Hog

This morning I managed to get the dead bulbs in the spotlights changed in our little exhibition room. Finally set up enough raking light to get a shot of the little man on the side of the hogback stone.
It dates from the middle decades of the 900s and once marked the grave of a powerful Dane. Probably the Danes from York would come up to the Forth, cross to the Clyde and thence on to Dublin. Although it is shaped like a longhouse, it probably marked a Christian grave, suggesting that the island may have had a small community of hermit monks 200 years before the abbey was founded.
It was probably the presence of this stone (and possibly other similar monuments) which gave rise to the story that Macbeth allowed Sweyn to bury his dead here after the battle of Kinghorn, although the stone is a century older than that.