Publication Account

Date 1997

Event ID 1017080

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1017080

RCAHMS: Exploring Scotland's Heritage - Shetland, 1997

Excavations in the 1950s revealed the remains of a medieval church first built in the 12th century and enlarged in the 13th century into a church with a rectangular nave and possibly apsidal chancel; it is likely that this church had been abandoned and then demolished in the mid 18th century, after which its ruins had been entirely hidden by wind blown sand until the excavation. The church had been built on the site of an earlier chapel with its accompanying graveyard, and it was in this earlier chapel that the famous silver treasure had been buried, beneath the nave of the medieval church. 28 silver objects had been buried for safekeeping, together with part of the jawbone of a porpoise, in a wooden chest made of larch in a small pit beneath a stone slab, sometime around AD 800 (NMS; replicas in Shetland Museum, Lerwick). The slab was itself part of an earlier cross-slab, and the excavations produced an important collection of Early Christian stones, together with a hogback tombstone of 11th century date. Some of the stones represent components of finely decorated Early Christian stone shrines (Shetland Museum), comparable to those from Papil (see p. 14).

St Ninian's Isle today is accessible at virtually all times across a massive natural causeway of sand, and it is likely that, even in Early Christian times,the island was accessible at low tide, a situation very similar to that of the Brough of Birsay in Orkney. There was also evidence of prehistoric occupation beneath the later structures, at which date the island may have been more truly an island. The sand causeway is known as a tombolo, and this is an exceptionally fine example.

Information from ‘Exploring Scotland’s Heritage: Shetland’, (1997).