Caves marked with early Christian motifs on Scotland’s western and eastern coasts have attracted scholarly attention for over a hundred years, where they have been associated with early medieval monastic communities. As a consequence of this work, cave use may be identified as an aspect of ‘northern’ Christianity. Our study challenges this idea in two ways: firstly, by looking at cave use more widely in Britain and Ireland; and secondly, by characterizing the long history of scholarship in Scotland and Canada that has led us to our current thinking on the early Christian use of these sites. For instance, the site of St Molaise’s Cave on Holy Island, off the coast of Arran, has long been identified as what we may call a medieval sacred place. First studied in the mid-nineteenth century by Daniel Wilson, this cave’s cross sculptures may be divided into two phases: an initial phase of large simple cross carvings and small graffito crosses associated with early medieval religious use; and a later phase of thirteenth-century Norse runic inscriptions and graffito crosses.Footnote 1

As a measure of current thinking, we may look to Ian Fisher’s characterization of the site type as a whole in his important Early Medieval Sculpture in the West Highlands and Islands. In that work, he classes cross-marked cave sites under his ‘small monasteries and eremitic sites’ category, which he identifies as individual or community hermitages. In this way, Fisher sees that:

He continues, sketching a model for relating the different grades of monastic sites:

Focusing upon Argyll, however, there is a problem with the ‘classic’ model in that the area’s small enclosed sites and cave sites do not share the inaccessibility of North Rona, Skellig Michael or St Kilda – as Fisher himself stresses.Footnote 4 Nevertheless, on Eilean Mór, Fisher points to

Similarly, he lists cave sites of what he calls ‘eremitic character’, such as:

Along these lines, we may also note Jerome’s Life of St Paul, the first hermit, since St Paul spent his eremitical life in what is called a cave.Footnote 7 This St Paul is significant, given the early medieval sculptural evidence for his popularity in northern Britain (eg, the Nigg cross-slab).Footnote 8 In Scotland, then, ideas surrounding early Christian cave use may be perceived as firmly rooted within archaeological and wider scholarship, with these sites posited to have held significance in early medieval landscapes.

Given the fundamental similarities between early Christian communities across Britain and Ireland, such well-established work in Scotland brings the question of cave use beyond Scotland sharply into focus. For instance, despite its rarity, the medieval literature suggesting the monastic use of cave sites is of a comparable sort throughout the Insular world. In other words, texts such as the Miracula Nynie Episcopi may describe how, in what is now south-west Scotland, ‘Ninian studied heavenly wisdom with a devoted mind in a cave of horrible blackness’;Footnote 9 yet literature of this sort is at least equal in its occurrence elsewhere. Thus, in his pioneering work on the early medieval use of some of Scotland’s caves, James Young Simpson drew upon the authority of the Annals of the Four Masters, which refer to cave use in Ireland. In this way, under the year 898, Simpson suggested that ‘probably we have the obit of [a self-denying and secluded anchorite] … under the designation of “Caenchombrac of the caves of Inis-bo-fine”, as these early ascetics sometimes betook themselves to caves, natural or artificial, using them for their houses and oratories’.Footnote 10 Similarly, Conleth Manning has recently called attention to references in Irish literature, including the twelfth-century story of Bishop Erc, St Brendan’s tutor, sending Brendan to a cave in penance, and the ninth- or tenth-century Tripartite Life of St Patrick, which refers to St Fíacc of Sletty spending Lent in a cave at Cnocc Dromma Coblai.Footnote 11 Early Christian cave use is also described in Wales and Cornwall. For instance, Peter Rose highlighted a number of examples, including references to cave use by St Samson and St Illtud.Footnote 12 As archaeologists, Manning and Rose are exceptional in turning their attentions to the early medieval monastic use of caves – in this way, their archaeological work has identified and contributed to our understanding of caves in Ireland and Cornwall.

Certainly, the written evidence suggests that caves were used by monastic ascetics. In the Lives of the British saints Samson, Ninian and Illtud, the saint’s use of a cave is normally something that marks his manner of life as exceptionally austere compared with that of ordinary monks.Footnote 13 Three theoretically possible reasons suggest themselves for the use of a cave within a life of unusual austerity: the desire for seclusion; the desire to live a life of exceptional poverty; and the desire to imitate the burial of Christ in a tomb carved in the rock, so as to ‘die with Christ’ in this world and then rise with him into the life of heaven.

