All Hallows' Eve

Halloween is on the horizon. When I were but a lad it was celebrated by carving a swede or turnip into a lantern with a face and sticking a candle inside. (Who could ever forget the smell of burning swede?) 

Now gardens are turned into plastic graveyards and giant spiders maraud around the village. That's commerce for you!

The extra shows a rather more pleasing Christian symbol which I photographed  on our recent walk around Loch Kinord. It is a cross slab with an excellently preserved interlace-filled cross carved in relief on one surface. The small scroll ends to the arms of the cross and the absence of other Pictish symbols shows that this is a purely Christian monument from the end of the Pictish period, sometime in the 9th Century.