Pictish Sarcophagus

If you have three inches of rain in a one week holiday you would probably consider that a very wet holiday. Fortunately for us, though not for some local residents, it all fell in just one night. Fife has been singled out in the news as the area worst affected by last night's deluge, and in particular Cupar, about fifteen miles away from us, where one poor guy with the unfortunate forename Storm had half his house washed away.

Our original plan for today was to go to a National Trust for Scotland property near Cupar called Hill of Tarvit, but the flooding on the roads was so bad that after three abortive attempts to approach by different routes, we decided to go to St Andrews instead.

We visited the cathedral museum which we were unable to do on Tuesday because it was closed due to staff illness.

I was very impressed with the St Andrews Sarcophagus in the museum. It is considered to be one of the finest pieces of sculpture to survive from early-medieval Europe and is believed to be a royal burial shrine from the late 770s. This side panel shows in the top centre a Pictish king attacking a lion, and the big guy on the right is the biblical King David also doing considerable harm to a lion.