Aerial view of Burghead.
Burghead has a visible history that goes back more than one and a half thousand years. As you pass through its orderly grid of streets, the neat lines of houses give way to the grass-grown ramparts of a Pictish fortress and to the cavernous ancient well that served the fort’s inhabitants.
The artificially regular lay-out of this village on the Moray coast is the clue to its origin as one of the newly planned settlements of 18th - and 19th-century improvement. It was built between 1805 and 1809 and, unfortunately for the archaeologist, its construction obliterated half of the largest Pictish fort known. Even the ramparts that survive are much reduced in size because they were robbed for rubble to build the harbour. Several old maps, including one made for General Roy in 1793, recorded the basic plan of the fort, and excavations in the later 19th century and in the 1960s have filled out the picture to some extent. Natural terracing at the end of the promontory was adapted to create an upper and lower enclosure within the fort, outlined by ramparts, and at least three ramparts and ditches were dug across the neck of the promontory.
Plan of Burghead fort.
Opposite
The Burghead promontory was not by nature well defended but it was heightened artificially by ramparts.
ANTIQUITIIS" 1793) WITH I9'*» CENTUtV STREETS AND HARBOUR SUPERIMPOSED
300 METRES
Bull carving in the British Museum, London.
Bull carving in Elgin Museum.
Enclosing an area of almost 3 hectares. It is possible that these three outer lines may have belonged to an earlier iron-age fort that the Piets re-used and improved. These outer defences were probably built of earth and rubble, but the inner fort was enclosed by massive walls with carefully coursed stone faces: they are shown as broad bands of collapsed stonework on a map of 1747.
It was this handy source of stone that was used to build the harbour, and there are tantalising records of the carved slabs that were found—and then built into the quay. We are told of‘mouldings and carved figures, particularly of a bull’, and it is tempting to imagine the great wall of the upper ward in its heyday, embellished with carvings, and prominent among them the symbol of strength and power: the bull. Thirty bull-stones are mentioned in old records, and more may have passed unnoticed, for incised carving is easy to overlook when the lines are filled in with earth, but six have since been re-discovered during repairs and alterations to the harbour.
The bulls are virtually identical, about 400 mm long, and each is a masterpiece of carving, with glaring eyes and lowered head, muscular limbs and solid hooves—and in two cases an angrily swishing tail. Each is solitary; nothing detracts from the power image of the bull. Two remain at
Burghead in the public library on Grant Street, two are in the museum at Elgin, one is in the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, and one is in the British Museum in London.
The bull carvings are likely to date from the 7th century (see pp 18-20) and perhaps mark a refurbishing of the fort at an imp>ortant period in its history. Our dating evidence for the fort rests primarily upon radiocarbon dates; these suggest that the fort was built sometime in the period firom the 4th to the 6th centuries AD and destroyed sometime in the 9th or 10th centuries. The scale of the fort and the bull-carvings imply an importance within the Pictish kingdom that is in keeping with the grandeur of the Burghead Well, the only part of the fort in state care.
The well is an astounding structure. It lies within the lower ward of the inner fort and, although used in medieval times and re-roofed in relatively modern times, the basic well-chamber seems to belong to the Pictish fort. One of the bull-stones is said to have been found in the well, but a record of 1862 makes it clear that this was not so. Nevertheless a Pictish origin is more likely than any other: in the past it was thought to be Roman, but there is no evidence of major Roman activity in the area. It has also been given a Christian function as a baptistry, and this is more possible, for there was a monastery close by in the 8th-10th centuries.
Glamis Manse, Angus: a great cauldron hangs from a sturdy frame, and the legs of two unfortunate victims wave helplessly from inside the vessel. Is this an execution by drowning or a scene from Pictish folklore?
The well at Burghead: a flight of well-worn steps leads down into a yawning black hole. After prolonged rain the water rises to lap over the bottom steps.
A flight of twenty rock-cut steps leads down towards what appears to be a huge black hole in the grassy slope—it could be the setting for Orpheus daring to enter the underworld. Once your eyes adjust to the gloom at the bottom of the steps, you find yourself at the threshold of a large square chamber cut into solid bedrock, with a platform surrounding the central tank and a basin and pedestal in opposite corners. The well looks bottomless through the dark water but in fact the tank is only 1.3 m deep.
It is difficult to tell the original work from later modifications, but it seems likely that this was always a well of imp>osing proportions, suited to the needs of a large community, whatever those needs may have been aside from a domestic water-supply. Given the importance of water gods to their Celtic ancestors, the pagan Piets may also have had water rituals that could have been modified and absorbed into a Christian Pictland. The traditional method of execution among the Piets was drowning, even for important political prisoners of royal blood; two such executions are recorded in the 730s, one of the victims the ‘King of Athoir, the ruler of a vital strategic frontier area between the Piets and the Scots. The curious scene depicted on the cross-slab at Glamis Manse in Angus may illustrate such an execution, in which the victims were plunged headfirst into a great cauldron. It seems possible that the grandiose Burghead Well may have had a similar purpose.
It may not be entirely coincidence that Burghead should be the scene for a re-emergence in later times of a fire-festival: the Clavie, a barrel of tar on a pole, is carried burning round the village in January and brought to rest on a plinth that caps a well-preserved remnant of one of the old Pictish ramparts. This unusual survival of a tradition rooted in pagan times may reflect, however faintly, the powerful role once played by the great Pictish fort.
Excavations in the late 19th century are said to have uncovered the stone foundations of a row of buildings lining both long sides of the lower ward of the fort, with a central open space. If this is so, we can envisage the great well at one end of this open area. Disappointingly few objects have survived from the various disturbances of the fort in the last century, perhaps because, as one source admits, ‘battleaxes and spearheads’ were given away to tourists. The finest object to survive is particularly appropriate to a military fort: an elaborately decorated silver mount from the mouth of a blast-horn. This is Anglo-Saxon work of the 9th century of which a Pictish war-lord could have been rightly proud.
Somewhere to the landward side of the fort was a major ecclesiastical foundation, of which the only evidence is a number of sculptured fragments including a corner-post and part of a panel from a slab-built shrine similar to the St Andrews Sarcophagus (see p 40; these two pieces are in the public library at Burghead). Again, the presence of an important church underlines the status of the fort, for it implies patronage, perhaps even royal patronage.
Both fort and church were destroyed, probably by the Vikings, sometime in the 9th or 10th centuries, the end of an era during which Burghead had played a dominant role in northern Pictland.
The round tower at Abemethy (Perth and Kinross) is all that remains standing of the monastery that flourished here in the 11th century. Tlie hill in the background is crowned by an iron-age fon that may have been re-used by the Piets.
Displayed against the wall of the tower at Abemethy is a symbol stone bearing the ‘tuning-fork’ symbol flanked by a blacksmith’s hammer and anvil above a crescent and V-rod. It was dug out of the foundations of a house in the village, which accounts for the fact that it has been trimmed down to a convenient size. Several fragments of later sculptures have also been found re-used for building purposes and are now in the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Communication in stone
World History
