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Rhynie and Tap o' Noth: A Pictish Royal Landscape

Rhynie and Tap o' Noth: A Pictish Royal Landscape

In the hills of Aberdeenshire, above the village of Rhynie, archaeologists have uncovered one of the most important early Pictish landscapes yet investigated. At Barflat farm, the Craw Stane complex looks like an early royal centre. On the summit above, Tap o' Noth holds Britain's largest known early-medieval hillfort settlement. This article, part 4 of our Picts series, keeps history, legend and scholarly debate apart, and names the digs and publications that have changed the map.

History (Rhynie, Place of a Great King)

The place-name Rhynie is thought to come from early Pictish rīg, "king". Gordon Noble and colleagues have suggested an early form rīgonin or rīgonīn, "place of" or "associated with a great king". That reading fits what the ground has produced.

The University of Aberdeen's Northern Picts project, led by Gordon Noble with Meggen Gondek, Cathy MacIver and others, excavated the Craw Stane complex at Barflat from about 2011 to 2017. A Class I Pictish symbol stone, the Craw Stane, still stands in situ. Aerial photography in 1978 first showed ditched and palisaded enclosures around it.

Seven Class I symbol stones are known in and around Rhynie. The most famous is Rhynie Man: a Class I stone about six feet tall, carved with a distinctive figure carrying an axe. The axe form has been linked by scholars to animal sacrifice. Farmer Kevin Alston found the stone while ploughing at Barflat in the late 1970s (often given as 1978). An empty stone socket near the enclosure entrance / outer ditch terminal suggests that was likely its original position.

The sequence on site is clear in outline. Ditched enclosures were later superseded by a larger plank-built palisaded enclosure, with internal timber and turf structures. The Craw Stane stood at the entrance to the inner ditch. The complex was restructured and expanded over a short period in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, then abandoned after a serious fire. Occupation ran broadly from the late fourth to the mid-sixth century (Noble et al. 2013 in Antiquity; AOC and Northern Picts summaries).

Imports show long-distance connections: sherds of Late Roman wine amphorae from the eastern Mediterranean, and glass drinking-beaker sherds from western France. Metalworking debris includes moulds, crucibles, rare fine metalworking tongs, an axe-shaped pin with a serpent design resembling the axe carried by Rhynie Man, and evidence for silver-working. Nearby, a contemporary cemetery of Pictish burial mounds and square barrows produced the partially preserved remains of an adult female in one barrow.

Summaries of the work call this the first major non-hillfort secular elite Pictish site investigated in detail.

History (Tap o' Noth)

Tap o' Noth is the hill overlooking Rhynie, the second-highest hillfort in Scotland at about 563 m OD, and one of the best-preserved vitrified forts. Its summit oblong fort is vitrified. Radiocarbon dates put construction and use of that summit fort in the Iron Age, roughly 400 to 100 BC — not the same phase as the lower enclosure's Pictish occupation.

The lower enclosure covers about 16.75 hectares when upper and lower works are taken together, making it the second-largest hillfort enclosure in northern Britain. It had long been assumed to be Bronze Age or Iron Age. University of Aberdeen dating, announced on 14 May 2020, showed that the lower fort and its hut platforms span the third to sixth centuries AD, with a major phase in the fifth and sixth centuries, contemporary with the Barflat elite complex. Gordon Noble called the Pictish-period dating the most surprising of his career.

Drone survey and LiDAR have revealed hundreds of hut platforms — perhaps as many as 800. If four or five people lived in each hut, that points to upwards of about 4,000 people: an estimate, not a census. As an early-medieval fort footprint it is larger than Burghead (about 5.5 ha), Cadbury Castle (about 7 ha) and Tintagel (about 5 ha). Settlements on this scale were previously assumed not to appear in Scotland until around the twelfth century. The distribution of platforms suggests hierarchical organisation: clusters, trackways, and some larger huts.

Work at Tap o' Noth was carried out with permission from Historic Environment Scotland, support from Aberdeenshire Council, and funding from the University of Aberdeen Development Trust and HES.

History (The Wider Landscape)

In the same environs, Cairn More hillfort has also been excavated. Its radiocarbon dates span the fourth to seventh centuries and overlap the Craw Stane complex. Nearby in Banffshire, the Gaulcross silver hoard — first found in 1838, then greatly enlarged when the Northern Picts project and National Museums Scotland recovered more than a hundred further objects in 2013 — belongs to the sixth and seventh centuries and is the northernmost pre-Viking Age hacksilver hoard in Europe. It is related Northern Picts work rather than the centre of this landscape, but it shows the same northern elite world of metal and power.

Cruithni is the Gaelic form of the old Pretani name for the peoples of Britain, and the same word was used for the Cruthin of Ulster. That shared name heritage belongs to everyone on the land, on both shores of the sea.

Legend (Ce, One of the Seven Sons)

The Pictish origin legend survives in Lebor Bretnach, the Irish version of the Historia Brittonum, and in the Pictish Chronicle. It says Cruithne, father of the Picts, had seven sons: Fib, Fidach, Fotla, Fortrenn, Cait, Ce and Circin. The land was divided into seven parts, and each part took its name from one son.

Noble and Evans link the Rhynie landscape with the Pictish realm of Ce, one of those legendary divisions. That is how medieval tradition remembered the old map of Pictland. It is legend, not a surveyor's certificate, but it gives the Aberdeenshire power centre a name in the origin tale that also named Fortriu (Fortrenn), Fife (Fib) and Caithness (Cait).

Debate (What Kind of Place Was This?)

Scholars read Rhynie as an early royal or high-status centre: the place-name, the in situ Craw Stane, the imports, the metalworking and the axe-bearing figure of Rhynie Man all point that way. How far "royal" should be pressed, and how Rhynie related day to day to the huge settlement on Tap o' Noth, remain open questions.

The Tap o' Noth dating was a shock because the lower enclosure had been assumed prehistoric. The hut-platform count and the population estimate of around 4,000 are published figures and estimates, not hard census numbers. Whether the site was permanently occupied at that density, seasonally thronged, or organised as a hierarchical settlement around elite households is still being worked out. What is no longer in doubt is that a major Pictish-period community stood above Rhynie in the fifth and sixth centuries, on a scale that forces us to rethink early medieval Scotland.

Class I symbol stones remain central to the argument: their carvings (in the tradition catalogued by Allen and Anderson) mark elite places, and Rhynie has an unusually dense cluster of them. The open-access Society of Antiquaries of Scotland volume Rhynie, A Powerful Place of Pictland, together with Noble and Evans's The King in the North (2019) and Picts: Scourge of Rome, Rulers of the North (2022), set out the case in full.

Sources

Primary and archaeological:

Scholarship:

Legend only:

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

First shared on X @dalriada36963.

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