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The Torrs Horns and Torrs Pony-cap (once together known as the Torrs Chamfrein) are
Iron Age The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three-age division of the prehistory and protohistory of humanity. It was preceded by the Stone Age (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic) and the Bronze Age (Chalcolithic). The concept has been mostly appl ...
bronze pieces now in the
National Museum of Scotland The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, Scotland, was formed in 2006 with the merger of the new Museum of Scotland, with collections relating to Scottish antiquities, culture and history, and the adjacent Royal Scottish Museum (opened in ...
, which were found together, but whose relationship is one of many questions about these "famous and controversial" objects that continue to be debated by scholars. Most scholars agree that horns were added to the pony-cap at a later date, but whether they were originally made for this purpose is unclear; one theory sees them as mounts for drinking-horns, either totally or initially unconnected to the cap. The three pieces are decorated in a late stage of
La Tène style Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and styli ...
, as Iron Age
Celtic art Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and styli ...
is called by archaeologists. The dates ascribed to the elements vary, but are typically around 200 BC; it is generally agreed that the horns are somewhat later than the cap, and in a rather different style. Whatever the original appearance and functions of the objects, and wherever they were made, they are very finely designed and skillfully executed, and form part of a small surviving group of elaborate metal objects found around the British Isles that were commissioned by the elite of Iron Age British and Irish society in the final centuries before the arrival of the Romans.


Modern history

The artefacts were found together, "about 1820" and "before 1829", in a
peat bog A bog or bogland is a wetland that accumulates peat as a deposit of dead plant materials often mosses, typically sphagnum moss. It is one of the four main types of wetlands. Other names for bogs include mire, mosses, quagmire, and muskeg; a ...
at Torrs Loch,
Castle Douglas Castle Douglas ( gd, Caisteal Dhùghlais) is a town in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. It lies in the lieutenancy area of Kirkcudbrightshire, in the eastern part of Galloway, between the towns of Dalbeattie and Gatehouse of Fleet. It is in the ...
, Kelton, in the historical county of
Kirkcudbright Kirkcudbright ( ; sco, Kirkcoubrie; gd, Cille Chùithbeirt) is a town, parish and a Royal Burgh from 1455 in Kirkcudbrightshire, of which it is traditionally the county town, within Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. The town lies southwest of C ...
shire ,
Dumfries and Galloway Dumfries and Galloway ( sco, Dumfries an Gallowa; gd, Dùn Phrìs is Gall-Ghaidhealaibh) is one of 32 unitary council areas of Scotland and is located in the western Southern Uplands. It covers the counties of Scotland, historic counties of ...
, Scotland, the context suggesting they were a
votive deposit A votive offering or votive deposit is one or more objects displayed or deposited, without the intention of recovery or use, in a sacred place for religious purposes. Such items are a feature of modern and ancient societies and are generally ...
(the bog being the bed of a drained loch). It was thought that the horns were detached from the cap at finding, but a recently unearthed contemporary newspaper report says they were attached. They were given by the local antiquarian and author
Joseph Train Joseph Train (6 November 1779 – 7 December 1852) was a Scottish excise officer, antiquarian, writer and poet. He corresponded with Sir Walter Scott, and his local knowledge provided Scott with ideas for his novels. Life Train was born in 1779 at ...
to the novelist
Sir Walter Scott Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels '' Ivanhoe'', '' Rob Roy' ...
, and long displayed with the horns attached to the cap at
Abbotsford House Abbotsford is a historic country house in the Scottish Borders, near Galashiels, on the south bank of the River Tweed. Now open to the public, it was built as the residence of historical novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott between 1817 and 1825 ...
, which was opened for public visits from 1833, soon after Scott's death. The horns are currently exhibited fixed onto the cap, pointing backwards, but were originally mounted pointing forwards, and have also been displayed detached from the cap. A replica was made and is on display at Abbotsford.


Description

The cap is decorated in repoussé with vegetal motifs, trumpet-spirals and bird heads, while the horns have "boldly asymmetric" engraved decoration including a human face and the single complete one terminates in a modelled bird head; it has been suggested that this represents specifically the head of a
northern shoveller The northern shoveler (; ''Spatula clypeata''), known simply in Britain as the shoveler, is a common and widespread duck. It breeds in northern areas of Europe and across the Palearctic and across most of North America, wintering in southern Eu ...
duck. This probably originally had coral eyes; the other horn lacks its tip. The cap has holes for the ears of the pony; the angle at which the cap is currently displayed, as in the photo here, is designed to show the decoration clearly, and corresponds to that the cap would have had with the horse bowing its head. The photos on the museum website show the normal angle when worn better, with the edges on the sides roughly parallel with the ground. The engraved decoration on the horns is described by Lloyd Laing as "very neatly incised and very elaborate; each pattern begins with a circular ''yin-yang'' element and swells outwards into a central design before tailing off into a delicate fan-shaped tip. A tiny full-face human mask has been incorporated into the central element of the larger horn." The pony-cap is 10.5 inches long, and the complete horn 16.5 inches along its curve, the dimensions meaning that the horse wearing the cap "would have had to be a very small one".Henig (1995), 18 The cap has a large piece at its back
proper left Proper right and proper left are conceptual terms used to unambiguously convey relative direction when describing an image or other object. The "proper right" hand of a figure is the hand that would be regarded by that figure as its right hand. ...
missing, and three ancient repairs, using small plates, each decorated with patterns; in the photograph here one can be seen between the ear hole and the near horn, another vertical near the front edge of the cap.


