Rutherglen

A friend and I drove out to Rutherglen this evening to collect some tools from inside a building on the Main Street. A while ago, lets say about 1800, masons altered a fireplace inside that building. They made it narrower using stone salvaged from elsewhere and one of the blocks had a bit of carving on it. The masons saw the carving and recognised the hand of a sculptor. Nonetheless they cut a small notch in it that would hold a dook, a short wooden peg about 2 inches thick, and laid the stone. The dook was one of many on that wall used by the joiners who came in to attach internal fittings. They built up the fire surround and nailed on wooden battens to hold lath and plaster. Once the fire surround was in, and the plasterer was finished, the carved stone was hidden from view - even when the fireplace was blocked up in the 1970s.

By 1800 the sculpture was already approaching a thousand years old because that block of stone was part of an early medieval cross. What happened before 1800 is a mystery. Perhaps it had been used in a building that was demolished around that time. In it's latest home beside the fireplace, the stone lay forgotten until the interior of the pub was stripped out to bare walls and earthen floor. It was at this point that Dave, the friend in the car with me, working inside the building for Archaeological Heritage Services Ltd (this is their picture) spotted it and academics recognised its antiquity. Their knowledge restored a little of the stone's memory.