An enigma in stone

The Ettrick

Shopping trips to our capital city are a great excuse to spend some time at the National Museum.

While LotH reconnoitres George Street, I can slip away into the past.

In search of the Stone Age bow that inspired the Wildwood project (Blog 28/07/13), I came across this intriguing little carving.

The carved stone

 I just had to go and seek out its origins, a place called Over Kirkhope far up the valley of the  River Ettrick.

 It transpires it is a gravestone retrieved from its nineteenth century role as part of a drystane dyke! A local farmer had saved it when the site of an ancient burial ground was taken into agricultural use.

The Kirk Hope

 It was recorded that a line of trees was planted to mark the site of what had been a very early chapel probably from the era of the Celtic church, in the time of the Brythonic peoples before the Anglian invasion (Blog 07/09/18) 

There is evidence of village settlement in the same area and a raised bank or grassed-over wall defining the nearby burial ground.

The outline of the chapel

The bank or wall dividing off the burial ground

The figure is crudely carved and appears to be dancing but is in fact an Orans, the raised arms being in a position of supplication or prayer that was the norm before the adoption of the palms -together style of today.  It is the realisation in pecked stone outline of a saint albeit a long forgotten one

Over Kirkhope is a sheep farm in the sparsely populated upper reaches of the Ettrick valley.

The name is self explanatory... Kirk hope...the valley of the chapel.

Once part of the lands of Melrose Abbey, it was described as a "free forest". The valleys would have been thickly wooded, a segment of the Ettrick forest, itself a residue of the great Wood of Caledon of Arturian legend.

To such a place might have come a hermit, an anchorite seeking solitude in the wilderness. The village with its burial ground and chapel may have arisen later. The carved figure with the cross on its chest showing its beatification, was probably raised as memorial to their patron saint inviting his blessings.

The Kirkhope Burn joins the Ettrick

Now a lonely place, with a few sheep-grazed mounds to to show where people had once lived and died, strived to get a living from the land, to survive and to raise families, to be dispersed and forgotten and to leave the enigma of the stone carved figure.