A hogback in Bidston
A hogback
in Bidston
A Viking Age stone carving, believed to be a hogback, was discovered
in Bidston in 1994 and is the smallest known example of this type of stone
monument. It was found in a rockery in a garden in School Lane, Bidston and was
subsequently recognised as of pre-Norman date by landscape archaeologist Jenny
Whalley. Stylistically it can be dated to the tenth century. The house had been
the vicarage for the nearby St Oswald’s church from 1936 to 1986.
The stone probably originally came from St Oswald’s
churchyard. The earliest documentary record of the church dates to the late
thirteenth century, although the present building is mainly work of a restoration
of 1855-6. The circular shape of the grounds at St Oswald’s suggests that this
may have been the site of an early medieval church before Vikings arrived. The
original parish stretched across much of the north end of the Wirral from the
edge of West Kirby to the Mersey, including Bidston, Moreton, Saughall Massie,
Claughton and Birkenhead. Pre-Conquest occupation has been recorded at Moreton.
The base of the stone is 47cm and the height at the centre
is 26cm. A report by the National Museums, Liverpool confirmed that the
sandstone used for the sculpture was likely to have been quarried locally. Like
most other pre-Norman monuments, the Bidston carving was probably produced in
the immediate vicinity.
Face A
Two open-jawed beasts with raised paws face each other. Both
beasts have an upper tooth. The beast on the left has a single almond-shaped
eye and an extended ear. The seemingly hole-like ‘eye’ on this right-hand beast
is possibly caused by the loss of a quartz pebble or similar. An interlace
pattern emerges from the tongue of the animal on the right and returns to join
its lower jaw. To the beast on the right the paw ends in four toes and to the
left in three. The lower part of the stone has three inter-linked triquetra (triangular figures
composed of three interlaced arcs). It would
appear that part of the lower section has been lost.
Face A Photo: Ross Trench-Jellicoe,
copyright of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture.
Face B
There are possible traces of a narrow vertical panel with arched head containing knotwork.
Face C
The decoration is badly damaged, probably during its
use as a paving stone or step, but sufficient remains to indicate that both
end-beasts had open jaws with a single upper tooth and protruding tongue
similar to those on Face A. The visible forelegs appear to have three toes. As
on Face A, the upper part of the stone was decorated by a curving run of
knotwork. The lower decoration is now difficult to interpret but seems to have
consisted of a central-stemmed bush scroll terminating at the top in two large
leaf or fruit forms, one rounded, and the other oval in shape.
Face D
Face D appears to have a panel of knotwork towards
the base of the stone.
The base is slightly bombé (curving or
swelling outward), broadening from 12cm in depth at one end to 15cm in the
middle before narrowing to 13cm at the other end. The curving ridgeline is flat
and 11cm deep.
Hogbacks are a Viking-Age form of recumbent monument
whose distribution through Cumbria and Yorkshire suggest an association with
Hiberno-Norse groups in northern England. The three-dimensional end-beasts,
curving ridgeline and bombé base are all characteristic of this class of
sculpture, which dates to the first half of the tenth century. There is very
little direct influence from Scandinavian art on the Viking Age sculpture from
Bidston.
The dimensions of the Bidston carving are, however,
not typical. The average size of English hogbacks is 142 cm and the vast
majority are over 120cm long. Apart from Bidston, only three are less than 90cm
in length: Kirby Stephen 8 (81cm), Ingleby Arncliff 3 (76cm) and Brompton 6
(76cm). Bidston is thus the smallest known hogback by some margin. The Bidston
stone can never have acted as a grave-cover (though the evidence for
that role for any hogback is decidedly thin). If it did have a funerary
function, it could have been as a grave-marker, or perhaps as a
headstone in a composite monument.
The Bidston sculpture’s plant ornament and linked
triquetras are unique across the hogback corpus. It is one of the few such
monuments to have decoration on the narrow ends. It is also the only hogback to
add further low-relief carving to the bodies of those beasts, though an animal
on a cross-shaft from Prestbury, Cheshire is similarly treated.
The scroll ornament and the linked triquetra could
plausibly be interpreted as Christian symbols. Animals flanking and eating from
a scroll represent a version of the theme of the Tree of Life, a symbol both of
God’s bounty and generosity and of Christ’s sacrifice. It is more difficult to
demonstrate that the decoration on the lower part of Face A carries
significance beyond the purely ornamental, although it could be read as three
linked triquetra – a motif which was used as a symbol of the Trinity in medieval
art.
The main areas of hogback production were in
northern Yorkshire, along the Eden valley and down the Cumbrian coastal plain
as far as Gosforth. Further south and the west of the Pennines there were, in
1984, only three known sites with this form of carving: Heysham, Bolton le
Sands (near the mouth of the River Lune) and West Kirby on the Wirral.
The general decorative organization of the Bidston
carving reflects the group of hogbacks labelled by J.T. Lang as the ‘extended
niche’ type. This is not a type known in Cumbria. Its development and
concentration are in northern Yorkshire and particularly at Brompton, near
Northallerton, where there are four examples, including a miniature hogback. In
this group the ‘roof’ area of the building-shape stone is occupied, not by the
usual tegulation (tiling), but by a run of horizontal knotwork set behind the heads
of two substantial end-beasts whose backs slope inwards towards the base.
The sculpture is in private ownership and not
available for public viewing.
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