Bulletin
3, 1997
Comments on the Tarbat Story So Far
The basic sequence anticipated in the Project Design is still holding, in which a late Iron Age 2-6th century AD settlement enclosure is re-commissioned as a central place in the Christian period. The Christian foundation included a cemetery of cist-burials, and inhumations with head-settings, sited on the hill on which the present church stands. It is this cemetery in which the majority of Tarbat's fine corpus of sculpture appears to have been employed as memorials or grave-markers. A small stone chapel may have served this cemetery, partly terraced into the east edge of the hill. The date for this development might be 7th to 9th century, but the favoured date is currently 9th century. This is suggested by the sculpture, but it might also be noted that complete and partial cist burials may be found in Carolingian contexts, where they seem to be a conscious revival of Roman practice (Carver 1987).
There appears to be an interval, in which a soil forms, before the developments which initiated the sequence of rectangular churches which has continued until the present day. The first form of Tarbat Old Church - a plain rectangle, to which a square-ended chancel was added - would fit the 12th century, and the extension of the church and the provision of a crypt seem to belong to the heyday of centralised Christian sponsorship and monastic organisation in the 13th century. After the Reformation, the Christian organisation becomes secular again and is ordered by the new hierarchy of the heritors. The excavations and the investigation of the architectural sequence by Annette Roe, Fred Geddes and Martin Jones have provided a vivid and detailed account of the adaption of the building to serve the oscillating power structure between the mid 16th century and the late 20th.
The early part of the history of the site at Portmahomack was recently re-interpreted as part of a general model for early medieval communities on the east coast of Britain (Carver, forthcoming). It was argued that these communities (like their later successors) were subjected to changing pressures from their neighbours and from each other, urging them to accept first one and then another form of religious and social organisation. These alternatives can be broadly divided into the pagan, the episcopal, the monastic and the Christian secular options; and it was suggested that the choice of which was adopted could be read in the material culture. Burial mounds, monasteries, carved stones and their distribution were all indicative of which influence pervaded. In East Anglia, the people attempted (unusually) to form a kingdom in the pagan idiom in alignment with Scandinavia, although it was shortly taken over in the later 7th century by those who preferred a Christian episcopal organisation and alignment with France. In 8th century Yorkshire, the Christian monastic system appears to have been "suppressed" by Scandinavian settlers, who preferred secular organisation run by the aristocracy served by personal churches and signalled by personal memorials.
On Tarbat Ness, the story so far is that we have as yet very little archaeological indication of Christian activity (or kingship for that matter) earlier than the 9th century, and Christianity when it comes has a secular organisation, with large memorials erected at Tarbat, Nigg, Shadwick and Hilton of Cadboll at roughly the same time. Given the geography of Tarbat Ness such estates were presumably small, but wealthy. They constituted a form of society run by landowners, to which the Scandinavians would have been more sympathetic than the continental prescriptions of Bishoprics with their centralised taxation or monasticism with its permanent alienation of land. Any Scandinavian takeover on Tarbat Ness may have had a soft impact on the Portmahomack settlement, although it would not be surprising if the cemetery and chapel had fallen into disuse in the 10-11th centuries, while the people developed their trading contacts from St Colman's Port.
The return of centralised Christianity in the 12th century under David I (Cameron 1996, 44-45), probably provides the context for the building of the rectangular chapel and its square-ended chancel. Fearn Abbey was founded on Tarbat Ness in 1227 and became the ecclesiastical authority during the 13th century. Tarbat Church, staffed by Fearn, was extended to serve the lay people and provided with a crypt, perhaps as a chapel of St Mary, so adding a global dimension to the influence of the more local saint Colman. This was Tarbat's medieval church, and the settlement it served is probably that being excavated in the Glebe Field to the west. The famous documented incident in which the Mackays of Sutherland took refuge from the Rosses in c1481 and were massacred by incineration, seems to have left visible marks of burning on this phase of the church.
Martin Carver
1 July 1998
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