The Govan Stones

Long before Glasgow became a great city, the most important place on this stretch of the Clyde may well have been Govan. Inside Govan Old Parish Church, on the south bank of the river, stands a collection of more than thirty carved stones made between roughly the ninth and eleventh centuries: a richly decorated stone coffin, massive Viking-age grave markers called hogbacks, standing crosses and carved grave slabs. Together they are known as the Govan Stones, and they are among the most important early medieval monuments in Scotland. They are the best surviving evidence of the lost kingdom of Strathclyde.

A kingdom on the Clyde

In the early medieval period the Clyde valley was home to a Brittonic people who spoke a language related to Welsh. Their kingdom, described on our Kingdom of Strathclyde page, was centred on the great fortress of Dumbarton Rock, which they called Alt Clut, the Rock of the Clyde. In 870, according to the Annals of Ulster, Viking forces captured and destroyed Dumbarton Rock after a siege of four months.

The kingdom survived, but its centre of power seems to have shifted upriver. Two years later the annals begin to speak of the kingdom of Strathclyde, the valley of the Clyde, and historians and archaeologists now believe that its new heartland lay around Govan and Partick, on opposite banks of the river. Govan, which already had a Christian burial ground dating back to the fifth or sixth century, became its most important church and, it seems, the burial place of its elite.

The Govan Sarcophagus

The centrepiece of the collection is the Govan Sarcophagus, a stone coffin carved from a single block of sandstone and covered in decoration. It is the only object of its kind known from pre-Norman northern Britain. One side shows a horseman hunting a stag, a scene common in Pictish art and associated with royalty and power. Other panels show interlaced beasts and an animal trampling a serpent, which some scholars interpret as a Christian symbol of victory over evil.

The sarcophagus was found in December 1855 by the church sexton, buried in the south-east corner of the churchyard while he was digging a grave. No human remains were found inside it, and it may have been buried to protect it, perhaps during the Reformation. It is thought to have held the relics of the church’s patron saint, Constantine, and it would once have stood inside the church as a focus of devotion.

The hogbacks

The most dramatic stones are the five hogbacks: long, heavy blocks of stone shaped like houses, with curved roofs carved to look like overlapping shingles. Hogbacks are a type of grave marker that developed in the Viking-age settlements of northern England, especially Yorkshire, and they are found only in parts of northern Britain where Scandinavian influence was strong. They may represent the halls of great lords. Nowhere else are there hogbacks as large as the five at Govan.

Their presence shows that the rulers of Strathclyde had close links with the Scandinavian and Norse-Gaelic world of the Irish Sea, through war, trade and marriage. The kingdom that the Vikings had attacked in 870 seems, within a few generations, to have absorbed and adopted their culture.

Crosses and grave slabs

Alongside the sarcophagus and hogbacks are four standing crosses and more than twenty recumbent slabs, grave markers that once lay flat over burials, carved with crosses and intricate interlace patterns. The quantity and quality of the sculpture suggests that Govan was a wealthy church under royal patronage, and that it was the burial place of the leading families of the kingdom for perhaps two centuries.

Across the river in Partick there was later a royal estate, and close to Govan Old stood Doomster Hill, a large mound thought to have been used as an assembly place where the people of the kingdom gathered. It was levelled in the industrial era.

Lost and found

For a thousand years the stones lay in the churchyard. In 1926, to protect them from the weather, they were moved inside the church, which had been rebuilt in the 1880s. Not all of them survived. In the 1970s fourteen grave slabs lay outside, beside the churchyard wall, and they were thought to have been destroyed in 1973 when the neighbouring shipyard’s plating shed was demolished and the damaged stones were mistaken for rubble.

Then, in 2019, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy taking part in a community archaeology project at the church uncovered one of the lost stones. Two more have been found since, raising hopes that others may have survived. Excavations in the churchyard led by archaeologists from the University of Glasgow have continued to make discoveries, including in 2023 a carved fragment nicknamed the Govan Warrior, and evidence of an early medieval road.

Visiting the stones

Today the stones are displayed inside Govan Old Parish Church, which is run as a heritage centre by a local trust and is open to visitors. Seeing the sarcophagus and the great hogbacks together in the dim light of the church is one of the most remarkable experiences in Glasgow, and a reminder that the history of the city began long before the cathedral, the burgh or the shipyards. Govan’s later history as a shipbuilding town is told on our shipbuilding pages, and the wider story of the city’s beginnings on our founding of Glasgow page.

Timeline