Tealing Parish Church

Tealing (St Peter?), Angus, Pictish cross-slab fragment

Measurements: H 0.79m, W 0.26m, D 0.18m

Stone type: sandstone

Place of discovery: NO 4035 3794

Present location: The McManus Museum & Art Gallery, Dundee (1969-270).

Evidence for discovery: recorded by Hutcheson in 1895 built into the south wall of the church at Tealing (1806), some 5.50m above ground level. By 1911 it had been removed from the wall and taken inside the church. In 1969 it was transferred to the museum in Dundee.

Present condition: trimmed and weathered, with surface flaking.

Description

This fragment comes from the lower part of a substantial cross-slab and is carved in relief on both broad faces. Above a plain basal panel and within a double roll moulding, face A bears part of the shaft and right-hand arm of a cross, itself outlined by a roll moulding. The arm has a square terminal and a circular armpit, and the drawing made from Hutcheson’s rubbing of 1895 shows traces of diagonal key pattern in the arm, where the surface has now flaked away. The shaft ends in an expanded pedestal and is filled with diagonal key pattern. To the right of the shaft is a fish monster, behind which is a serpent with spiral tail. The body of the monster is decorated with an incised zig-zag line, and a dorsal fin overlaps the serpent's body on the right. Hutcheson saw a ventral fin between the fish-monster and the cross-shaft, but this area is now too damaged to be certain. the monster's its head has prominent ‘goggle’ eyes, corrugated snout and prominent nostrils, and its jaws are clamped round the serpent's head, with the latter's small bulbous eyes visible above the monster's snout.

Face C appears to have been carved with a single large panel containing at least one Pictish symbol. A plain roll moulding runs down the left-hand edge of the slab and a band of step pattern divides the panel from the plain base. Within the roll moulding is first a band of key pattern based on alternate horizontal bars, and second a band of similar key pattern which is set diagonally and which continues along the bottom of the panel. Within the small area that survives of the panel interior is the head and foreleg of a Pictish beast, with prominent eye, long straight snout and crest lying close to its body.

Face B shows clear traces of secondary working, but there reains a groove parallel to the right-hand edge, which is probably the vestige of a roll moulding some 25-30mm wide.

Date range: ninth century.

Primary references: Hutcheson 1896; ECMS pt 3, 234-5; Hutcheson 1911; Fraser 2008, no 70.

Desk-based information compiled by A Ritchie 2018