130 Northern Antiquities, [No. 2. 



Since the Thirteenth Century, when the Church of St. Vijeans, 

 near Arbroath, in the basement of which one of them is found as a 

 foundation stone, was constructed, they have received no reverence 

 from any one, and no mercy at the hands of the stone mason, having 

 been built into house walls, or field enclosures, and broken up and 

 destroyed as often as it suited. At this moment two of the finest 

 Runic stones in Scotland stand as gate posts at Dukeld Church Yard ; 

 one of them turned upside down ! 



At Monike one, and at St. Vijeans, as already stated, a second is 

 built into a Church wall : at Dunnichers one forms a portion of a park 

 dyke ; at Cossens, near Glamis, another serves as a rubbing post for 

 cattle — to the very great disgrace, as it appears to me, of the antiqua- 

 ries of my native country. 



The monuments under consideration are generally single oblong 

 blocks of stone, of from three to eighteen feet in length, and from one 

 to fifteen in breadth, mostly in the form of the grave stones in country 

 churchyards. They for the most part have a cross, of the form com- 

 monly called the Cross of Calvary, sculptured on them — in many cases 

 they are fashioned in the form of a cross. There is no single instance 

 in which a crucifixion is represented, or in which the cross is provided 

 with the tablet at top always found in the crosses seen in Catholic 

 Churches for the superscription of " King of the Jews." The arms 

 of the cross are almost always united by a richly sculptured circle or 

 ring, and the shaft and limbs are covered with most elaborate sculp- 

 tures. 



The cross is far from being an eminently Christian symbol : they 

 are often found in Oriental sculptures. The following is an outline of 

 a cross very much resembling those of the Scottish monuments, copied 

 from the vestment of a Coptic Priest, now in the British Museum, and 

 believed to belong to a date 600 B. C. at least, together with a cruci- 

 form ornament, of which there are abundance of examples on the 

 Catacombs recently opened near Alexandria, and at least 2000 years 

 old. 



