St Ninian's Cave Description of carvings
Event ID 1085700
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Early Medieval Carved Stones Project
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1085700
St Ninian’s Cave, Wigtownshire, rock carvings
Measurements: various
Stone type:
Place of discovery: NX 4224 3595
Present location: natural cleft in the cliff at the northern end of the Physgill shore on Port Castle Bay.
Evidence for discovery: the carvings were well-known locally by the mid nineteenth century. Seven incised crosses were recorded by RCAHMS in 1912, and a new survey by RCAHMS in 2004 identified another fourteen crosses.
Present condition: mostly in good condition.
Description
In its surviving form, the cave is V-shaped in plan, 10m long and a maximum of 5m wide. The crosses are incised on the south wall of the cave, all but two on the outer unroofed part. They are all of early Christian type and range from simple Latin crosses to crosses with barred terminals, ringed crosses and outline crosses, including a finely carved encircled Chi-Rho cross. A number of cross-slabs and cross-incised stones lay loose in the cave, and these are now in the Whithorn Museum except for one in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Date range: sixth to ninth centuries.
Primary references: RCAHMS 1912, no 3.
Desk-based information compiled by A Ritchie 2019
