Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 148

In 1999, the late Professor Charles Thomas donated a Middle Bronze Age spearhead to the National Museum collection. This spearhead came with a label indicating that it was part of the pennant taken into the Battle of Flodden by Robert Chisholme in 1513. This paper investigates the likelihood that such a claimed association could have any basis in truth, as well as briefly contributing some thoughts on the discovery of already ancient objects in the past.

The key to understanding a landscape is through its connections, which tie together people and environment within and beyond that landscape and across many different periods. This is particularly true of the northern face of the Ochil Hills in central Scotland, which is characterised by dense networks of connections between lowlands and uplands, local and regional. To trace those connections we integrate the results of walkover survey, aerial archaeology, excavations, documentary analysis and place name analysis, revealing significant continuities and differences in the networks and relationships that have connected this landscape across time and space. Iron Age hillforts used their prominence and monumentality to guide people along very specific routes across the Ochils. Regular seasonal movements of cattle and herders in the medieval and post-medieval periods were closely related to the agriculture and settlement they encountered on the way: this interaction can be clearly seen in the elaborate intertwining of paths, braided cattle tracks, farmsteads and enclosures, most strikingly in the 18th century. Such intricate connections across the landscape are equally keyed in to the specifics of particular locations and to much broader networks and historical change.

Eighteen early medieval carved stone fragments (Applecross 5.1–5.18) were recently recovered from Applecross, Wester Ross, Scotland, a site that functioned as an important ecclesiastical centre in the early medieval period. These 18 fragments join a pre-existing collection of monuments and other carved stones at Applecross, including three fragments (Applecross 1, 2 and 3) that together likely belonged to the same cross-slab. Both the Applecross slab (Applecross 1–3) and the newly discovered fragments are decorated with relief-carved, geometric ornament common to early medieval Britain and Ireland, including interlace, key and step patterns, and are of exceptional workmanship. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the patterns, which reveals that at least 16 of the 18 new fragments also belonged to the same monument as Applecross 1–3. In particular, the author has applied a new, artist-focused, artwork-centred approach to the study of key pattern and its structure, drawn from her doctoral research of this type of ornament. Through close physical analysis of the internal symmetry of individual spiral units and the negative (carved-out) lines in these key patterns, it is possible to identify where the new fragments were located on the Applecross monument, as well as their orientation within it. Furthermore, detailed analysis of the patterns’ negative lines confirms that Applecross was linked to Nigg and likely also to Rosemarkie – two contemporary, high-status, Pictish ecclesiastical sites in Easter Ross – and that a single carver or team produced stone sculpture in all three places. The Nigg cross-slab and Rosemarkie’s collection of carved stones are widely recognised as amongst the finest in the Pictish corpus, and the Applecross fragments rival them in their supreme, virtuoso quality. This is the first concrete evidence for a single Pictish artistic hand on multiple artworks – a master carver or expert team whose oeuvre spanned both Easter and Wester Ross and who created some of the greatest surviving art-historical monuments in Britain.

The identification and dating of a supposed Norse grave slab of 10th-/11th-century date from Jarlshof, Shetland, consisting of two decorated fragments picked up on the beach beside this multi-period settlement site in the 1930s, are rejected by the authors of this paper in favour of a Pictish attribution, a late 6th- or early 7th-century date, and a probable architectural function. On the basis of a detailed examination of the two fragments of the so-called 'Jarlshof Serpent' (front and back), alternative reconstructions of the incised motifs are considered, leading to the conclusion that they probably represent a hybrid in the form of a horse-headed serpentine creature with the body conventionally decorated in the manner of the Pictish salmon symbol. The use of such hybrid symbols by the Picts, as well as the growing evidence for their erection of symbol stones in association with structures, are discussed. The paper ends with a brief consideration of the implications of this reattribution for the traditional 'minimalist' interpretation of the Pictish settlement-phase at Jarlshof.

John Stuart, duke of Albany was born in France, but acted as Regent of Scotland from 1514 until 1524. He visited Scotland three times and, in the early years of his regency, is credited with bringing a degree of stability back to Scottish governance during an otherwise troubled political period. Albany was also noteworthy for his love of visual splendour and magnificence. In France, he was an astute patron of the visual arts, commissioning a number of important manuscripts and architectural projects, such as the Sainte-Chapelle at Vic-le-Comte in the Auvergne. Albany’s main architectural achievement in Scotland was the fortification and extension his principal residence, Dunbar Castle, in the form of a great artillery blockhouse: perhaps the first such structure to have been built in the British Isles. The plan of the blockhouse appears to follow the basic form of a contemporary Italian angle bastion. The fortification earned a formidable reputation during this period, contemporary commentators noting that it was impregnable. Further evidence supporting the idea that Albany was greatly interested in Italian developments in military science come in the survival of a working sketch, now held in the Uffizi, Florence, which bears a note in the writing of the famed military architect, Antonio Sangallo the Younger, that it was undertaken ‘following the opinion of the Duke of Albany.’ The sketch shows a square fort protected by a ravelin. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between these two pieces of evidence, to investigate what they tell us of Albany and of his interest in military science, and to demonstrate how such ideas were introduced into Scotland and then fed back into architectural and military discourse on the Continent.

The anti-invasion defences of the Second World War are still a prominent part of the modern landscape (Barclay 2013). The defences built during the First World War are, however, less well known. Some of these, indeed, have been misidentified as having been built in the later war, and many places were defended in both conflicts. Even less well known are the defences planned, and in some cases built, between 1900 and 1914, as set out in the Army’s ‘Defence Schemes’ for Scotland, and in the records of individual coast defence batteries. This paper sets out the plans to defend two adjacent parts of Scotland between 1900 and 1919, the coasts of the Tay and Forth estuaries, in the wider context of the defence of the UK.