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St Ringan's Cairn Description of stone
Event ID 1084411
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Early Medieval Carved Stones Project
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1084411
St Ringan’s Cairn 1, Redstone Hill, Kincardineshire, Pictish cross-slab fragment
Measurements: H 0.58m, W 0.49, D 0.16m
Stone type: red sandstone
Place of discovery: NO 6549 7944
Present location: University of Aberdeen museum collections, Mariscal College (ABDUA 39615).
Evidence for discovery: found in 1964 in or near St Ringan’s Cairn (Canmore 36070), which lies beside a track (the old military road) over Redstone Hill, east of the modern road. It was taken to the grounds of the Department of Botany, University of Aberdeen, and later that year to the Marischal Museum in Aberdeen. Ringan is a Scottish variant of Ninian (www.saintsplaces.gla.ac.uk).
Present condition: broken and worn.
Description
This stone is the lower part of a straight-sided cross-slab with a well-shaped tenon at least 0.20m long (it is thought not to belong to the socketed base that was found at the same time, St Ringan’s Cairn 2). It appears to have had a plain flat-band border and is carved in low relief. Only the base of the cross shaft survives on face A, edged by a roll moulding which flares outwards at the foot and slithers over to become a fishtail below the foot on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side of the base of the shaft, much has been lost through flaking but again the roll moulding slides off the base, perhaps to form a serpent head, now lost, with a long narrow tongue. The interior of the shaft is filled with diagonal key pattern. Placed vertically on the left of the shaft is a heavily built animal, possibly a bear judging by its hind-quarters, but the area of the head is damaged.
Very little survives of face C, only part of a finely executed pattern of triscele and spiral. The narrow faces are plain. There is no evidence that there was any symbol on the stone.
The stone is likely to have functioned as a wayside cross.
Date range: eighth or ninth century.
Primary references: Borland, Fraser & Sherriff 2007, 106-8.
Desk-based information compiled by A Ritchie 2019
