Note 35 — Chapter II · The Kingdom of Scotland—843–900.

Adam. Vit. St. Col., l. 3, c. 5. It was the Vergobreith, not the Toshach, who was “consecrated” by the Druids, v. p. 28, n.†. Giraldus Cambrenses has left an extraordinary description of the barbarous rites with which the inauguration of the princes of Cinel Conal was celebrated. He wrote from hearsay, and very probably heightened the colouring of a picture that was exaggerated in the first instance; for he fully participated in that rooted antipathy which seems to have long existed between the Welsh and the Irish. Still the words of Ailred shew that certain barbarous ceremonies on such occasions lingered amongst the Scottish Gael in the twelfth century, shocking the more fastidious ideas of David after he had “rubbed off his Scottish rust.” “Unde et obsequia illa quæ a gente Scottorum in novella regum promotione more patrio, exhibentur ita exhorruit ut ea vix ab episcopis suscipere cogeretur” (Twysden, p. 348). The conspicuous part still assigned at coronations to the Scottish “Stone of Destiny” is as well known as are the numerous tales and fables connected with it. In his “Essay on Tara” Mr. Petrie impugns the identity of the stone in St. Edward’s chair with the genuine Lia Fail, upon which the Ardrighs of Ireland were inaugurated at Tara; where, in his opinion, the mystic stone of the “Tuath de Danan” still remains in spite of the claims of the Dalriads and the fables of the Connaughtmen. It indeed seems extraordinary that a small and migratory tribe from the north of Antrim should have been permitted to carry off with them the “sacred stone” of the Irish kings, and I am inclined to look upon the Scottish Lia Fail as the stone upon which the Pictish kings and their successors were consecrated, its only migration, unless it was removed from Dunfothir to Scone, having been undertaken at the order of Edward the First; though after the Gaelic people of Scotland had identified their own ancestry with that of the MacAlpin line of princes the Lia Fail necessarily became mixed up with the supposed wanderings of the latter.