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Portmahomack: The Monastery of the Picts on Tarbat Ness

Portmahomack: The Monastery of the Picts on Tarbat Ness

No chronicle names it, no saint's Life describes it, and for centuries it lay under a ploughed field. Yet at Portmahomack, on the Tarbat peninsula in Easter Ross, archaeologists found the first Pictish monastery ever excavated: its church and cemetery, its carved crosses, the workshops where monks made church silver and prepared calf-skin for books, and the layer of fire that ended it all. This is part 6 of our Picts series. As always, history and archaeology, legend and scholarly debate are kept apart, and the sources are named.

History (Finding a Lost Monastery)

The Tarbat peninsula juts out between the Dornoch Firth and the Moray Firth. Its name comes from the Gaelic word for a portage or isthmus (tairbeart): the peninsula was once more nearly an island, and boats or goods could be carried across its neck. Portmahomack grew up beside one of the best landing beaches in the region, and on the rise above it stands the old parish church of St Colman.

For two centuries, gravediggers and antiquaries kept turning up fragments of fine carved stone in and around the churchyard. One, pulled from the garden wall of the manse, carried a Latin inscription. In 1984 Ian Keillar and Barri Jones, flying over Moray, photographed a cropmark: a great ditch curving round the church towards the sea, much like the enclosure at Iona. A trial trench by Jill Harden in 1991 dated organic material from that ditch to between the 2nd and 6th centuries AD.

In 1994, at the invitation of the local Tarbat Historic Trust, the University of York began what became the Tarbat Discovery Programme. Directed by Martin Carver, with fieldwork managed by Field Archaeology Specialists (now FAS Heritage) under Justin Garner-Lahire and Cecily Spall, it ran for 13 seasons until 2007. About 0.75 hectares were opened, inside the church and in the fields to its south and west. A local farmer, Duncan Johnson, who had ploughed the field for years, pointed out where beach cobbles came up in the plough soil, which proved to mark buried buildings. The excavators opened areas, recorded them, then sealed them in plastic and reburied them until they could return, a method Carver called strip, map and wrap.

Historic Environment Scotland now protects the monastic settlement as a scheduled monument (SM12793), describing an enclosure about 275 metres long and at least 130 metres across.

History (Before the Monks: An Elite Estate)

The final report (Carver, Garner-Lahire and Spall, 2016) divides the site into periods. In Period 1, from the mid 6th to the later 7th century, Portmahomack was not yet a monastery. It was a high-status secular centre: long-cist graves of men, women and children on the ridge overlooking the Dornoch Firth, some under small mounds, iron smithing, farming, iron dress pins and a gilt-bronze disc of a kind found at Dunadd, Mote of Mark and Sutton Hoo. Reviewers of Carver's second edition saw in it a horse-riding warrior aristocracy with links across Britain.

History (The Monastery of the Long Eighth Century)

Around AD 700 the site changed completely. The cemetery under the present church went on being used, but now almost only for men, mostly middle-aged or elderly, many laid in graves with stones set around the head (head-support or head-box burials). Isotope analysis showed that a number of them did not grow up locally. The economy turned from crops to cattle. A paved, kerbed road with stone-lined drains ran down past the workshops; a massive slab bridge formed part of a dam holding back a mill-pond, from which five rotary querns or millstones were recovered. To the south stood a large bag-shaped timber building, interpreted as a kiln-barn for drying grain and dated to the mid 8th century, with hammerscale suggesting it doubled as a smithy.

The workshops made the objects of the liturgy. Crucibles, moulds (some for objects marked with a cross), a shallow dish for cupellation (refining precious metal) and a possible touchstone for testing gold point to the casting of church plate. Lumps and droplets of glass and moulds for escutcheons resemble finds from Iona; a glass stud inlaid with wire and enamel compares with the Derrynaflan paten. The Scottish Archaeological Research Framework (ScARF) calls the glass-working debris the most extensive from medieval Scotland. A tiny silver coin, a porcupine sceatt of around AD 715 from the mouth of the Rhine, was the northernmost of its type known when it was published (Mark Blackburn, 1998).

