The Clach a' CharridhorShandwick Stone is a Class II Pictish stone located near Shandwick on the Tarbat peninsulainEaster Ross, Scotland. It is a scheduled monument.[1] Since 1988 it has been encased in a glass cover room.
It is a Class II stone, with a jewelled cross studded with 54 raised spiral bosses on the top half of one side and various Pictish symbols on the reverse.[2]
On the face beneath the arms of the cross there are four-winged cherubim in frames either side of the cross-shaft. Beneath these are indeterminate beasts above interlaced serpent-like creatures. At the bottom, beneath the cross are two double-discs each composed of two pairs of serpents whose upper bodies form the rim of a disc with their lower bodies interlaced together in the centre of the other disc of the pair.
The reverse contains four full-width panels above a 2 x 2 arrangement of panels at the bottom (but the bottom 2 half-width panels are now hidden). The top panel shows a Pictish double-disc with (mostly) triple-spiral decoration. The second panel shows a large Pictish Beast with three small animals: two horned sheep and another quadruped with a long tail. The third panel is usually referred to as a hunting scene. It shows a large assortment of men and animals with three of the men mounted on horses hunting a stag; two men on foot fighting each other with swords while holding shields; and a man with a peaked cap firing a bow at a stag. The fourth panel contains 52 triple-spirals in concentric circles. The bottom 2 x 2 panels contain circular knotwork and interlace.
The earliest published record of the stone is in Rev Charles Cordiner's Antiquities and Scenery of the North of Scotland, in a series of Letters to Thomas Pennant, London, 1780 where the reverse side is illustrated. The next published record is a paper by Charles Petley (1780 - 1830) written c.1811-2, delivered posthumously to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1831 and published in 1857[3]. This illustrates both faces of the stone, with the cross-face referred to as "west" and the reverse as "east" (see the accompanying plate showing the reverse). The paper includes these statements:
The length of the cross on the west side in 5 feet 7 inches. It is supposed that the workmanship of this is much more modern than that of the east side...
The stone fell in a storm in 1846[4] and was re-erected. Today the cross faces east towards the sea and the Pictish symbols face west over the land.
The Gaelic name (Clach a’ Charaidh) means ‘stone of the grave-plots’. A burial ground here was recorded in 1889 as last used during the cholera epidemic of 1832 and ploughed under about 1885.[5]
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| Caithness |
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| Ross |
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| Badenoch and Strathspey |
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| Moray |
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| Inverness |
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| Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire |
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| Angus |
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| Perth and Kinross |
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| Fife |
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| Orkney |
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| Shetland |
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57°44′51″N 3°55′29″W / 57.74750°N 3.92472°W / 57.74750; -3.92472
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