All pictures copyright © 1998 Martin McCarthy
Fowlis Wester is a tiny village that is in an area heaving with ancient sites: cup-and-ring marked rocky outcrops, hill forts, stone circles, standing stones, Pictish sculpted stones, Roman forts, and more.
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To the west of the village, standing in a field by a burn, are three megaliths. Two standing together are large - six to eight feet high - and the third, a little downslope from the others, is enormous - perhaps fifteen feet by fifteen feet by six feet. This latter is prostrate and cracked into two, with cup marks in one surface. |
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On a hill above the village are two stone circles. If you use Aubrey
Burl's gazeteer A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland
and Brittany then this might be a site that you never visit as
Mr Burl obviously had a pretty miserable day when he was here. I
thought it was a splendid place.
The eastern circle consists of nine stones (once twelve) around the remains of a cairn. One of the kerb stones of the cairn is cu-marked. One of the large outer stones still stands. The stones of the western circle have all fallen. Outside the circle is a very large prostrate stone. |
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In the centre of the village used to stand a tall Pictish cross-slab. To
save it from the weather, it has been taken into the local church (along
with another cross and several fragments of another stone) and replaced
with a fairly horrible replica. Inside the church, the lighting is
terrible and it is very difficult to make out the carvings. On one side
is a cross, and on the other are several horsemen, a crescent-and V-rod
and a double-circle-and-Z-rod.
A second, smaller cross-slab lives in the same church. The top-left and top-right quadrants of the slab seem to contain monsters that look like a cross between a dog and an eel. The one in the top-right has hold of a person by the head. According to Elizabeth Sutherland in In Search of the Picts this is illustrative of the Jonah and the Whale story; in the top-left corner the whale has swallowed Jonah leaving his sword and shield--in the top-right corner the whale is disgorging him. Below the arms of the cross are two seated figures. These are Paul (on the left) and Antony (on the right) -- two early Christian hermits and saints. They supposedly lived alone in the desert in the early years of Christianity, meeting just before Paul's death at the age of 113 years. Paul fed on and was clothed by date palms, seen before and behind the figure on the left; a spirit (seen behind the figure on the right) revealed to Antony the presence of Paul in the desert. |
