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Feb. 8th, 2011 06:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
endlessraritiesAnother day, another Vatcave. And yet another day when there was a crisis on the roads. This morning it was treacherous - black ice everywhere. And some poor soul paid the ultimate price on one of the local streets...
While the emergency services dealt with this crisis, I took to the back roads. Always a risky business on a day like this, and I reacted accordingly. I saw ice on the roadside puddles, and I was glad to be cautious. Meanwhile, a host of drivers in Very Big Expensive Cars (i.e. those who should be intelligent enough to know better) zipped past me as if it were just another average day,
Hmmm...
And now, it's Dumb Procter time.
Sunday's walk took us to the cemetery in Lochwinnoch, which is extremely neatly kept and very picturesque, with some elegant 19th century monuments:-
It's very worn, and not very easy to make out the details, but it features on this side, the figure of a man riding a donkey:-
While the emergency services dealt with this crisis, I took to the back roads. Always a risky business on a day like this, and I reacted accordingly. I saw ice on the roadside puddles, and I was glad to be cautious. Meanwhile, a host of drivers in Very Big Expensive Cars (i.e. those who should be intelligent enough to know better) zipped past me as if it were just another average day,
Hmmm...
And now, it's Dumb Procter time.
Sunday's walk took us to the cemetery in Lochwinnoch, which is extremely neatly kept and very picturesque, with some elegant 19th century monuments:-
And stuck in the middle of these modern monuments, we found this:-
It's very worn, and not very easy to make out the details, but it features on this side, the figure of a man riding a donkey:-
In this photo, you can just see the line of its jaw and neck as an upturned 'V' to the left of the picture, and there's a couple of legs visible, too.
So what is it, and what does it mean? Here's the other side, which is also carved:-
So what is it, and what does it mean? Here's the other side, which is also carved:-
This is much more informative. It shows the lower body, legs and feet of a figure, which tells us that a) this monument was originally free-standing, and b) it is now incomplete.
It's my suspicion that this represents a fragmentary religious monument, probably a cross, with the remains of the crucified Christ on one side, and a biblical scene on the other. A quick search through the internet confirms this. Here's another view of the Dumb Proctor, which also features some 19th century prints of the stone, showing it as it was before the elements eroded the scenes into their modern ambiguous forms. It's suggested that the man on the donkey represents the flight into Egypt, while the odd features above represent a snake coiled around some vegetation.
Do take a look, at http://www.lochwinnoch.info/gallery/history/DumProct
It sounds perfectly convincing to me, so if we're talking about a likely date, we're certainly talking pre-Reformation (e.g. pre-1560), as such imagery would be condemned as idolatry by Knox and his cronies. So a medieval date seems quite possible. Part of a wayside cross, perhaps, like the nearby Barochan Cross which survived intact in nearby Houston until it was moved indoors for safekeeping.
This one didn't fare so well. It was broken up and lost, before being recovered in a field during ploughing in the early 1800s. The man who found it, named Ewing, had it adorning his burial lair for many years.
And somewhere out there, the missing pieces may very well remain undiscovered...
It's my suspicion that this represents a fragmentary religious monument, probably a cross, with the remains of the crucified Christ on one side, and a biblical scene on the other. A quick search through the internet confirms this. Here's another view of the Dumb Proctor, which also features some 19th century prints of the stone, showing it as it was before the elements eroded the scenes into their modern ambiguous forms. It's suggested that the man on the donkey represents the flight into Egypt, while the odd features above represent a snake coiled around some vegetation.
Do take a look, at http://www.lochwinnoch.info/gallery/history/DumProct
It sounds perfectly convincing to me, so if we're talking about a likely date, we're certainly talking pre-Reformation (e.g. pre-1560), as such imagery would be condemned as idolatry by Knox and his cronies. So a medieval date seems quite possible. Part of a wayside cross, perhaps, like the nearby Barochan Cross which survived intact in nearby Houston until it was moved indoors for safekeeping.
This one didn't fare so well. It was broken up and lost, before being recovered in a field during ploughing in the early 1800s. The man who found it, named Ewing, had it adorning his burial lair for many years.
And somewhere out there, the missing pieces may very well remain undiscovered...
