Experts cast doubt on Auckengill 'runes'
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Anne Richard and Karen Begg, both from Auckengill, came upon the etchings on an enormous slab just north of the village harbour during the Easter school holidays.
They regularly walk with Mrs Begg’s children and Mrs Richard’s grand-daughter along the beach and have never seen them before.
A recent storm caused part of the cliff to fall down, leaving huge slabs of rock strewn over the beach. The pair thought that might have uncovered some ancient runes, protected for hundreds of years.
Mrs Begg said: “We often come down to the beach and it was very dry the day we found them, so they were very clear. There’s a little cave here too, so you’d never know with all the rocks around here if there were any more.”
Mrs Richard said: “I’ve lived here for 40 years and have never seen them before. We used to take the kids all the way along the beach as those big rocks weren’t here until recently.
“From when I was very young, I used to walk back and fore along the beach and I’ve never seen anything like that before. We had that storm last December which shifted the beach about and brought down part of the cliff.
“You wouldn’t think somebody modern would come down and carve it in this weather. They’d have to spend a lot of time here and we don’t get a lot of visitors.”
Unfortunately, the carvings are not ancient. On closer inspection, they appear very fresh, and experts have established they are not the real McCoy.
After being sent pictures of the finds, Dr Ragnhild Ljosland, runologist at the Centre for Nordic Studies in Orkney, said: “I can tell right away that the inscription is new.”
He said that all genuine runic inscriptions from Caithness, Orkney and Shetland use the Younger Futhark alphabet developed about 700 AD. The characters used in the Auckengill find were Older Futhark, which had gone out of use by the time the northern lands were settled by Scandinavians.
The carving, which reads ‘SUYNASLLFARSON’, is very clear and has been deciphered by Dr Ljosland.
“The start of the inscription is a bit difficult to see in the photo, but it looks like someone has meant to carve the name of the famous “last Viking” Sveinn Asleifarson, a main character in the Orkneyinga Saga. He lived in the 12th century, and would therefore not have used the Older Futhark,” he said.
John Borland, of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, said: “They’re very crisp and new looking, the sheer size of the runes would mark them out as unusual, and the nature of their carving – a sharp V-cut with a triangular facet at the end, as in a Roman inscription – is wrong.
“Genuine Norse runes do come in various forms and sizes. Some have quite deeply cut characters, but most are finely scratched with a knife blade. But I’ve never seen any like this.”
Mr Borland added: “Although not genuine, it still makes an interesting story. Someone with a fair amount of skill has spent a lot of time doing this.”
Runes are not unknown in the area. Caithness Horizons has a Viking cross-shaped gravestone on display, incised with runic letters that was found near to Old St. Peter’s Church, Thurso in 1896.
The Auckengill discovery follows the find of one of Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda’s poems carved into rocks at the Bay of Sannick near John O’Groats in March. Pablo Neruda was one of Chile’s greatest poets and died less than two weeks after a military coup in his country in 1973.
Edgar White came across the carvings while examining the Old Red Sandstone reefs at the west end of the remote beach. He became aware of the carving on an adjacent reef being exposed as the tide dropped. It turned out to be the whole of number XVII of Pablo Neruda’s suite of poems Las Piedras del Cielo – Stones of the Sky.
Mr White thought the words may have been carved in 2004, the 100th anniversary of Neruda’s birth, when there was a celebration of the poet’s life in Edinburgh that year. Time for working on the carving would have been limited to the period between tides, as would have been the case at Auckengill.
The question now turns to who is doing the carvings as they have taken considerable time and effort to work in inaccessible spots.