Artistic context

The horns and cap are part of a small group of elaborately decorated objects that are the main evidence for one of the last phases of "Insular" La Tène style in Britain and Ireland, known as "Style IV" in an extension of the scheme originally devised by de Navarro for Continental works. Other objects include the
Battersea Battersea is a large district in south London, part of the London Borough of Wandsworth, England. It is centred southwest of Charing Cross and extends along the south bank of the River Thames. It includes the Battersea Park. History Batter ...
and
Witham Shield The Witham Shield is an Iron Age decorative bronze shield facing of La Tène style, dating from about the 4th century BC. The shield was discovered in the River Witham in the vicinity of Washingborough and Fiskerton in Lincolnshire, England in 182 ...
s, and an especially closely related work is a bronze shield boss found in the river
Thames The River Thames ( ), known alternatively in parts as the River Isis, is a river that flows through southern England including London. At , it is the longest river entirely in England and the second-longest in the United Kingdom, after the R ...
at
Wandsworth Wandsworth Town () is a district of south London, within the London Borough of Wandsworth southwest of Charing Cross. The area is identified in the London Plan The London Plan is the statutory spatial development strategy for the Gre ...
in London, to the extent that Piggot designates a "Torrs-Wandsworth style"; all these three objects are in the
British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...
. The group includes other objects from Britain and Ireland. In a Scottish context, the cap has been seen as a leading example of a distinctive "Galloway style" of La Tène art, closely related to developments in northern Ireland, a short distance across the Irish Sea. Other scholars see the pieces as imported products, perhaps from "east-central England".


Function

The pony-cap is normally regarded as a Celtic example of a
champron Barding (also spelled ''bard'' or ''barb'') is body armour for war horses. The practice of armoring horses was first extensively developed in antiquity in the eastern kingdoms of Parthia and Pahlava. After the conquests of Alexander the Great ...
or chamfrein, a piece of
horse armour The horse (''Equus ferus caballus'') is a domesticated, one-toed, hoofed mammal. It belongs to the taxonomic family Equidae and is one of two extant subspecies of ''Equus ferus''. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million y ...
of the type familiar from the late Middle Ages, but has also been seen as intended to be worn by a human in ritual contexts. This was also the view of local antiquaries when the object was found; in its first publication in 1841 it was described as "a
mummer Mummers' plays are folk plays performed by troupes of amateur actors, traditionally all male, known as mummers or guisers (also by local names such as ''rhymers'', ''pace-eggers'', ''soulers'', ''tipteerers'', ''wrenboys'', and ''galoshins''). ...
's head-mask", though thought to be medieval. It would have been held on by leather straps, with a plume rising from the top of the cap. No other metal champron from ancient times is known, but there appear to be Celtic and classical Greek examples in materials such as boiled leather, including one from Newstead Fort, a Roman outpost in Scotland. Another possibility is that the intended wearer was a wooden cult statue of a horse, which would help explain the small size. The theory that the horns were
drinking-horn A drinking horn is the horn (anatomy), horn of a bovid used as a drinking vessel. Drinking horns are known from Classical Antiquity, especially the Balkans, and remained in use for ceremonial purposes throughout the Middle Ages and the Early Mo ...
mounts, never joined to the cap in ancient times, was first proposed by Professors Piggott and Atkinson in 1955, and was widely accepted for about three decades, leading to the horns being detached from the cap and displayed separately. The single surviving bird's head terminal is comparable to much later early medieval examples from
Anglo-Saxon The Anglo-Saxons were a Cultural identity, cultural group who inhabited England in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to settlers who came to Britain from mainland Europe in the 5th century. However, the ethnogenesis of the Anglo- ...
burials (for example from Sutton Hoo and the
Taplow burial The Taplow Barrow is an early medieval burial mound in Taplow Court, an estate in the south-eastern English county of Buckinghamshire. Constructed in the seventh century, when the region was part of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, it contained the remai ...
) as well as Irish and Pictish contexts, which are either known or assumed to have decorated the tips of drinking-horns. However the theory depended on the assumption that the holes and rivets used to attach the horns to the cap were all the work of a 19th-century restorer. Subsequent investigation suggested that this was not in fact the case, and "opinion has swung back" to support the original reconstruction, and by the late 1960s Piggott and Atkinson preferred "to think of the horns as yoke-terminals" for chariots. The possibility remains that the horns were made for a different function, but later attached to the cap at some time before its deposit. Though no actual comparable finds have been made, some parallels have been suggested in representations of similar caps, including a figure of the mythical horse
Pegasus Pegasus ( grc-gre, Πήγασος, Pḗgasos; la, Pegasus, Pegasos) is one of the best known creatures in Greek mythology. He is a winged divine stallion usually depicted as pure white in color. He was sired by Poseidon, in his role as hor ...
on a coin of
Tasciovanus Tasciovanus (died c. 9 AD) was a historical king of the Catuvellauni tribe before the Roman conquest of Britain. History Tasciovanus is known only through numismatic evidence. He appears to have become king of the Catuvellauni c. 20 BC, ruling ...
, the largely Romanized chief who ruled the
Catuvellauni The Catuvellauni (Common Brittonic: *''Catu-wellaunī'', "war-chiefs") were a Celtic tribe or state of southeastern Britain before the Roman conquest, attested by inscriptions into the 4th century. The fortunes of the Catuvellauni and their ...
from
Verlamion ''Verlamion, or Verlamio, was a settlement in Iron Age Britain. It was the centre of Tasciovanus' power and a major center of the Catuvellauni from about 20 BC until shortly after the Roman invasion of AD 43. Its location was on Prae Hill, 2& ...
(St Albans) between about 20 BC and 9 AD, and was the father of
Cymbeline ''Cymbeline'' , also known as ''The Tragedie of Cymbeline'' or ''Cymbeline, King of Britain'', is a play by William Shakespeare set in Ancient Britain () and based on legends that formed part of the Matter of Britain concerning the early Celti ...
. The Pegasus appears to wear a cap from which rise two knobbed horns. The remains of horses found in the graves of the
Iron Age The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three-age division of the prehistory and protohistory of humanity. It was preceded by the Stone Age (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic) and the Bronze Age (Chalcolithic). The concept has been mostly appl ...
Pazyryk culture The Pazyryk culture (russian: Пазырыкская культура ''Pazyrykskaya'' kul'tura) is a Scythian nomadic Iron Age archaeological culture (6th to 3rd centuries BC) identified by excavated artifacts and mummified humans found in t ...
in Siberia were fitted with masks in the shape of stag heads, complete wit
antlersanother example
o
hornsanother example
. In July 2015, an Iron Age burial of carefully arranged animal bones that included a horse's skull with a cow's horn on its forehead was unearthed in Dorset, England.


