West Kirby hogback
West Kirby hogback
The hogback front
The hogback in St Bridget’s Parish
Church, West Kirby dates from the 10th or early 11th
century AD and is of Anglo-Norse origin. It was discovered during the
restoration of the church in 1869-70 on the site now covered by the aisle and
was restored by the Merseyside Conservation Centre in 1999. In the Charles
Dawson Museum next to the church, there are a number of fragments from the same
period, including tenth- or eleventh-century circle-headed crosses. The
collection has been taken to indicate that an early medieval ecclesiastical and
burial landscape developed at West Kirby. The wealthy patrons of the church
commemorated by the monuments might have included landed elites, merchants and
their followers.
West Kirby is a Scandinavian place-name
(ON kirkju-býr ‘village with a church’. It is West ~ to distinguish the
place from Kirkby in Wallasey.) The church’s dedication to the Irish St Bridget
has been connected to Hiberno-Norse activity in the north west, including
Chester.
Hogbacks are sculptured stones with a
distinctive curved ridge and bowed sides, common in the north of England. W.G.
Collingwood claims they originated in the house-shaped Roman tombs, as seen in
York. This shape and the carved roof shingles (tegulae) on either side
of the central ridge imitated Scandinavian-type houses of the Viking Age. They
are stylised houses for the dead. Hogbacks have no direct precedent in the
Insular or Norse worlds and are seen as distinctively Hiberno-Norse.
Drawing by W.G. Collingwood of the front, as published in
1928: dotted line projections illustrate the likely form of the once intact
stone
The decoration on the side of the
stone is a late example of an
interlace or "plait" which can be found on much Anglo-Norse and
Celtic sculpture. The "cart-wheel" pattern found above the tiles is unusual, but is
similar to designs on a cross on the Isle of Man.
Collingwood writes, “the West Kirby
hogback is obviously later than most – so much later that the original meaning
of the house-shape has been forgotten. Instead of bevelling off the top part of
the stone to make a gable section, it is merely rounded a little, and the forms
intended for tiles are carved on a vertical face, so that they do not tell
their tale but look like big drops running down the wall. On the rounded
shoulder above them is a row of what may be called ‘cart-wheels’ pattern –
pairs of rings joined by a sort of axle… Beneath the tiles is a very rude plait
incised with hacked lines, not following on in the true sequence of a plait.”
The hogback back
The back of the stone is like the
front, except that all the patterns are pushed up by a plait band, like a
plinth, filling 4” (10cm) of the base. The lower parts of the ends seem to have
been trimmed away, perhaps when the stone was used as a lintel; the whole
length is now 5’9” (175cm), but was possibly originally 6’ (182cm) or more, to
fit a grave of that length. The thickness is 9” (23cm) at the base, tapering to
7” (18cm) a foot (30cm) higher. In the middle it rises to about 19” (48cm),
falling to about 15” (38cm) at the ends, as restored. The top of the stone has
been broken away by weathering because the carver did not understand his
material and ‘face-bedded’ his stone – that is to say, turned it so that the
bedding or cleavage was vertical, allowing rain in to soak into the cracks
which the frost opened up and split away.
The West Kirby hogback was already
damaged along the top and narrow edges when it was discovered. As well as the
damage to the top of the stone, it seems that at some stage in its history the
ends of the stone may have been lost, perhaps deliberately cut off, perhaps so
that the stone could be used as a lintel or in a wall.
The St Bridget’s hogback is carved
from hard grey sandstone, which is believed to be Cefn sandstone from the west
of Ruabon 43km to the south of West Kirby in North Wales. The only other
hogback found on the Wirral is in Bidston, discovered in the garden of a former
parish vicarage in 2004, which is much smaller and of a different style. Hogbacks
are found in greater numbers in Yorkshire and Cumbria.
The use of non-local stone, which
must have been brought some distance, suggests that the memorial was of some
important person, especially as such monuments were rare in the region. The
colour of the stone and its form and ornamentation would have been distinctive
as a statement for the dead person.
The hogback provides evidence of
Christian burial and Viking settlement a thousand years ago. This is consistent
with the known arrival of Norsemen on the Wirral peninsula from Ireland at the
beginning of the 10th century AD. Many of them seem to have already
converted to Christianity – hence the dedication of the church in West Kirby to
St Bridget, Abbess of Kildare. All the surviving "hogback" stones
have been found within parish churchyards (or in a vicarage, as in Bidston) and
scholarly opinion is that they
served as markers for the burial place of important members of the Norse
community, some stones perhaps being
combined with head and foot stones, and even with standing crosses.
References and further reading
Collingwood, W.G., Early
Monuments of West Kirby, Reprinted from John Brownbill, ed., West Kirby &
Hilbre. A Parochial History (Liverpool, 1928), pp 14-26 (in Cavill, P.,
Harding, S., Jesch, J., Wirral and its Viking Heritage, Nottingham English
Place-Name Society 2000)
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/ncmh/documents/dna/WVH7.pdf
Harding, S., Ingimunds Saga:
Viking Wirral, 3rd edn. University of Chester Press 2016
Harding, S., Viking
Mersey Scandinavian Wirral, West Lancashire and Chester Countyvise Limited 2002
Williams, H., ‘Clumsy and
illogical’? Reconsidering the West Kirby hogback. The Antiquaries Journal, 96,
2016, pp 69-100
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