The Life of St Samson is both the earliest and the most informative source. The saint decides to inhabit a cave on two separate occasions. On the first, the cave is the culmination of two acts of separation. Samson has been the abbot of Ynys Bŷr, but he decides to leave the monastery and withdraw to ‘a suitable desert’. He and three other companions first find a castellum near the Severn; there he left his companions and, ‘as he wandered through the forest, he found a very spacious and very lonely cave’, with its mouth opening towards the east. The cave is, as it were, a desert within the desert. On the second occasion, Samson has just triumphed over ‘a poisonous and very vicious serpent’, which lived in a cave in Cornwall.Footnote 14 The saint then takes over the serpent’s cave, ordering his men to build a monastery nearby. The cave is, therefore, an ascetic satellite settlement close to a monastery; subsequently it would be a site that recalled the saint’s ‘heavenly life’. In the Northumbrian Miracula Nynie Episcopi, dated to the late eighth century,Footnote 15 the saint is portrayed as a great teacher rather than an outstanding ascetic. In accordance with this central theme, he ‘studied heavenly wisdom with a devoted mind in a cave of horrible blackness’.Footnote 16 Seclusion of a bishop for biblical study, rather than of a monk for exceptional austerity, is what the cave offers here. The Life of St Illtud portrays the saint’s seclusion in the cave in yet another light: Illtud was in conflict with Meirchion, king of Glamorgan, who proposed to kill the saint and destroy his monastery. When the king’s army was at the gates of the monastery, Illtud fled from the king’s men and from ‘the excited people, who caused hindrance to his prayers’,Footnote 17 and took up residence in a cave by the River Ewenni. The flight was from the violence and the disturbance of the world.

The other two possible motives are not made evident in the texts. St David’s community renounced the use of the plough, thus placing themselves among the contemporary poor – those confined to using the spade. If contemporary monasticism had thought of the cave as the resort of the very poor, this form of habitation might have had the same significance. But the texts never advert to any such conception. Similarly, the insistence of Adomnán’s Life of Columba that the saint was buried in sindonibus, in linen cloths, echoes the gospel accounts of the burial of Christ: Columba was buried in a Christ-like manner. One might have supposed that such imitation of Christ could have been taken further. In baptism the Christian died with Christ; and, indeed, the baptized descended into the baptismal pool recalling not only Christ’s baptism but his burial. The Life of St Samson describes his first cave as being underground and also, like the second cave, as being miraculously provided with a spring of water; but, if this was intended to remind the reader of the baptismal pool and of the tomb of Christ in the rock, it was all left implicit. The choice of words for the cave avoids the monumentum of the gospel narratives, partly no doubt because that was a word of much wider meaning than spelunca and specus (it would give Welsh mynwent ‘cemetery’).Footnote 18

Seclusion was, therefore, the dominant theme, although it could be given different twists according to the context. Correspondingly, though uniformly sparse across Celtic Britain and Ireland, the medieval literature describing early Christian cave use emphasizes seclusion and crucially does not suggest that using caves was a particularly ‘northern’ thing to do.

Additionally, we may also be concerned about using the presence of sculpture as an accurate measure of early Christian activity. This is because, though sculpture is distinctive to many Scottish caves (as well as a number of Icelandic sites),Footnote 19 it is lacking at Irish and other British sites, which have been ascribed early Christian associations by other means. Manning, for instance, bases his identification of rock shelters and caves associated with Irish saints upon a combination of medieval literature, place-names, folklore and archaeological survey.Footnote 20 Yet, the sculptural element distinctive to Scottish cave sites may be important (and has long been understood as contemporary with comparable rock-cut and carved stone sculpture):Footnote 21 eighth-century Irish canon law describes the fundamental significance of the cross symbol as well as hierarchies of sacred precincts or places;Footnote 22 and the creation and display of largely anonymous simple, cross-decorated stones have been proposed to reflect a change in monument use from earlier periods, marking out ‘protected’ spaces,Footnote 23 proclaiming holy ground and the community of the Christian dead or defining church landownership.Footnote 24

Nevertheless, despite preliminary or speculative discussions by Manning or Rose, we may perceive that early Christian cave use remains a topic largely unexplored outside Scotland.Footnote 25 This unequal distribution of scholarship and focus upon the caves of northern Britain may be credited to the dedicated interests of two key figures: Daniel Wilson and James Young Simpson. These two men were multi-faceted scholars of great significance. In his seminal 1851 publication, Archæology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, Wilson coined the English word ‘prehistory’ and brought important ideas from Scandinavian scholarship to Britain, and later to Canada. Simpson, in turn, is most widely known for his discovery of the merits of chloroform as an anaesthetic and his advocacy of its medical applications; less well known is his role as a leading figure in Scotland’s archaeological community, bringing a wealth of wide-ranging knowledge and fresh perspectives to the field.

