Qualla: Edderton Cross Slab

Edderton Cross Slab: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit sylvia duckworth, CC BY-SA 2.0. The horsemen were hidden for centuries. Edderton's Class III Pictish stone, a slab of red sandstone planted in the old graveyard of a Highland village, was sunk too deep into the soil - so deep that the two lower riders disappeared below ground level. Lichen still marks where the earth used to begin. Recently archaeologists raised the stone to its presumed original height, and three horsemen, two carved in faint incision and one in confident relief, ride again across the eastern face of a thousand-year-old monument.

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Image: sylvia duckworth | CC BY-SA 2.0

Edderton Cross Slab: Two Sides of a Stone

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit sylvia duckworth, CC BY-SA 2.0. The slab is shaped like a tall doorway: oblong, narrowing slightly toward the top, weather-darkened on the windward side. On the western face stands a Celtic cross - undecorated, but elegant in its proportions, with the circles within its rings emphasised by being left in relief ...

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Image: sylvia duckworth | CC BY-SA 2.0

Edderton Cross Slab: Class III and What It Means

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Xabier Cid (gl:User:Xabier Cid), Public domain. Pictish stones are sorted into three classes by the archaeologists who study them. Class I bears only Pictish symbols - the famous V-rod, the crescent, the Pictish Beast - incised on rough boulders. Class II carries Pictish symbols together with Christian iconography, usually a c...

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Image: Xabier Cid (gl:User:Xabier Cid) | Public domain

Edderton Cross Slab: Two Stones, One Village

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Deacon of Pndapetzim at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Edderton has two Pictish stones, and visitors regularly confuse them. The cross slab in the graveyard - elegant, formal, Christian - is one. The other is the Edderton Symbol Stone, also called *Clach Biorach*, the Pointed Stone, a red sandstone pillar of Bronze Age origin that st...

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Image: Deacon of Pndapetzim at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Edderton Cross Slab: What the Horsemen Mean

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Pictish horsemen turn up on dozens of stones - sometimes hunting, sometimes processing, sometimes simply present. The Edderton riders are not in obvious motion: they sit beneath their cross like a kind of honor guard. Some scholars read them as members of the local aristocracy, t...

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Image: Public domain