Field Visit

Date September 2009

Event ID 607904

Category Recording

Type Field Visit

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/607904

NH 3749 3006 The previous DES entry (DES 2008, 117) outlined the fact that this unscheduled standing stone is

recorded as traditionally marking the burial place of Mony, ‘a son of one of the Kings of Denmark’, but that its current position on the eastern side of the formal avenue to the now demolished house of New Corrimony may have been a Victorian relocation. The stone was re-examined in situ with the landowner, Lindsay Girvan, in September 2009. The stone’s lower portion was fairly clear of vegetation this time and some inscribed detail was identified on a small portion of its lower W face close to the northern edge of the stone. This consisted of three elements:

• A neatly inscribed OS benchmark of a horizontal line with underlying arrowhead, immediately beneath a small

horizontal ledge chipped into a slight natural bulge.

• A roughly inscribed but unambiguous date of 1871, which is now fairly faint but can be clearly felt with fingertips.

• A group of possibly three faintly inscribed letters, the clearest of which is O (or 0), with the others possibly

being an H and an L, although these are less definite.

Lindsay advised that the stone had toppled by the 1940s, so was re-erected by his father at that time, and that he had been told the OS benchmark referred to 520ft OD, which is a close match to its current altitude. The grouping of the newly identified features, on a small portion of an otherwise apparently unmarked monolith, does not automatically mean that they were all contemporary. The OS benchmark can be assumed to date from a point in time when the stone was upright, which suggests either after its installation into the avenue around 1870 or after it was re-erected in the 1940s. A third, more intriguing, possibility is that the benchmark

was inscribed when the stone was in its reported original pre-avenue position somewhere near Mony’s Cave and the waterfall. However, this would rely on the OS having undertaken surveys of the area before the OS Name Book entry of 1871, and it might be expected that the benchmark would have been slighted for a new position in the avenue. This idea has not been pursued by any OS archival research and is not proposed here as a convincing possibility. The inscribed date of 1871 may well mark its installation into the avenue; while this is conjectural, no other event is known from this period which could provide an alternative to commemorate.

No explanation is apparent for the group of three letters and no other markings were found on the stone, so the question of whether there are authentic ‘Pictish’ inscriptions elsewhere on the stone or if this newly identified set has been mistakenly described by previous reports remains open.

David Lynn