PICTISH ARTS SOCIETY LECTURE SYLLABUS 2024–25
Lectures are held on Fridays at 7.30pm (UK time), on Zoom
Friday 18 October 2024
Of Saints and Chariots: Recreating the Skinnet Cross for the Northern Pilgrims’ Way
Jane Coll and David McGovern
The Northern Pilgrims’ Way is a medieval pilgrimage route through the most northerly part of mainland Scotland and across the Pentland Firth to Orkney.
One associated site is St Thomas' Chapel, Skinnet, where a cross-slab with Pictish symbols was discovered built into the wall of the church in 1861. Among its remarkable features is what appears to be the wheel of a chariot, providing a tantalising glimpse into early medieval transportation.
In collaboration with the Northern Pilgrims’ Way Trust, David McGovern is making a reconstruction of the Skinnet Cross, using drawings, photos and photogrammetry to inform the design. Once complete, the cross will be restored to a prominent place in the Caithness landscape.
In this lecture, Jane Coll will introduce the saints, sites and landscapes of the Northern Pilgrims’ Way. David McGovern will discuss the challenges of interpreting the eroded features of the Skinnet Cross, and the new technologies that are giving us deeper insight into Pictish sculpture.
About the speakers
Jane Coll was born in an isolated crofting community with no electricity and no public water supply. Education took her south to Clydebank, but the call of the Highlands was strong and in 1983 in 1983 she and her husband moved to Caithness. Having developed a love of Celtic art alongside a love of the Caithness landscape, Jane was fascinated to discover that early saints and pilgrims had trod ancient paths across the far north of Scotland. In 2019 she co-founded the Northern Pilgrims’ Way Group to re-establish the medieval pilgrimage route between St Duthac's, Tain and St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall.
David McGovern is a professional stone-carver specialising in heritage projects and new public monuments in the Pictish tradition. For many years he wasted his time on a career in international IT before recklessly pursuing his true vocation. His public work can be seen at Forteviot, St Vigeans and Brechin, and imminently at Conon Bridge. David is Vice President of the Pictish Arts Society. His website is www.monikierockart.co.uk.
Friday 15 November 2024
The “Wide and Long Arms of the Sea”: People and the Landscape on the Early Medieval Firths of Southern Scotland
Trevor Wiley
In the eighth century, the Venerable Bede wrote of the Firths of Forth and Clyde in southern Scotland as two of the essential boundaries of his age, separating the Scots and Picts from the Britons and Angles. Over a millennium after Bede, our discussions of the firths and their hinterlands are still shadowed by his descriptions. Our growing body of archaeological evidence is often contextualised within frameworks of Angles, Picts, and Britons.
Recent research across Britain and beyond, however, has emphasised the centrality of waterways in the Early Middle Ages, and new scholarship on plant and animal evidence has the potential to rewrite our understanding of British landscapes.
This paper, drawn from ongoing PhD research, examines the Firths of Forth, Tay, and Clyde as connected spaces through the lens of the landscape in the fifth to eighth centuries. Using an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeological settlement evidence, animal and plant remains, texts and sculptured stone, it examines individual coastal landscapes and their transformations through the post-Roman world.
In doing so, it will argue that we can see considerable commonalities across traditional ethnic frontiers and heartlands, and it will suggest new approaches for examining such communities and their landscapes from the bottom up.
About the speaker
Trevor Wiley is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Boston College, USA, where he is writing a dissertation on changing estuarine landscapes in fifth- to eighth-century southern Scotland. He is particularly interested in frontiers and heartlands, and how early medieval people would have experienced such spaces, as well as how modern people organise and conceptualise them. He records his thoughts on landscape, interdisciplinarity, and the Early Middle Ages on his blog at https://wanderingthebetween.substack.com.
Friday 17 January 2025
Pictish Stirlingshire, the Fords of Forthín and the Old Kilmadock Stone
Dr Murray Cook
Bede described the Forth as the frontier between Pictland and Northumbria. This geopolitical boundary is assumed to date from 685 and the battle of Dún Nechtain. But what did it mean at Stirling? It is clear that Clackmannanshire was a hybrid zone between speakers of Pictish and British, and this is also assumed for Stirlingshire.
Dr Cook will discuss new early medieval dates obtained from the forts at Abbey Craig and Dumyat and other less well-known sites. These findings will be combined with new insights into how the Forth was crossed before a bridge existed at Stirling, as well as the discovery of a cross-slab at Old Kilmadock which features both Pictish-style carvings and an ogham inscription.
Finally, Dr Cook poses the question of whether we should divorce our thinking about Pictish art and culture from our thinking about the polity of Fortriu and political control of Pictland.
About the speaker
Murray Cook is Stirling Council’s Archaeologist, giving archaeological advice to Stirling, Clackmannanshire and North Lanarkshire Councils. He conducts research excavations into later prehistoric settlement sites in Stirling, East Lothian and Aberdeenshire. In 2015 he gained a PhD from the University of Edinburgh for a study of the later prehistoric settlement record of the Don Valley in Aberdeenshire, combining key-hole excavation with commercial mitigation excavations. Murray publishes a twice-weekly newsletter with archaeology news and research at https://stirlingarchaeology.substack.com/.
Friday 21 February 2025
The Pictish-Norse Transition in Orkney
Professor David Griffiths
[abstract to follow]
Friday 21 March 2025
Pictish Dress and Textiles in Insular Context
Dr Alexandra Makin
[abstract to follow]
Friday 18 April 2025
Early Insular Music and Depictions of Lip-Vibrated Instruments in Insular Art
Dr Emma Holmes Mackinnon
[abstract to follow]