There are around three hundred and fifty carved stones in Scotland bearing what we call Pictish symbols. Over two hundred and fifty carry the symbols proper. The full set of symbols runs to about three dozen designs.

Nobody knows what they mean.

Not in the sense that scholars disagree about the details. In the sense that we cannot read them, we are not certain they are writing, and the people who carved them left no explanation in any language we can recover.

I find this the most interesting body of material in Scotland, and I want to write about it in a way that keeps the not-knowing at the centre, because almost everything else written about the Picts does the opposite.

What they are

Carved stones, mostly north of the Clyde-Forth line and mostly on the eastern side of the country. They date from roughly the sixth to the ninth centuries, the period during which the Picts were becoming Christian.

Romilly Allen and Joseph Anderson divided them into three classes in 1903, and the scheme is imperfect but still universally used.

  • Class I. Unworked boulders and pillars with symbols incised, no cross. Sixth to eighth century. Around two hundred of them. These carry the great majority of the symbols and they are the oldest and strangest.
  • Class II. Shaped rectangular slabs with a large cross carved in relief on one or both faces, with symbols alongside it. Eighth and ninth century.
  • Class III. Crosses and grave markers with no Pictish symbols at all. Whether this should be a class is disputed, since without the symbols they belong to the wider Insular tradition rather than to anything distinctively Pictish.

Allen and Anderson thought the classes were sequential. It is now clear that Class I and Class II were being produced concurrently for a considerable period, which complicates the tidy story of pagan symbols giving way to Christian ones.

The symbols

About three dozen designs, most of them abstract, some of them recognisable.

  • The abstract ones, which are the majority and the mystery: the crescent and V-rod, the double disc and Z-rod, the triple disc, the notched rectangle, the mirror and comb, the so-called flower, the horseshoe.
  • The creatures: the eagle, the salmon, the wolf, the boar, the stag, the bull, the serpent.
  • The Pictish Beast, which is the one everybody knows and nobody can identify. A long-snouted, curl-limbed creature that appears on a great many stones and resembles no animal that has ever lived. Dolphin, seahorse, kelpie and pure invention have all been proposed.

Symbols usually appear in pairs, and this is the single most important structural fact about them. The average is around 2.3 symbols per stone. The pairing is consistent enough to be meaningful and nobody agrees on what it means.

The competing readings

This is where I want to be careful, because you will find each of these stated as fact somewhere.

  • They are writing. Currently the leading view. A naming system, possibly recording personal names, with the paired symbols standing for something like a name and a patronymic. Statistical work on symbol distribution supports something language-like. Undeciphered.
  • They are marriage or alliance records. The pairing reads as two lineages joined. Popular, plausible, and unproven.
  • They are grave markers. Symbol stones do occur at graves, at Dairy Park in Golspie, at Garbeg, at Ackergill. But in each case the stone may have been reused from somewhere else, so the association is not secure.
  • They are territorial or ownership markers. Also plausible. Also unproven.
  • They are religious or cosmological. The weakest supported, and by far the most commonly asserted in esoteric writing.

The honest position, and it is the position of the Scottish Archaeological Research Framework, is that the main current theory holds them to be writing of some sort, probably a naming system, and that it remains undeciphered.

The Ogham complication

Around thirty Pictish stones carry Ogham inscriptions, cut alongside the symbols.

And here is the thing: we largely cannot read those either.

Ogham is an Irish alphabet and its sound values are known. So we can transliterate the Pictish inscriptions perfectly well. What we get is strings like the one from Brandsbutt in Aberdeenshire, IRATADDOARENS, possibly a form of the name Ethernan or Adrian, and the one from Dyce, which runs to a long string of which only the last portion, MAQQ ROGODDADD, is confidently readable as son of Rogoddadd.

We can pronounce them. We cannot understand them, because the language underneath is not Old Irish and is not securely identified. The Pictish ogham appears to relate to a Brittonic Celtic language rather than the Goidelic of the Gaels, and there is genuine scholarly argument about whether all the inscriptions are even in the same language.

Ogham seems to have reached the Picts by about AD 600, and the Ogham cut on a stone may or may not be contemporary with the symbols on the same stone.

So: an undeciphered symbol system, and beside it an alphabet we can read carrying words we cannot.

Where to see them

The good ones are mostly free, mostly outdoors, and mostly not busy.

