The Kincardine Churchyard Stone in the Archives
In addition to archaeological and ethnographic work, this season I am spending considerable time in various archives across Scotland. The purpose of this work is to locate moments at which Pictishness is defined and refined historically--and to analyze these moments carefully: Why did people care about Pictishness at a given time, or within a given project/event? To what was Pictishness being likened or with what was it being contrasted? What materials (artifacts, images, languages, etc.) were mobilized as evidence of Pictishness?
While it is always exciting to work on an excavation or to carry out ethnographic interviews, archival research may be my personal favorite component of SLIPP's methodology. The archives often offer a view of social interactions unfolding across several years, available to be paged through by an interested researcher in a few hours!
Over the past few weeks, I was fortunate to be able to spend some time in the National Records of Scotland, where I mainly focused on case files pertaining to the scheduling of ancient monuments during the 20th century. In Scotland, as elsewhere in the UK, there are government mechanisms in place to record and maintain monuments deemed to be of "national importance." The process of securing these protections for a monument, or "scheduling," is today the responsibility of Historic Environment Scotland, but has taken different shapes and involved different offices in the past. While scheduling appears on the surface to follow a relatively straightforward process, from the identification of the monument to the filing of the requisite government paperwork, each step in fact involves social actors with varied interests engaging with material remains--often shaping their significance as well as preserving it.
This fact is illustrated particularly well by the case file for the Kincardine Stone, an early medieval Pictish sculptured stone from the churchyard of Kincardine, Easter Ross (DD27/5737). In 1976, the scheduling process was initiated with the following letter from Stewart Cruden to Patrick Ashmore, both of whom served as Inspector of Ancient Monuments for the Scottish Development Department (SDD) around this time. The letter reads:
In the churchyard of Kincardine Church, Easter Ross (near Edderton) there is a recumbent stone of some interest, sculptured on the side and prob. a sarcophagus, wh. I was taken to recent by Miss [sic] Durham & friends. I advised removal into the church wh. is unused, cleaning, & photography.
This they will do. We should schedule the stone. It is, I believe, described in R. Allen, & Stuart*
Ashmore responds with a note indicating his agreement, and preliminary scheduling documents are soon drafted. However, after some months, Nicholas Reynolds, the Assistant Inspector of Ancient Monuments, follows up with the Mrs. Durham mentioned in the original letter:
Dear Mrs. Durham,
Mr Cruden has asked me to arrange for the scuptured stone which you showed him in the churchyard of Kincardine church to be scheduled as an Ancient Monument.
He tells me that he advised removal of the stone into the church, to be cleaned and photographed. I write now to ask you whether this has yet been done; we cannot proceed with scheduling until the stone has reached, as it were, its final resting place.
I should be most grateful if you would let me know what the present situation is.
This "final resting place," as it were, becomes from that moment a major sticking point in the scheduling of the stone and dominates the rest of the case file. Durham replies to that letter to inform the office that they should await work in a month's time. Later, she informs them that they (the village) have succeeded in moving the stone into the church, but they do not know how to clean it. Joanna Close-Brooks, Assistant Keeper at the National Museum of Antiquities, also writes with some concerns that the location and means of display determined by the locals and Cruden is inadequate--though better than being "at the mercy of the weather, and worse, of the lawn mowers that banged into it."
Moreover, the simple relocation of the stone from the churchyard into the church appears to have triggered an unforeseen ownership dispute. As part of the scheduling process, the owners of the monument must be notified. This was presumed at first to have been the Church of Scotland, though a representative for the Church was unsure of their ownership, considering that, in contrast to the church building, the churchyard itself was actually property of Sutherland Council. At this point, a representative of the Solicitor's Office writes to notify SDD that they were wrong to encourage the removal of the stone from the churchyard to the church without consulting the owners of the churchyard (the council). It then became necessary to retroactively clear the action with Sutherland Council--who, in the end, did not object in the slightest.
Within this tangled mess of bureaucracy lies, I think, an interesting insight--that a process which ostensibly exists in order to recognize and protect objects which presumably already exist as national monuments can be alternatively analyzed as creating monuments as such. One characteristic of a monument of historical significance, at least from the perspective of this string of interactions, appears to be that it stands in place, more or less permanently, and testifies to the particular history to which it belongs. The Kincardine Stone only does this as a result of the scheduling process itself, which fixed it in place both physically and symbolically--while at the same time adding a series of complex (and amusing) events to its biography. The moving of the stone (and the subsequent ownership disputes resulting from the move), while potentially part of the stone's history in a broad sense, are not a part of its monumental significance. A monument cannot be moving around--it must find its final resting place.
These movements are, however, always recoverable in the archives, where they may become someday (e.g., right now, in this blog post) the basis for new signification.
* Allen, J. Romily, and Joseph Anderson. 1903. The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland: A Classified, Illustrated, Descriptive List of the Monuments, With an Analysis of Their Symbolism and Ornamentation. Rhind Lectures in Archaeology. Edinburgh: Printed for the Society of antiquaries of Scotland, by Neill & co., limited.
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