Building on history

Scone Palace, Perthshire, part I The seat of the Earl and Countess of Mansfield and Mansfield In the first of two articles, John Goodall explains the importance of Scone—and the great abbey that formerly stood here in the grand narrative of Scottish history

- John Goodall

SCONE PALACE—as the modern visitor encounters it—is a magnificent Regency country house. Set in spreading parkland on the River Tay about two miles north of the centre of Perth, the present building is almost entirely the creation of the architect William Atkinson working for the Earl of Mansfield between 1803 and 1812. The form of the house as a battlemented mansion partly reflects the Romantic taste for the Gothic style (Fig 2). It also, however, evokes the exceptionally deep history of this place.

Scone is first reliably recorded as a site of importance at the time of the Viking invasions of Britain more than 1,100 years ago. According to the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, a compilation of earlier texts in Latin made in about 1300, it was here, on the hill beside the ‘royal civitas of Scone’, in the sixth year of his reign—in 904 or 905—that Constantin II met Bishop Cellach and ‘pledged to keep the laws and disciplines of the Faith and the rights of the Church and the Gospels.... From that day the hill earned its name, that is the Hill of Belief’ or colle credulitatis.

The form of this civitas—by which the writer presumably meant a settlement and seat of royal authority—is a matter for speculation. What can be confidently identified, however, is the hill where king and bishop met, presumably as part of a large public gathering. Moot Hill, as it is now known, is unexpectedly modest, standing about 7ft high and 300ft across. The remnant of a parish church, built in about 1620, now occupies the summit (Fig 3).