Perth Museum

Location: St John’s Pl, Perth PH1 5SZ
Opening times: Friday – Wednesday 10.00am to 5.00pm, Thursday 10.00am to 7.00pm
Entry: Free, but there is a charge for the temporary Unicorn exhibition
Access: Local car parks, charge applies

I’m on my way to the brand spanking new Perth Museum, which opened amid much fanfare on 30 March this year. I assumed, given the media hoopla, that such a prestigious venue would have some brown signs pointing eager visitors in its direction, but nope, not a single one, so I will just have to file this under ‘Unsigned’. However, a sign or two would have been good for reasons beyond the aesthetic of this website; when I punched Perth Museum in to Google Maps, it merrily led me to the Perth Art Gallery. A second attempt insisted on taking me to Victoria Street, wherever that was. It appears that Perth Museum is so new it isn’t yet recognised by Google, so I end up typing its address in, St. John’s Place, and that did the trick.

It turns out I have been here before as the building the museum occupies is the old Perth City Hall. I saw Rick Wakeman for the first time at City Hall in May 2002, and saw Bob Geldof there for the umpteenth time a month or so later. A quick Google search tells me that the City Hall closed its doors in 2005 when it was replaced by the new Perth Concert Hall, and that it lay empty until the decision was made to not only return the Stone of Destiny to Perth for the first time in over 700 years, but to make it the centrepiece of a museum celebrating the city and surrounding area.

A couple of souvenirs from the museum in its previous incarnation as Perth City Hall: my Rick Wakeman ticket (bought off someone selling a spare, thus the ‘E. McFaeden’ name) and meeting Bob Geldof backstage. Naturally, Geldof’s been dining out on this meeting ever since.

And yes, ‘Stone of Destiny’ does sound like it should be preceded by the words ‘Indiana Jones and the …’. And, fittingly, the Stone is as shrouded in myth and cloaked in history as any MacGuffin or doohickey Hollywood scripters might have Indy going in search of. For the uninitiated, here is a potted history of the Stone.

It makes its first appearance in the Bible, when it is used as a pillow by Jacob, who dreams of angels ascending and descending a ladder from Heaven while resting his head on it. It was then taken to Ireland by the prophet Jeremiah for reasons that remain as clear as mud, and later to Scotland by the historically debatable Fergus Mór, who was later crowned king of Dál Riata while sitting on it, thus establishing a centuries-old tradition that continues today. A later king of Dál Riata, the equally shadowy Kenneth MacAlpin, united the Scottish and Pictish kingdoms, moved the Stone to his new capital Scone around 840CE.

During the next 450 years, 42 kings would be crowned at Scone while sitting on the Stone of Destiny, or the Stone of Scone as it was now also known. The first Scottish king not to be crowned on the Stone is perhaps the most famous, King Robert I, or Robert the Bruce. This is because the Stone was stolen in 1296 by the dastardly Edward I of England, and taken to London. And there it remained for 700 years, as part of the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey on which all English kings and subsequent British monarchs would be crowned. It did however make one spectacular journey north during that time, when four Scottish nationalists stole the Stone from Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1950. The following April it was left to be found at Arbroath Abbey, a symbolic choice as this is where the Scottish Declaration of Independence was written in 1320, after which the Stone was taken back to Westminster Abbey. It was finally returned to Scotland amidst much pomp and circumstance in 1996, with the proviso it travel south for the coronation of all future British monarchs. As such, it made a guest appearance at the crowning of Charles III in May 2023.

That, by anyone’s standards, is a storied history, but c’mere, there’s more. Some believe the Stone carted off by Edward I was a fake, surrendered to the English king by the crafty Abbot of Scone after he had spirited away the real deal. The novelist and historian Nigel Tranter was an adherent to this theory. An alternative theory has it that the Stone found by police at Arbroath Abbey in 1951 was a copy of the one taken from Westminster, and that the genuine article remains hidden somewhere in Scotland. Or perhaps not that hidden, for the Arlington Bar in Glasgow’s Woodlands Road proudly displays what it claims is the one, true Stone of Destiny.

The pavilion housing the Stone of Destiny. Photography is forbidden, so I can’t show what it looks like, alas. I wish now I had asked someone if I could take at least take one picture for this blog. The upper section of the pavilion contained the bulk of the ‘Unicorn’ exhibition, which is why there is a giant neon-horned horse on the top.

Anyway, here is the Stone, back in Perth as the literal heart of the new museum, just three miles away from its earlier location in Scone. It sits in an oak-panelled pavilion in the middle of the main hall, and booking in advance is advisable as only a fixed number of people are allowed to view it at any one time. The pavilion consists of two small chambers, and an enchanting, immersive audio-visual history of the Stone is presented in the first. Much of my history above derives from this presentation, but not all; Perth Museum doesn’t want their visitors gagging on an information overload, but I have no such qualms. Doors then open into the second chamber, where visitors can view the Stone itself. Anyone unfamiliar with it might be surprised by how unremarkable it looks, for it is not a thing of grandeur full of elaborate carvings and symbols, but rather a plain, rectangular chunk of rock that looks a lot like a battered old suitcase. A ring is attached to each side of it by a short chain, and a pole would have been put through these rings to allow the Stone to be carried. Another short audio-visual presentation focuses on the coronation of the eleventh-century boy king Alexander III, and then the show is over.

