Nigg Old Church, Cholera and Pictish Stones Traditional Cache
Lorgadh: As the owner has not responded to my previous log requesting that they check this cache I am archiving it.
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Lorgadh
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Nigg Old Church, Cholera and Pictish Stones
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Nigg Old Church has a wonderfully preserved and 'packed' graveyard.
In the churchyard is the Cholera Stone, dating from the cholera epidemic of 1832. One of the elders, on coming out of the church, saw a cloud of vapour hovering above the ground. He believed it to be a cloud of cholera, threw a blanket or cloth over it and placed this large stone on top to keep it from escaping. Children were afterwards wont to stamp on it and spit if it made a noise if the stone moved. Inside the church, according to one tradition, the beadle (church officer) allowed an illicit still to be kept in the space under the pulpit.
The Cholera stone has a small sign beside it - near the Church building.
The Church itself has a very interesting past - my partner has a wealth of information on it's history. If you want to know, ask!
Apart from the building's history, it now contains the Nigg Stone - a Pictish carved stone from the 8th century with Christian imagery. Its ornamental cross resembles a manuscript page. The fantastic intricacy of the carving, the whirlpools of spirals, and the heaped up knot of snakes, with tails and tongues endlessly intertwining, is only paralleled in the illuminations of the great Gospel-Book of Kells, made at the island monastery of Iona.
The carvings include a unique illustration of a miracle, the first monks, Paul and Anthony, receiving bread in the desert from a raven sent by God: and David, King and Psalmist, saving a sheep from a lion, his harp (modelled on a contemporary Pictish instrument) beside his shoulder.
The Church was largely rebuilt in 1626 and the sound of its bell, cast in the Netherlands in 1624, has rung out over the fertile farmland of the parish, on the shore of the Cromarty Firth, since then.
The cache lies just outside the Church fence.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Cbfg/Cvyyne
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