Scone Palace / Scone Abbey

Forty-two Kings of Scots were made kings on a mound at Scone, and the mound may have been built out of Scotland itself.

The tradition holds that nobles swore fealty to their king while carrying the earth of their own lands in their boots, or standing on soil brought from home — which is why the Moot Hill is also called Boot Hill, and why it is supposed to have grown from the contributions of the whole kingdom. Whether or not any of that is true in fact, the symbolism is exact: a king taking his oath there was standing on all of his country at once.

The list of men inaugurated here runs from Kenneth MacAlpin, traditionally the first King of Scots, through Macbeth and Robert the Bruce to Charles II, who accepted the Scottish crown at Scone in 1651. Nobody, it was held, had a right to reign as king of Scots unless he had first been crowned here upon the Stone of Scone. In 1296 Edward I removed that stone to Westminster Abbey and had the Coronation Chair built specially to fit over it — an act of appropriation whose meaning nobody at the time can have missed. Robert the Bruce was crowned at Scone anyway, ten years later. The Stone is now in Perth Museum.

Scone was not only where kings were made. In 906 King Constantine II called an assembly here, recorded in the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba: Constantine and Bishop Cellach met at the Hill of Belief near the royal city and pledged that the laws and disciplines of the faith, and the laws of churches and gospels, should be kept. That gathering is counted as the first Parliament of Scotland. For centuries afterwards Scone was where the kingdom crowned its rulers and where it made its law, and it served besides as a royal residence and hunting ground. Robert II spent most of his life calling it home and was buried in the abbey, though his grave has never been found.

Even the name is contested in an interesting way. Written across ten centuries as Scon, Scoon, Schone, Skune, Sgàin and a dozen other forms, it has resisted etymology. The likeliest derivation is from the P-Celtic word sken, meaning cut or cutting, later gaelicised as Sgàin — which would make the name Pictish in origin and its Gaelic form a later overlay, a small linguistic record of two cultures meeting. Modern analysis of place-names in eastern Scotland supports a Brittonic rather than a Gaelic root, and that matters for the site’s history: it suggests why Kenneth MacAlpin chose an existing Pictish centre for his capital rather than founding a new one.

The abbey came later. From 1114 to 1559 Scone was one of Scotland’s major religious houses, formalised by a charter of Alexander I, and between 1284 and 1402 it frequently housed the Parliament of Scotland — sometimes under the name the Palace of the Abbots. Its seal and a few surviving architectural fragments show a Romanesque church with a central tower and spire.

It ended abruptly. In 1559, in the early days of the Reformation, a mob came out from Dundee at the urging of John Knox and largely destroyed the abbey. The stone cross that had marked the Moot Hill through the Middle Ages disappeared around the same time. Nothing of the abbey now stands above ground level except detached fragments.

The estates went in 1580 to Lord Ruthven, later Earl of Gowrie, who rebuilt the Abbot’s Palace as a grand residence. Twenty years later James VI charged the Ruthvens with treason and handed Scone to Sir David Murray of Gospetrie, one of his most loyal followers, and the Murrays have held it ever since — a branch of the Murrays of Tullibardine whose original seat was Balvaird Castle, and which produced William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench.

What stands now is the work of the 3rd Earl, who commissioned William Atkinson in 1802 to recast the late sixteenth-century palace while keeping the character of the medieval Gothic abbey buildings underneath it. The result, in red sandstone with a castellated roof, was largely complete by 1807, and its Long Gallery is the best known room in it. The earl kept accounts and kept perspective: in 1808 he noted that much as the place had cost him, some £60,000, and much as it would still cost, it more than answered their expectation, and had given the family a handsome and agreeable residence.

John Claudius Loudon landscaped the grounds, and further work was done in 1842 to prepare Scone for a visit from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The palace is Category A listed, and it and its grounds — with a collection of fir trees and a star-shaped maze — are open to the public. The Moot Hill is still there, a low green mound beside a great house, which is a modest thing for a place where a nation decided who its kings would be.