Ancient graffiti at the UK’s most northerly cathedral offers new insight
A SURVEY of the UK’s most northerly cathedral has recorded 600 separate ancient graffiti marks revealing new insight into its colourful past.
They include symbols left by masons, a complex medieval charm, pencil marks made by wartime service personnel – and a hidden Blue Peter sticker.
St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall on Orkney has a long and interesting history.
Local tour guide Melba Leonard said she had been hoping to find a cross made by the Vikings. “When they went on pilgrimage, they would leave a vertical mark. If they came back, they would add the horizontal mark,” she said, of the vikings.
“That’s what I was looking for.”
Instead, she found a star which has been described as a mystery by archaeologists.
She said it was “exciting” that the marks had been highlighted in a new guide to the cathedral, which dates back nearly 900 years.
It is possible the star may be the remnants of a ritual protection charm. There is such a mark – known as a hexafoil, because it looks like a flower with six petals – carved into stonework near one the grandest family tombs in the cathedral’s nave.
Dr Antonia Thomas, from the Archaeology Institute at the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI), said: “We find these sort of markings in all sorts of contexts, from the medieval and post-medieval period.
“Interestingly, we find them quite often in churches. Medieval graffiti surveys done in England and southern Scotland have found them. They’re thought to be a ritual protection mark.”
But not all the graffiti recorded by the volunteers is so ancient. They also found a sticker from a 1983 Blue Peter fundraising campaign hidden in one of the cathedral’s choir stalls, as well as a pencil inscription reading “HD 1940 Wilts”. This may have been left by someone from the armed forces serving in Orkney during the Second World War.
Georgian and Victorian names, initials, and dates have also been carved into stonework.
Hayley Green, secretary of the Orkney Archaeology Society, said the discoveries underlined the fact that the cathedral’s story was the story of all those who had been in it.
“I particularly like the pencil marks of people who were here during the wars, which we haven’t got fully recorded yet,” she added.
There was one more unexpected discovery. Some of the pillars are pock-marked with shallow dents as though someone has been hitting the stonework with something like the sharp point of a modern ice axe.
But these so-called marks are actually hundreds of years old. They show where 12th-century pilgrims have hammered the sandstone to remove tiny samples of dust – perhaps as a souvenir, or possibly to mix with food or drink in the hope of benefiting from a miracle cure for their ailments.
Cathedral custodian Fran Flett Hollinrake said those marks were left by “ordinary people”, unlike the “great and the good” who paid for the privilege to be buried in the cathedral and had a monument on the wall.
“Those tiny little marks were made by just anybody that came in, and we have so little material evidence of their lives that I find this stuff really precious,” she added.
The project was run by Orkney Archaeology Society, with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
Britain’s most northerly cathedral – which has its own saint’s relics embedded in the pillars – was recently named as one of Europe’s top 100 Cathedrals by the respected writer and historian Simon Jenkins.