The St Ninian's Isle Treasure
About 800
Spread out in this case is the largest hoard of Pictish silver ever found: twenty eight pieces of silver and gilded silver, buried under a stone slab in a small church on St Ninian's Isle in Shetland around the year eight hundred. There are twelve brooches, seven bowls, a hanging bowl, a spoon, a strange pronged implement, two sword chapes, three cone shaped mounts and the jawbone of a porpoise, which nobody has ever fully explained. Together they look like the possessions of a wealthy family or a church, gathered up in a hurry and hidden, perhaps as Viking raiders arrived on the horizon. Nobody came back for them.
Look at the brooches first. They are penannular, with an open ring and a long pin, and their terminals are decorated with animal heads, interlace and spirals in the Pictish style. The bowls are hammered silver with punched decoration, and one of the sword chapes, the fitting at the tip of a scabbard, carries an inscription in Latin letters asking for the protection of the Lord. The hanging bowl and the spoon may have been church equipment; the brooches and sword fittings were personal and secular. The mixture is one of the mysteries of the hoard, and it tells us that the line between church and household was not sharp in Pictish Shetland.
The treasure was found in July 1958 by a schoolboy, Douglas Coutts, who was helping on an archaeological dig led by Professor Andrew O'Dell of Aberdeen University. The box in which it lay had been made of larch wood, and traces survived. A long legal case followed over who owned the find, and in the end it came to the national collection in Edinburgh. It matters because Pictish silver is rare, and this hoard shows a whole set of objects from one place and one moment. The porpoise bone, tucked in with the silver, is the memorable detail everyone remembers.
Did You Know? The hoard was found by a schoolboy helping on an excavation in 1958, and it included a porpoise jawbone alongside the silver.
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