Tim Clarkson's Blog, page 7

Saints in Scottish Place-Names

Ancient chapel and cross at Keills in Knapdale, beside Loch Sween. Photograph by Erskine Beveridge in The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland (1903).

A research project in the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow has produced a fascinating online resource: a searchable database of hagiotoponyms in Scotland. Hagiotoponyms are place-names that commemorate saints. They are found all over the Scottish landscape as names of old parishes, medieval churches, holy wells and standing sto...

NOSAS Archaeology Blog

Pictish symbol stone from Rhynie Kirk, Aberdeenshire (drawing by John Romilly Allen in ECMS, 1903)

An excellent online resource for Scottish archaeology appeared this year. The blog of the North of Scotland Archaeological Society (NOSAS) is the place to go for updates on current excavations and other projects in the Highlands. It started in July and is already a treasure trove of fascinating information.

Unsurprisingly, the Picts turn up in several blogposts, of which the ones listed below are...

Brunanburh in 937: Bromborough or Lanchester?

Athelstan, king of the English (924-39), in a manuscript of Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert.

Last Thursday evening (4th December) the eminent philologist Andrew Breeze gave a lecture to the Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries at their headquarters in London. His main topic was the battle of Brunanburh, fought in 937, one of the most famous events of the Viking Age. The victor was the English king Athelstan who thwarted an alliance of Norsemen, Scots and Strathclyde Britons. Frustratingly, the sit...

Dunblane’s ‘Late Pictish’ cross-slab

Early medieval cross-slab in Dunblane Cathedral (© B Keeling)

Two early medieval carved stones were discovered at Dunblane Cathedral during restoration work in the late nineteenth century. One is a broken rectangular slab with carved patterns along one edge only, the rest being unadorned. The other is a fully ornamented cross-slab, with carvings on front and back. Both stones were found under a staircase in the Lady Chapel or Chapter House but can now be seen at the west end of the North Aisle...

More on the Dumfriesshire hoard

Derek McLennan recently sent me a copy of the December issue of The Searcher which has an article on his discovery of the hoard. The Searcher is a magazine for the metal-detecting community and hadn’t popped up on my radar before. I found it very interesting nonetheless, not least because many of the articles move beyond the technical aspects of the hobby to discuss broader archaeological and historical themes.

The article on the hoard gives a detailed account of how Derek found it in a Dumfri...

The English invasion of Strathclyde

A thirteenth-century depiction of Edmund, king of Wessex (939-946)

In 945, the English king Edmund – a grandson of Alfred the Great – launched a devastating raid on the territory of the Strathclyde Britons. Contemporary annalists noted the event in their chronicle entries and some of these brief reports have survived (more or less) in later texts. Last month I wrote a short article on Edmund’s campaign for the website of History Scotland magazine. This is now online and can be accessed via the...

Dumfriesshire Viking Hoard – update

This is a follow-up to a blogpost from last month, in which I wrote about the discovery of a major hoard of Viking treasure in South West Scotland.

Among the items is a small Carolingian (Frankish) pot with its lid still in place. This fascinating object was CT scanned earlier this week, to give the archaeologists an idea of what it contains. Only after this kind of preliminary investigation will the pot be opened and emptied so that its contents can be examined individually.

I am grateful to...

New book on the Viking period

My fifth book on early medieval Scotland was published this week.

Strathclyde and the Anglo-Saxons in the Viking Age traces the history of relations between the Cumbri or North Britons and their English neighbours through the eighth to eleventh centuries AD. It looks at the wars, treaties and other high-level dealings that characterised this volatile relationship. Woven into the story are the policies and ambitions of other powers, most notably the Scots and Vikings, with whom both the North B...

Viking treasure found in Dumfriesshire

Funeral of a Viking Warrior by Charles Ernest Butler (1864-1933)

This story will already be old news to some readers of this blog, having been well-reported on social media in recent weeks. But it’s an important item, so I’ll give it a quick mention here.

Last month, a metal detectorist found a hoard of treasure in a Dumfriesshire field. Among the 100+ objects of silver and gold were brooches, armbands, a decorated cross and a Frankish pot. The hoard was buried in the ninth or tenth century and...

Antonine Wall website

The Antonine Wall at Rough Castle near Bonnybridge (© B Keeling)

A new website for the Antonine Wall was launched last month, giving this famous Roman monument some well-deserved publicity by promoting it as a major heritage attraction. With fewer surviving traces than Hadrian’s Wall – most of which was constructed in stone – the turf-built Antonine frontier is a less visible feature of the landscape. In some places the remains of its ancient, grass-covered earthworks blend with the surroundin...