Pictish Stone

This stone stands very near the main road from Alloa to Clakmannan and I've probably passed it thousands of times without actually stopping to investigate it closer. So today, Euan and I went on our weekly photo expedition and eventually ended up here.

For something that looks pretty ancient and fairly significant there's no signs around indicating what it is. The field it sits in seems to be one that's regularly used, but the patch around this stone and a single tree are left uncultivated and growing wild.

Even a trawl through Google didn't turn up a huge amount of information. There's loads on the nearby 'Stone of Mannan' in the town of Clackmannan, but I could only find one reference to this stone, a fairly old chapter from a paper published around 1889 that discusses an archaeological dig around this site in 1829. During this an ancient cist (burial chamber) containing numerous bones was uncovered nearby the standing stone. The article goes on to speculate that this may have been the ancient burial site of some Royal significance, due it's proximity to Clackmannan 'castle' and that building's significance between Stirling and Dunfermline.

I thought it slightly sad that something that may be quite as important as this is left unattended and apparently uncared for, except maybe the farmer taking a detour around it with his tractor when he's working the field.

Note: As there's an interesting discussion thread going on over in the forums about how much post-processing people apply to their images, and it's something I do tend to to do to all of my images in some form or other, here's the above image as it came out of the camera, for comparison.