We propose that, by explicitly considering an early Christian use for Scottish caves, Daniel Wilson and James Young Simpson broke with earlier interpretations of these sites. For instance, George Chalmers, in 1807, glossed over the potential early Christian use of caves, instead focusing upon his idea that cave use was an aspect of primitive society.Footnote 26 Wilson’s Archæology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland differed from Chalmers in proposing that some caves ‘are the retreats which the primitive confessors of Scotland excavated or enlarged for their oratories or cells’.Footnote 27 Wilson then continued to suggest specific early Christian associations for a number of sites:

With this passage, Wilson sparked research into early Christian cave use. Furthermore, both he and Simpson, as Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland,Footnote 29 went on to establish this topic within that society’s canon by building upon existing interest in early Christian Scotland – interest evidenced, for instance, by one of that society’s earliest excursions: in 1848 to the island of Inchcolm near Edinburgh, a site associated with St Columba.Footnote 30 Thus, the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland were soon established as the leading forum for Scotland’s cave-use research, with Simpson turning his pen to the topic in the second volume.Footnote 31 The two scholars were friends and, bearing in mind that Wilson’s second edition of his Prehistoric Annals was dedicated to Simpson,Footnote 32 we may presume that this aspect of their printed output captures stages of an evolving discussion. In this way, Wilson developed Simpson’s Reference Simpson1857 discussion and Simpson, in his 1865 study, in turn developed Wilson’s ideas.

At the same time, however, Wilson and Simpson also gained impetus from high-profile contemporary scholarship in England, which brought attention to the prehistoric human use of cave sites. For instance, Wilson referred to such leading figures as Buckland, Owen, Prestwich, Falconer and MacEnery – and he himself contributed to meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where many of these scholars were especially active and where key sites such as Brixham Cave and Kent’s Hole held special prominence in the playing out of ideas challenging Biblical conceptions of the antiquity of man.Footnote 33 The extent to which Wilson engaged with geological and archaeological explorations of the antiquity of man is noteworthy, and suggests that Bruce Trigger’s influential analysis of Wilson’s thinking could be profitably revisited. For instance, Trigger perceived Wilson to have resisted arguments for the great antiquity of human origins until 1864.Footnote 34 Yet, as Wilson discussed ‘the presence of the British Troglodyte and the practice of his simple arts contemporaneously with some at least of the long-extinct fossil mammals’ before 1864,Footnote 35 we may instead identify an earlier date and geological focus (rather than Darwinian) for his challenges to Biblical chronologies.Footnote 36 Wilson and Simpson engaged with these important ideas,Footnote 37 and we may suggest that English research into prehistoric cave use focused Wilson’s attention upon the site type, and consequently helped to spur study of Scotland’s caves. In particular, the idea of cave art resonated with Simpson: he felt that ‘in his earliest and rudest times, man has been a sculpturing and painting animal; and his old attempts in this way may yet possibly be found upon the walls of those ossiferous English caves’.Footnote 38 Summing up then, by broaching the question of cave use in his Prehistoric Annals, Wilson sought to establish the merits of that topic for archaeological research and, in particular, to understand early Christian Scotland.

More generally, Wilson argued that the materials of archaeological research allow us to learn somewhat of the habits, thoughts and even faith of Scotland’s prehistoric peoples.Footnote 39 Furthermore, by charting how Christianity travelled from there to many Scandinavian places, such as Iceland, Wilson also sought to demonstrate the international relevance of early medieval Scotland – and he was reacting to contemporary beliefs that the country’s native material must either be of foreign origin (by which was usually meant ‘Viking’ or ‘Danish’ origin) or else be inherently unremarkable.Footnote 40 Indeed, James Graham-Campbell underscores the significance of Wilson’s objection to the way in which the vast majority of Scotland’s ‘native relics’ had been assigned a Scandinavian origin and how ‘this theory of a Danish origin for nearly all native arts, though adopted without investigation, and fostered in defiance of evidence, has long ceased to be mere popular error’.Footnote 41 In this way, Graham-Campbell credits Wilson with reclaiming Scotland’s past. He writes that: ‘It was Wilson who threw out the Danes (even if on Norwegian advice), and Wilson who dismissed the numerous antiquarian fantasies concerning the supposed Scandinavian origins of much that has, ever since, been rightly accepted as of native construction or manufacture.’Footnote 42 In contextualizing archaeological work, we should also remember the allure that Celtic languages, literatures and histories held in the later nineteenth century – exciting a range of scholars, such as the philologist Johann Caspar Zeuss, and even Karl Marx – as a forum for exploring critical and widely applicable ideas.Footnote 43 It may be that cave-use studies focusing upon the early medieval Celtic past resonated with this impulse.

