The Hilton of Cadboll Stone

Look at the depth and precision of the carving. The spiral bosses in the top panel are cut almost in the round, and the interlace border is as controlled as the ornament in a manuscript like the Book of Kells. The Picts were skilled metalworkers, and the stone was probably designed by an artist used to working in gold and silver. The other face once carried a great cross, but in 1676 the slab was reused as a gravestone for a man named Alexander Duff and his three wives, and the cross was chiselled away to make room for the inscription. That flat, scarred face, when you walk round it, tells its own story about how attitudes to the past change.

The stone stood originally at Hilton of Cadboll on the Tarbat peninsula in Easter Ross, part of a landscape rich in Pictish monuments. It was moved to Invergordon Castle in the nineteenth century, offered to the British Museum in 1921 and then, after protests, given to Scotland instead. The base, broken off long ago, was rediscovered by excavation in 2001 and remains in the local community. It matters as evidence of a sophisticated Christian Pictish culture, and because the woman rider is one of the earliest images of a named or important woman in Scottish art.

Did You Know? The lower part of the slab, missing for centuries, was found buried in the chapel site in 2001 and stayed in Hilton of Cadboll.