History (The Vellum Workshop)

The most famous discovery is the parchmenerie, the place where hides were turned into vellum for books. Martin Carver and Cecily Spall set out the evidence in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (volume 134, 2004). In a square workshop beside the road they found an iron lunellarium, the crescent-shaped knife used to scrape a hide stretched on a frame. There were three shaped pumice rubbers with holes for hanging from the belt, a white residue still caught in their pores. Rows of cattle foot bones (metapodials), sharpened and pushed into the ground, look like the pegs of a vanished stretching frame, and beside them lay small round white quartzite and red jasper pebbles that don't occur naturally in the stone-free local soil: parchment-makers fold the edge of a hide over small pebbles to tie it to the frame. Five metres away was a slab-lined tank with a stone culvert, a good match for a pit where hides were soaked.

The most ingenious detail is in the floor. A spread of greasy, greyish-white ash proved to be full of the tiny chalky casings of a tubeworm, Spirorbis, that grows on serrated wrack seaweed on the beach below. Slaked lime, the usual agent for treating skins, is hard to find on the Old Red Sandstone of Tarbat; the ash of these casings is white and alkaline and may have served instead. Experiments by Gifford Charles-Edwards showed the ground casings could also make a pounce for smoothing a writing surface. Bone needles, wood shavings fossilised in the rust of a dropped chisel and burnishing pebbles complete the picture. Rachel Moss of Trinity College Dublin has called Portmahomack the first-known evidence for large-scale parchment manufacture in northern Europe. No book made here is known to survive.

History (The Carved Stones)

More than 200 pieces of carved stone, each the size of a hand or larger, have come from the site, and Carver argues that most of them belonged to four great crosses or cross-slabs that stood round the church, alongside small grave-markers with crosses closely matched on Iona. The pieces are numbered with the prefix TR:

History (Fire, Sword and Sledgehammer)

Then came catastrophe. A layer of burning sealed the workshops, full of burnt wood, nails and freshly broken carved stone. The great cross-slabs were toppled and smashed into hundreds of pieces, later used to level the ground. In the cemetery, three men bore blade wounds: one survived a sword cut across the face; another was struck three times on the head with a heavy blade. Carver's final modelling places the fire between about AD 780 and 810, and calls it an attack by fire and the sword, and the sledgehammer. No record of it survives.

Yet the site did not die. In Period 3, the 9th century and after, the workshops revived, but now for secular customers: metalworkers made objects such as copper-alloy weights with the old monastic techniques, a former workshop became a grain kiln, and the settlement worked as a trading farm before its industry faded around 900; the settlement was probably abandoned by the late 10th century. Norse place-names now ring the peninsula: Arboll, Cadboll, Tarrel, Bindal and Balnabruach.

In 1889 a gravedigger found a silver hoard in a crevice of the churchyard wall, 5 to 6 feet down: three complete silver armlets (ring money), fragments of three more and six coins, one Anglo-Saxon of about 959 to 975 and the rest Frankish of about 846 to 879. It was probably buried between 990 and 1000. National Museums Scotland lent the real hoard back to Portmahomack in 2024 for the 25th anniversary of the museum.

From about 1100 a stone parish church rose over the levelled monks' cemetery, and burials of men, women and children resumed. Inside the church the excavators traced eight phases of building, including a north aisle dated 1623 and a rebuilding of 1756. One medieval grave in the nave held a man killed by a bladed weapon, buried with four extra skulls. Radiocarbon and DNA work published in 2020 showed most belonged to his own family in the 13th to 15th centuries, but one skull was of a man who died between about AD 770 and 945, probably a Pictish monk, perhaps kept as a relic.

History (The Tarbat Cross-Slabs and the Discovery Centre)

Three more great cross-slabs stood around the peninsula, carved in the same style and the same imported stone.

Carver suggested in 2004 that the four monuments looked out to sea, Portmahomack over the Dornoch Firth, Shandwick and Hilton over the Moray Firth and Nigg towards the Cromarty Firth, guiding travellers to landing places.

St Colman's church, redundant by the 20th century, was bought by Tarbat Historic Trust in 1980 for one pound. Restored, it was opened in 1999 by Prince Charles as the Tarbat Discovery Centre, where the Dragon Stone, the Calf Stone and the grave-markers are displayed, and where you can go down into the crypt.

