Cathedral restoration reveals hidden nude statue of well endowed monk

Elgin Cathedral, in north-east Scotland, is impressive as a ruin and must have been spectacular in its glory days. Sometimes known as “The Lantern of the North”,  the building underwent many changes in its long history.

In 1390 the Earl of Buchan,  the “Wolf of Badenoch”, attacked the church, damaging it quite extensively when he descended on Elgin with a band of  “wyld wykkyd Helandmen”. Further damage in the early 1400s was inflicted by the Lord of the Isle’s followers.

Repairs fell to the Bishop of Elgin,  Bishop Columba, who set about rebuilding this important church. Structures were altered and extended, and teams of medieval stonemasons were brought in to re-build and decorate the building.

Now a ruin, much of the interior has been lost, yet some artefacts have been preserved by ancient monuments specialists. Historic Scotland has collected numerous stone carvings that would have been used throughout the church to hold up structures or merely for decoration. They have been kept safe for years, seldom looked at until now.  Historic Scotland recently engaged Dr Mary Markus, a specialist stone historian,  to look at them. And she was very surprised by one of the finds.

“It was shocking in subject matter,” she says. “It was a beautiful piece of carving, and you don’t expect to come across this sort of thing. And so cleverly hidden.”

What Dr Markus found was a stone that would once have held up part of the great arched roof. From below it would have simply looked like a shield with unusual heraldry. But once on ground level, the carving took on an altogether different aspect.

Behind the shield, and hidden from the congregation, is the figure of a monk. Dr Markus explains: “He is naked from the waist down and anatomically correct, fairly well endowed if probably exaggerated.”

The bawdy monk, or “Bollocks Man” as he is fondly referred to, posed a bit of a mystery. For starters he is a rarity.  Dr Markus has looked at thousands of stones in her job over many years and has never seen anything like the statue before. There is also the question of what its purpose might have been.

The heraldry on the shield offered some hope of shedding light on the mystery, so it was taken to David Sellar, the Lord Lyon, who was surprised by the details he uncovered. “This is a very unusual coat of arms,” he says, referring to the two-tailed lion,  almost unknown in Scottish heraldry. “But there is some evidence to suggest that it may have belonged to Bishop Columba.”

And with this revelation Dr Markus can only guess at the purpose of the priapic figure. “It wouldn’t have been anything serious,” she says. “Just typical schoolboy humour poking fun at the bishop in a way that only they could enjoy”.

We cannot hope to find out much about the men who carved the stones, knowing them only through their work, but Dr Markus sees similarities in a number of carvings which suggests the masons worked as a group. She also speculates that they were especially talented, carving beautiful animals and portraits which remain within Historic Scotland’s collection.

Related posts:

1. Five-year obsession carved out place in craftsman’s family ive years ago craftsman John Donaldson was asked to carve...
2. Iona’s Mysteries Revealed very year Iona Abbey draws thousands of people to the...