  • Aberlemno, Angus. Three stones by the roadside and one in the kirkyard. The kirkyard stone is a Class II cross-slab with a battle scene on the reverse, frequently read as Nechtansmere, and it is one of the great pieces of early medieval sculpture in Europe. The roadside stones are covered over winter for their protection.
  • Brandsbutt, Aberdeenshire. Symbols and a bold Ogham inscription. The stone was broken up and built into a dyke and has been reassembled, and it may originally have stood in a prehistoric stone circle.
  • Dyce, Aberdeenshire. Class I and Class II together, with Ogham.
  • Sueno's Stone, Forres. Over six metres, the tallest carved stone in Scotland, now in a glass case. Class III.
  • Rodney's Stone, Brodie. The Eagle Stone, Strathpeffer. The Crawstane, Rhynie. Meigle and St Vigeans both have excellent museums of collected stones.
  • Portmahomack, Tarbat, has the excavated monastery and the only Pictish stone with a Latin inscription.

Standing at them

I visit these often and I want to say something about the experience of it, because it is not like standing at a stone circle.

A stone circle is legible as a shape. You can tell what it is for at a level, even if you are wrong.

A Class I symbol stone is a boulder with three marks on it that you cannot read, made by somebody who assumed you would be able to. The confidence of the carving is the unnerving part. These are not tentative. Whoever cut the crescent and V-rod on the Aberlemno stone knew exactly what they were writing and expected it to be understood.

That is a very particular kind of encounter with the past: not mystery, exactly, but a message with the recipient missing.

And a word about what not to do

The Picts attract an extraordinary amount of invention. You will find the symbols assigned meanings, sold as an oracle deck, incorporated into correspondence tables, described as a druidic alphabet and marketed as a divination system.

None of it has any basis. Every one of those systems is somebody's twentieth or twenty-first century construction with a Pictish label on it, and the constructions contradict each other, which is the usual tell.

There is no Pictish oracle. There is no key. There is no surviving Pictish tradition that anybody has access to, because the Picts were absorbed into Gaelic Scotland and their language died without being written down.

What you can honestly do:

Go and look at them. Learn the actual symbol names and which stones carry which. Understand the classes and the dating. Read the current scholarship, which is genuinely exciting and moving quickly, particularly the recent work at Rhynie and Burghead. And leave the not-knowing alone. It is a better thing to stand in front of than a made-up meaning would be.

Practically

Most are free and unstaffed. Many are in kirkyards or by roadsides.

  • Do not touch the carving. Skin oils and abrasion do cumulative damage, and these have survived twelve hundred years.
  • Do not chalk, rub or cast. Ever. Historic Environment Scotland prohibits it and it damages the stone.
  • Photograph in raking light, early or late, or with a torch held almost flat. In flat midday light most of these are close to invisible, which is why so many were dismissed as blank for so long.
  • Leave nothing. No offerings, no coins, no ribbons. These are scheduled monuments.

Sources

  • The Scottish Archaeological Research Framework (ScARF) — the current state of scholarship, free and authoritative. See the early medieval sections on carved stones and Pictish symbols.
  • Allen, J. R. & Anderson, J. (1903). The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland. The origin of the three-class system. Available via Internet Archive.
  • Fraser, I. (2008). The Pictish Symbol Stones of Scotland. RCAHMS.
  • Henderson, G. & Henderson, I. (2004). The Art of the Picts. Thames & Hudson.
  • Noble, G. & Evans, N. (2022). Picts: Scourge of Rome, Rulers of the North. Birlinn. The most current general account, drawing on the Rhynie and Burghead excavations.
  • Forsyth, K., on the linguistic status of the Pictish Ogham inscriptions. See also the ongoing debate summarised in the academic literature on Pictish language.
  • Pictish stone — Wikipedia, for the classes, the corpus size and the symbol inventory.
  • Historic Environment Scotland — site records, statements of significance, and the Dyce and Brandsbutt stones in particular.
  • What's Left of the Picts? Scotland's Pictish Stones — Historic Environment Scotland blog.
  • Canmore — the national record, searchable by site, with photographs and grid references for every stone mentioned here.
  • Ogham in 3D — Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, three-dimensional scans of inscribed stones.

Related: [Ogham]; [The Silences]; [How to Read an Esoteric Claim]; [The Cailleach]