Hilton of Cadboll Stone

The Hilton of Cadboll Stone is one of the most magnificent of all Pictish cross-slabs. It was erected on the East coast of the Tarbat Peninsula in Easter Ross, Scotland about AD 800. It seems likely that, at the time, the entire peninsula from the mouth of the Cromarty Firth to Tarbatness was the estate of the monastery at Portmahomack and that the stone was carved at its instigation.

It was erected in a natural amphitheatre about 100m from the shore. In the thirteenth century the Hilton of Cadboll Chapel was erected 6m to its east; more recently the modern settlement Hilton of Cadboll has developed along the coast to its south-west.

In 1674 the stone was felled in a storm, with the top three-quarters breaking off. The cross on the front face was chipped off and a memorial inscribed to Alexander Duff and his three wives. The stone appears never to have been used as a memorial and was left at Hilton, where it was shown to visiting antiquarians including Rev. Charles Cordiner, who brought it to public attention in his book Antiquities and Scenery of the North of Scotland, London, 1780.

In the late 1860s the Macleods of Cadboll moved the top three-quarters of the stone to be a feature in the garden of Invergordon Castle. When the estate was sold in 1921, the stone was gifted to the British Museum. A rearguard action by the Scottish antiquarian establishment succeeded in deferring the Trustees' acceptance and their releasing Macleod of Cadboll from his gift so that he could redonate it to the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, which he did. The stone is now in the National Museum of Scotland.

The bottom quarter of the stone, below the break, remained in situ at Hilton of Cadboll. During 1998, excavation in the vicinity of the Hilton of Cadboll chapel site found fragments of carved micaceous sandstone which were surmised to be from the lost cross face of the Hilton of Cadboll stone. Further excavations in 2001 recovered further carved sandstone fragments and the missing lower portion of the cross-slab. Carved fragments have now been restored to the base and it is on display, in pristine condition, at the John Ross Visitor Centre in Balintore. A representation of the bottom quarter in copper has been added to the stone in Edinburgh, but it shows only the reverse face, and not the stepped base of the cross on the stone's front.

In the 1990s a campaign to return the stone to its original location having failed, a full-scale copy of the stone was commissioned from local sculptor Barry Grove. It was erected close to the original location with the hunting scene on the west face, so people facing it are looking to the east. The subsequent discovery of the lower portion of the original stone showed that the hunting scene was on the east face and that the west face bore a cross with a stepped base. People facing the cross would therefore face east, as in a church. In accordance with convention, the face with the cross will be referred to as the front and the face with the hunting scene as the back.