Meigle Sculptured Stone Museum

On 28 March 1869 the old church at Meigle burned down. William Galloway went into the ruins immediately afterwards and pulled out the carved stones. Twenty-seven of them now stand in the village schoolhouse of 1844, a few hundred yards away, and they are the reason anyone comes to Meigle at all.

They were all found here — in the neighbouring churchyard, or built into the fabric of the church that burned. That concentration is itself an argument. Nobody carves twenty-seven monuments for a place of no consequence, so there was an important church at Meigle, and quite possibly a monastery. One early record supports it: Thana, son of Dudabrach, is recorded working at Meigle, written Migdele, in the middle of the ninth century during the reign of King Pherath. He was most likely a monk serving as a scribe, in a house that may have been founded a century earlier.

About a third of the stones are Class II — carved in relief, bearing symbols and usually a Christian cross. Most date from the ninth or tenth century and were made as tombstones. The dead they commemorate are the Pictish warrior aristocracy, and the stones show them as they wished to be remembered: armed, or hunting.

The carving has a local accent. Meigle work favours aggressive biting beasts, fills its crosses with a diagonal key pattern, and rounds the heads of its cross-slabs. Some elements show Northumbrian influence, so the workshop was aware of what was being cut further south without simply copying it. The material is local old red sandstone, soft enough to take very fine detail and correspondingly quick to erode. The carvers used iron chisels, punches and hammers along with hammerstones and wooden mallets, and the designs may have been taken from painted vellum pattern books.

Two stones stand out, and they used to stand facing each other at the northern entrance to the churchyard. Meigle 1 may be the oldest here, perhaps carved in the late eighth century — but the Picts were not the first to use it. It had been a standing stone two thousand years before they touched it, and the cup and ring marks of that earlier use survive low on the back. Its cross is Greek in form, with full circles where the shaft meets the arms, filled with interlace and spiralled at the crossing point. The other face is an uncoordinated jumble arranged around a hunting scene, and among the figures are a winged figure that may represent a Persian deity and a kneeling camel.

Meigle 2 is nearly 2.5 metres high and the work of a master. The figures are cut in deep relief and arranged in order, not crowded. The head of its cross is unique and was probably modelled on a jewelled metal cross; the projecting boss at its centre is ringed by eight smaller ones, most likely the eight days of Passion Week from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday. Three pairs of animals face each other down the shaft with tails and tongues interlaced. Tenons project from the top and sides, so the slab was made to slot into a screen or a wall.

The other face shows Daniel in the lions’ den, with a mounted huntsman and two hounds above, an angel hovering over the dogs, and a procession of four horsemen — three of them leading a fourth marked out by a large saddlecloth.

Local folklore reads that scene differently. It holds that the figure among the beasts is Guinevere, known here as Vanora, abducted by Mordred and condemned by Arthur to be torn apart by wild animals, and that the grass mound in front of which Meigle 1 and Meigle 2 stood is her grave. Some of the stones appear to have been trimmed and placed near the mound in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to decorate it — which means the folklore is old enough to have rearranged the monuments.

The collection runs well past those two. Meigle 22 is a fragment of architectural frieze with a cross-legged figure whose entwined legs end in fish-tails, flanked by two clawed animals, read either as a siren or as a Pictish version of the Celtic god Cernunnos. Meigle 25 is a hogback tombstone of the late tenth century, its sloping sides carved as concave roof-tiles and its ridge as an elongated beast that ends in a fish’s tail, with clear links to early hogbacks from around Glasgow. Meigle 26 is an exceptionally fine recumbent gravestone with a socket at one end for a vertical cross, three coiled snakes at its head, twelve bosses at its middle, two sea-horses facing each other at its foot, a hunting scene and a griffin along one side, and along the other a corpse being consumed by two beasts.

Not everything survived. Local records say eight stones were lost before the end of the nineteenth century, Meigle 10 and Meigle 24 among them. Several of the survivors are only parts of larger monuments, and it is likely that other fragments are still in the churchyard soil or in the walls of buildings around the village.

Sir George Kinloch, the local laird, bought the schoolhouse towards the end of the nineteenth century for the express purpose of protecting the stones. The museum passed into state ownership in 1936, was renovated after the Second World War and reopened in 1949. The building itself is Category C listed — which is a modest designation for a house holding one of the most important collections of Pictish sculpture anywhere.