Crosses and crimes

This trip we have been hunting down things Pictish, the painted people in Scottish history, and lo! without even searching we stumbled across the most beautiful specimen in a deconsecrated church just a few hundred metres from a charming pond-fishing farm where we have been camping for the last three nights, just outside of Perth. 

For nearly 1200 years the Dupplin Cross, a heavily decorated Pictish cross, one of the most beautiful of its kind found in Scotland, lay in a field on a hillside overlooking the Pictish palace at Forteviot, near Dunning, near where we were camped. When weathering from acid rain threatened to destroy the face of this priceless piece the authorities lifted it, took it to Edinburgh to be cleansed and stabilised, then set it up in St Serf's Church at Dunning, just down the road from where it had stood outdoors for all those hundreds of years. 

Academics and scholars galore have poured over this stone, its abstract designs, its animal representations, and its kingly references. But only recently, using a technique with infra red light to enhance viewing, one of the dedicated scholars determined that what was previously thought to be a blank panel at the heart of the stone, actually held inscriptions, in Latin, nearly eaten away with age, which when eventually deciphered, revealed that the panel, and the cross, honoured Constantine, son of Fergus, and king of the Picts until AD820. An amazing dating.

Constantine is important in Scottish history as he was the first Pictish king to rule not only the Picts from North and east Scotland, but, for the last ten years of his reign, he also ruled the Scots of Argyll. Bringing the two together. 

Early the morning we visited we were given virtually a private tour of the features of this important cross, and the church, by an extremely enthusiastic member of Historic Scotland.  He couldn't have been more knowledgeable, more obliging, or more informative.  It's always a delight to come across someone like this as we travel. 

Later, in a little village called Meikleour we almost drove into an ancient mercat cross set up right in the middle of the street, circa 1698. 

But in a field, tucked behind a hedge, barely visible these days from the road, we found, quite accidentally, an old stone pillar. This, we discovered, once bore the old scales used for weighing the produce bought to market.  But, more ominously, attached by a short chain to the front face of the pillar, was an old set of iron jougs. 

Jougs were restraints, like handcuffs, for offences of either a civil and ecclesiastical nature. But, usually offenders in jougs were collared by the irons, padlocked in, there to be shamed in public until justice was seen to be done. 

Mayhap, how the term, 'in the jug', came about, for imprisonment. 

And on the edge of Meikleour, we found the tallest hedge we have yet seen, planted by the Marquis of Lansdowne, in 1746. Beech. Today it is over 100 foot high. Quite stunning. 

Honestly, when they start these gardening passions do these noblemen ever think of the poor old hedge clipper folk? Yikes.

The beautiful Pictish Dupplin Cross 

Tells tales of the King of the Picts

Old iron jougs, or handcuffs, attached to this stone pillar

Over 100 feet high beech hedge

Meikleour mercat cross