal above a wide octagonal base, with a lion on top. Such a cross was a burgh’s licence to trade rendered in stone, and the fixed point at which official business was announced aloud, so its position in the street was the whole purpose of it.

Its attribution rests on a family likeness. It is presumed to have been erected by Patrick Lyon, third Earl of Kinghorne and first Earl of Strathmore, who inherited the Huntly Castle estate in about 1660 and put up a similar cross at Glamis. Nothing on the stone itself names him; the pairing with the Glamis cross is the evidence.

Two centuries of weather in the castle grounds have told on it. The capital and the lion above are described as considerably weathered, so the carving that would once have made the cross legible from the street is now indistinct.

The cross was formerly Scheduled Ancient Monument number 1648, scheduled on 12 March 1963 and descheduled on 12 May 2016, when its protection transferred to the listing. It is described by Lawrence Melville in The Fair Land of Gowrie of 1939 and recorded in the Old Statistical Account of 1797 — the latter written while the cross was, or was about to be, away from the village.