I have seen the Stone of Destiny in both Westminster Abbey and in Edinburgh Castle, its home since 1996, but none of those august institutions presented it nearly as well as Perth Museum, the new ‘ Home of Destiny’.

*I have no idea if this just signage for the Unicorn exhibition or if it is a sculpture in and of itself. Modern art, eh?*

After the Stone, I seek out the museum’s first ever temporary exhibition, ‘Unicorn’, but take a wrong turn and end up on the second floor. There is indeed some unicorn-related material, and the sculptures by six artists who identify as queer or part of the LGBTQIA+ community are quite interesting, but the rest of the floor looks like the dumping ground for old unicorn toys. Where, I wondered, was the Unicorn exhibition I saw advertised, the one that told of the development of the mythical animal from ancient Greek texts to its role as Scotland’s national animal to it being adopted by the queer community, and all points in-between? Downstairs on the first floor, that’s where, so I headed there and wasn’t disappointed. ‘Unicorn’ runs until 22 September 2024.

Anyway, enough yakking from me. From here on I’ll let the pictures (and their captions) do the talking.

An unicorn in the Ashmole Bestiary, a manuscript created during the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Here the beast is called by the Greek name ‘monoceros’, and appears above the entry for a bear. As far as the mediaeval mind was concerned, one was as real as the other.

The ‘Danny Jewel’, c. 1550. This pendant is made with a sliced half-section of unicorn horn. This would have been worn to ward off disease or even to cure it, thanks to the horn’s assumed medicinal purposes.

*Of course, the slice of horn in the ‘Danny Jewel’ didn’t come from a unicorn at all, but from an animal every bit as strange, the narwhal.*

Royalty in early mediaeval Scotland were quick to appropriate the unicorn as their symbol, due to the beast’s supposed courage and purity, and soon it was adopted as the country’s national animal and incorporated into its coat of arms. Mercat crosses all across the country would habitually have a unicorn at the top. In the photo above, the Scottish unicorn meets its English equivalent.

*Moving on to some of the museum’s permanent exhibits, here is the Carpow Logboat*. This 3,000 year-old Bronze Age boat was discovered in the Tay estuary in 2001 and excavated and recovered five years later. It is one of Britain’s best-preserved prehistoric logboats.

*It came from Outer Space! Fragment of the Strathmore Meteorite* *that fell to earth from the skies above Perth and Kinross on 3 December 1917.*

Loch Katrine by Horatio McCulloch (1866). McCulloch (1805 – 1867) was Scotland’s most successful landscape painter, and he perpetrated the romantic Victorian notion that the Highlands were wild empty spaces, all of which conveniently overlooked the communities being forcibly removed from the land during the Clearances, and the accompanying disintegration of Highland culture and society.

*A blast from the past, for sure, but I couldn’t find see anything connecting it to Perth.*

*Is it just me, or does the face on this sarcophagus look a lot like Christopher Lee? That’s because it is a fibreglass prop created for the 1957 Hammer horror film* The Mummy, which starred Mr. Lee in the titular role. It was then used to promote ticket sales in Perth cinemas, and then found a home as part of a window display in the McEwan’s department store on St. John’s Street.

*The view from the top of the pavilion. The display directly opposite depicts local flora and fauna.*

Nice imagining of the original colours used in the St. Madoes Stone, an eighth century example of Pictish art.

Destination or Diversion?

Perth Museum tells the story of the city and its surrounding areas through an absorbing, eclectic collection of exhibit items, and is a definite destination. I whiled away two easy hours here and that was without being distracted by the cafe and the shop, although I did have a brief stroll around the city centre.

Perth Museum’s impressive exterior. The church in the background is St. John’s Kirk, and that was my first port of call after the museum. The kirk was founded in 1126, and it is the oldest building in Perth. It is open to visitors every day except Sunday, from April to October.

Another church, or in this case, former church. This is St Paul’s, a nineteenth century church that closed in 1986 and was left to fall into dereliction. It was transformed into an outdoor event and performance venue and reopened in 2021.

This cool sculpture on the main pedestrianised shopping street is called Nae Day Sae Dark, and was inspired by the 1941 poem of the same name by William Soutar. The sculptor is David Annand, and it was installed in 1992. Other works by Annand include the statue of Sir Jimmy Shand at Auchtermuchty and that of Robert the Bruce and Abbot Bernard holding aloft the Declaration of Arbroath.

Destination or Diversion?

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