In 1853, Wilson took up the Chair of History and English Literature at University College, Toronto, and later came to preside over that college and, eventually, over the newly federated University of Toronto.Footnote 44 Correspondingly, though Wilson did remain an important figure for Scottish archaeology, Simpson’s continued presence in Edinburgh (where he held the Chair of Medicine and Midwifery) proved critical in bringing about and shaping sustained archaeological work on early Christian cave use, with F R Coles in 1911 clearly regarding Simpson’s discussion of the topic as seminal.Footnote 45 In this way, soon after Simpson’s death in 1870, John Stuart was able to reflect on his leadership of Scotland’s archaeological community:

Simpson’s influence was remarkably long-lasting. In particular, Joseph Anderson claimed not only the theoretical and methodological importance – fifty years on – of his inaugural address to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland,Footnote 47 but also his more informal significance. Simpson’s inaugural address was

The nineteenth century witnessed great changes in archaeological research and Simpson engaged with these transformations, perceiving how ‘Archaeology, as tempered and directed by the philosophical spirit, and quickened with the life and energy of the nineteenth century, is a very different pursuit from the Archaeology of our forefathers’.Footnote 49 For instance, as a leader of the Scottish scene, he (and later Anderson) came to shape the form of archaeological research in Scotland, advocating the application of explicitly Baconian ideas of induction to archaeological problems.Footnote 50 Simpson elaborates:

Only soundly refuted in the twentieth century,Footnote 52 Bacon provided a well-established theoretical foundation for Simpson’s influential methodology, which may in turn be responsible for the observation-led approach in Scottish archaeological studies.Footnote 53

Furthermore, both John Stuart and Joseph Anderson played key roles in recognizing and seeking to understand this site type. For instance, as Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland from 1855 to 1877,Footnote 54 Stuart worked from Wilson and Simpson’s ideas in making his own contribution to the growing body of cave-use scholarship. Thus, though the first volume of his Sculptured Stones of Scotland did not touch upon cross-marked cave sites, his second volume did – and included an inventory of sites in its treatment of the topic.Footnote 55 Similarly, Anderson engaged with this research and, in his 1880 Rhind Lectures on Scotland in Early Christian Times, he concentrated on the significance of the early medieval sculpture present in a number of cave sites.Footnote 56 In succession, Wilson, Simpson, Stuart and Anderson set an agenda for research on early Christian cave use. Furthermore, for Wilson and Simpson, at least, high-profile cave research in England could have triggered their work. At the same time, however, a focus upon the early Christian, rather than the early prehistoric, may demonstrate a desire to distinguish Scottish from English research – and may also have served to challenge contemporary beliefs that Scotland’s native (that is, non-‘Danish’) material must be inherently unremarkable.Footnote 57 Alternatively, Wilson and Simpson may have focused upon the early medieval use of caves because the presence of cross sculpture provided a chronological anchor, clearly identifying early Christian use of these sites. A further consideration concerns Wilson’s religious beliefs,Footnote 58 which one might initially suppose may have directed his work away from the prehistoric and towards aspects of early Christianity; however, he also advocated a scientific research unshackled by creed.Footnote 59

At the outset, this article set out to assess the merits of characterizing early Christian cave use as having a predominantly ‘northern’ distribution. We targeted two interconnected topics: namely, the extent of cave use by early Christian communities beyond northern Britain and a history of scholarship. As Fisher’s work illustrates, cave use is currently understood to have been an aspect of early Christianity in Scotland. Given that this idea is not widespread elsewhere in Britain and Ireland, the evidence of medieval literature is significant, as it indicates a more extensive distribution. Yet, at a number of cave sites in northern Britain, early medieval use is distinctively marked by early Christian sculptural motifs. However, we may also be concerned about using the presence of these motifs as an accurate measure of early Christian activity – this practice may instead be related to impulses specific to northern Britain. Additionally, the relevance for Scotland of contemporary high-profile studies of cave use in England is a new discovery: this work challenged Biblical conceptions of the antiquity of man and may have spurred study of Scotland’s caves. In short, then, there has been an unequal distribution of scholarship, with highly influential figures in the history of archaeology setting an agenda in Scotland, for research on the early Christian use of cave sites. This last point is important because, if unaware of the origins of our ideas, previous trajectories of scholarship risk entrenching potentially false ideas, such as the characterization of cave use as predominantly an aspect of ‘northern’ Christianity.