Legend and Tradition (The Saint at Terbert)

The Martyrology of Aberdeen, a medieval Scottish calendar of saints, records a bishop and confessor Colman buried in the diocese of Ross apud Terbert, at Tarbat, with a feast on 18 February. The Aberdeen Breviary's readings for that day come from Bede's account of Colmán, the Irish bishop of Lindisfarne who left after the Synod of Whitby in 664. There is also a St Colman's Well at Tarbat, Tobar ma Chalmag. The Saints in Scottish Place-Names project at Glasgow treats the link with Colmán of Lindisfarne as possible, not certain.

In 1851 to 1855 the antiquaries of Origines Parochiales Scotiae assigned the crypt to a chapel of St Columba. Later histories keep a darker story: in the 1480s a raiding party of Clan Mackay was cornered in Tarbat church by the Rosses, who set it on fire. The Discovery Centre tells it as the crypt's infamous 15th-century atrocity.

And one Columban story touches the vellum yard: Adomnán tells how Columba, after visiting King Bridei near the River Ness, picked up a white pebble from the river and blessed it for healing. The white and red pebbles of Portmahomack were tools, but Carver and Spall noted that pebbles carried a quiet holiness in the Columban world too. A painted pebble, of a type found only in north-east Britain and thought to have had a magical role among the Picts, also came from the workshop.

Scholarly Debate (Columba's Port or Colmán's?)

Portmahomack is Port Mo Chalmaig in Gaelic, the haven of my Colmóc, an affectionate form of Colmán. Colmán is itself a pet form of Columba (Colum Cille), so in 2004 Carver argued the site might be Columba's port, founded on his journey up the Great Glen (which Carver dated to about 565), on the nearest thing to an island at the far end of the Glen from Iona. Others prefer Colmán of Lindisfarne, and George Campbell (2006) attributed the name to St Cormac. After the final analysis Carver himself revised the story: the 6th to 7th century phase looks secular, and the monastery begins around 700.

Scholarly Debate (Iona, Northumbria and Nechtan)

The grave-markers and glass moulds tie Portmahomack to Iona, but the vine-scrolls and the road built in the Roman manner look south to Northumbria. Bede (Ecclesiastical History V.21) tells how the Pictish king Nechtan wrote to Abbot Ceolfrith of Wearmouth-Jarrow for advice on Easter and the tonsure, and the Annals of Ulster record in 717 the expulsion of the community of Iona across the spine of Britain by King Nechtan. Was Portmahomack founded, or refounded, as part of that turn? It fits the dates; no text says so.

Scholarly Debate (Vikings, or Someone Else?)

Carver's 2004 paper called the Vikings the obvious but not inevitable culprits, and also considered whether later Christian reformers might have broken the old icons. The freshly broken stone in the burnt layer argued for an early date, and the Vikings remain the prime suspects. The date itself has moved: published estimates range from c. 780 to 810 in the final report to c. 820 to 830 in other summaries. The Orkneyinga saga's battle of Torfness, where Thorfinn the Mighty beat Karl Hundason around 1035, is placed by Carver at Tarbat Ness, while other writers set it at Burghead (see part 5).

Scholarly Debate (Was the Book of Kells Made Here?)

Julian Brown (1972) and John Higgitt (1982) both suggested that a Pictish house in the Tarbat area could have produced books like the Book of Kells, whose display capitals resemble the Tarbat inscription. In 2025 Victoria Whitworth argued in The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma that Kells was most likely made at Portmahomack. Rachel Moss replied that books, monks and artists moved widely and that the case can't yet be proved. It is a live question.

Scholarly Debate (Fortriu and the Northern Picts)

If Alex Woolf (2006) and later scholars are right that the great Pictish kingdom of Fortriu lay around the Moray Firth rather than in Strathearn, Portmahomack sat in its heartland, between Burghead to the south-east and the Golspie symbol stones to the north-west (see part 3). Carver pictured a patchwork in which Christian monks on Tarbat Ness lived alongside non-Christian neighbours at Burghead in the 7th century. Whether Hilton, Nigg and Shandwick were daughter churches, separate monasteries, secular estates or boundary markers of one great monastic estate is still unknown.

The Picts who built and worked here carried the old British name of the Pretani (Priteni), and Irish annalists called them Cruithni, the same name the Cruthin of Ulster bore. At Portmahomack their symbols stand on the same stones as the cross: a people becoming Christian without ceasing to be Pictish.

Sources

Archaeological reports and records:

Texts and scholarship:

History, legend and scholarly debate are marked separately in the headings above.

First shared on X @dalriada36963.

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