Notes


References

*Green, Miranda. ''Animals in Celtic Life and Myth'', 1998, Routledge, , *Henig, Martin (1974). "A Coin of Tasciovanus", ''Britannia'', Vol. 5, 1974, 374–375
JSTOR
*Henig, Martin (1995). ''The Art of Roman Britain'', Routledge, 1995, , *Kilbride-Jones, H. E., ''Celtic craftsmanship in bronze'', 1980, Taylor & Francis, , *"Laings", Lloyd Laing and Jennifer Laing. ''Art of the Celts: From 700 BC to the Celtic Revival'', 1992, Thames & Hudson (World of Art), *Laing, Lloyd Robert. ''Celtic Britain'', 1979, Taylor & Francis, , *Sandars, Nancy K., ''Prehistoric Art in Europe'', Penguin (Pelican, now Yale, History of Art), 1968 (nb 1st edn.) *Smith, John Alexander, ''Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland'', Volume 7, December 1867, 334–341, Printed for the Society by Neill and Company, 1870
google books
*Youngs, Susan (ed), ''"The Work of Angels", Masterpieces of Celtic Metalwork, 6th–9th centuries AD'', 1989, British Museum Press, London, {{ISBN, 0714105546


Further reading

* Calder, Jenni. ''The Wealth of a Nation'', Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland and Glasgow: Richard Drew Publishing, 1989, pp. 97–9. * Jope, E. M., "Torrs, Aylesford, and the Padstow hobby-horse", in ''From the Stone Age to the 'Forty-Five', studies presented to RBK Stevenson'', ed. A. O'Connor and DV Clarke, 1983, 149–59, John Donald, Edinburgh – interprets Torrs as part of a mummer's costume. See also p. 130 in the same volume. * MacGregor, Morna. ''Early Celtic art in North Britain''. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976, vol. 1, pp. 23–4; vol. 2, no. 1. * Megaw, J. V. S., ''Art of the European Iron Age: a study of the elusive image'', Adams & Dart, 1970 * Piggott S. and Atkinson R., "The Torrs Chamfrein", Archaeologia'', XCVI, 197–235, 1955 – the paper proposing the "drinking-horn mounts" theory. 2nd-century BC works 3rd-century BC works 1820s in Scotland Ancient Celtic metalwork Collections of the National Museums of Scotland History of Dumfries and Galloway Iron Age Scotland Scottish art