History Scotland Magazine: Lickerstane: meanings and myths

The author at rest.

The lickerstane mentioned in the Kirkness-Ballingry boundary document of c. 1400 survived remarkably as a field-name on an 18th century estate map of Findatie farm, Portmoak parish, Kinross-shire (West Register House Plan 42552). It can thus be plotted with some accuracy at National Grid Reference NT178985. Nearby is a small clump of trees in which there is a considerable pile of large whinstone boulders (NT1815 9865). These were put here in the 1950s by the farmer, when clearing an adjacent strip of trees. It is very likely that at least some of these stones were originally part of the lickerstane.

Placenames

Lickerstane: meanings and myths

Simon Taylor

Although you will find very few places called Lickerstane, with variants such as Leckerstane and Liquorstane, on the modern map, the objects referred to in these names were once relatively common in eastern Scotland from Aberdeenshire to Fife, and the more closely local records are studied, the more they appear. The most usual explanation of these names, and certainly one that I myself have peddled for several years now, is that they derive from a Scots word lickerstane, referring to a stone on which the coffin was rested on the way to burial in the parish kirkyard. This turns out to be, however, only part of a much more complicated story.

Any investigation of a Scots word must begin with the michty and magnificent Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, known as DOST for short. The first volume of this twelve volume work was published in 1937, the final volume last year. It covers the Scots language from the 12th century to around 1700.

Under Likarstane, Lykyrstyne etc., DOST states that it is a name of obscure origin given to a conspicuous stone or heap of stones. It gives as a formally possible derivation Old English (OE) lcrest(e)-stn containing OE lcrest resting place of a corpse, burial place and stn stone. OE lc body has survived in the Modern English lichgate (or lychgate), defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the roofed gateway to a churchyard under which the corpse is set down at a funeral to await the clergymans arrival. In Scots and Northern English it is lyke body, as in lyke wake, defined as the watch kept at night over a dead body, best known in the Lyke Wake Walk, the old route across the North Yorkshire Moors to Whitby Abbey along which corpses were taken for burial.

The examples in DOST deserve closer study. The earliest of all is from the St Andrews Liber (Bannatyne Club, 1841), and has been incorrectly interpreted both by DOST and by Sir Archibald Lawrie, in his Early Scottish Charters prior to 1153 (Glasgow, 1905), p. 231. The text is a description of the march between the lands of Kirkness, Portmoak parish, Kinross-shire (formerly Fife), and Ballingry, Fife, from around the year 1400. The Latin of the boundary description reads as follows, with letters abbreviated in the original put in [square brackets]:

....via qua itur versus aquillonem ad vnum ac[er]uum lapid[u]m qui d[icitu]r in wlgari lykyrstyne.....[National Archives of Scotland (NAS) GD 27/45/8 folio 1r, printed in St Andrews Liber 1)].

This translates as the road by which one goes towards the north to one heap of stones which is called in the vulgar tongue lickerstane.

DOST (probably following Lawrie) has misread ad vnum aceruum lapidum to one heap of stones as ad vnum acerum (more correctly acrem) lapidem to a sharp stone. The term acervus lapidum heap of stones can be found in other boundary charters, such as per acervos lapidum by heaps of stones, from a charter of 1240 relating to the marches of Fordel, Dalgety parish, also in west Fife (Inchcolm Charters no. 19). In modern Scottish English we would probably describe acervus lapidum as a cairn, and in fact this is just how this same 1240 charter glosses another occurrence of acervus lapidum: usque ad acervum lapidum qui dicitur carne (as far as a heap of stones which is called cairn). We thus have, from an early period, a clear equivalence between lickerstane and cairn in the sense of a heap of stones.

Another example quoted by DOST reinforces this interpretation. In the Panmuir Register (edited by J. Stuart, 1874; vol. i, p. xcv), from a document in Scots of 1611 relating to Panmure, Angus, we find ane heape of steans callit ane lekker steane. This lies about eighty yards (fourscor passes) from the carved free-standing cross known as Camuss Cross. The 1611 document associates the cross itself, the lekker steane, and another heap of stones lying about a quarter of a mile west of it, with the slaughter and burial of Danish invaders in a battle confidently dated by the text to about 1010! Amongst DOSTs quotations, this is the earliest which explicitly links lickerstanes with death and burial. However, as we shall see later, there is an example from Fife which predates this reference by about 40 years.

The DOST definition should therefore be emended to read simply a name of obscure origin given to a conspicuous heap of stones. This has, apart from anything else, important archaeological implications, since at least some of these heaps of stones will have been prehistoric burial mounds.

Modern Times

The Scottish National Dictionary (SND for short) is another great scholarly achievement, published in ten volumes from 1931-1976, which covers the Scots language from 1700 onwards. This rather muddies the waters as regards lickerstane (also lickar-, licker-, lecture-, lackerstone), reflecting the confusion which has grown up around this term in the last three hundred years. In 1962 the SND defines leckerstane thus:

A large conspicuous stone of some sort which has given its name to various localities in Kincardineshire, Angus, Kinross-shire and Fife (Leckerstone, Lickerstanes, Liquorstane) and in Aberdeenshire (Liggarsteen), traditionally a stone on which a coffin was rested on its way to a churchyard.

The SND usefully quotes the chief theories which have been devised to explain the word, and which have contributed to the confusion. The earliest is from the Old Statistical Account (OSA) report on Abdie parish, north-west Fife, dating from the 1790s. At no great distance from the church [i.e. the old kirk of Abdie by the Loch of Lindores], and on the way to it from the Abbey of Lindores, there are a few stones called Licker-Stones: Antiquaries have conjectured licker to be a corruption and contraction of lecturer, and with much show of probability have observed, that formerly, when Bibles were scarce, and the capacity of reading them was confined to a few, the people might assemble at such stones to hear the scriptures read to them. In a good example of how false etymologies can then go on to affect the development of names, we find a Lecturers Inch (i.e. haugh or water-meadow) at the north-west end of the Loch of Lindores, which can be assumed to have originally been a *Leckerstane(s) Inch, named after one or more of the stones mentioned in the OSA account of Abdie.

The SND also notes that the tradition that these stones were used as rests for coffins on the way to burial does not seem to be recorded earlier than 1839, in the New Statistical Account (NSA) for Kinross-shire (vol. IX, 41, Cleish parish). This describes a large rock in a stone dyke opposite Nivingston House about a quarter of a mile east from the church of Cleish. It is called The Lecture Stane, showing the same confusion as the Abdie example above, and informing the local tradition, as reported by the author of NSA, that it was used before the Reformation at funerals, as a support for the coffin at the time that the burial service was read (i.e. lectured). So in fact it is not entirely accurate of SND to say that the tradition of resting coffins on these stones on their way to burial is recorded here.

Bodies and Booze

Free Church minister J. W. Taylor, in his short book with the long title Some Historical Antiquities, Chiefly Ecclesiastical, connected with Falkland, Kettle and Leslie, first published in 1861, writes that on the Liquor Stone in Falkland, Fife, a large stone sunk in the ground near the schoolhouse, funeral companies would place the coffin, while drink was supplied to refresh them, in bearing the body to the churchyard. This is the earliest reference I have found to the tradition of the resting coffin on its way to burial, as well as of the taking of liquor, the latter obviously deriving from a re-interpretation of the first element. This tradition, with and without the drink, can be found repeated in many a local history. One dry example is from Robert Youngs About Kinross-shire and Its Folk (Perth, 1948, page 87). It concerns a stone in Kinross parish, about 3 kilometres west of Kinross, beside the road from Burnbrae to Turfhills. It is still beside the road, and is marked on detailed modern OS maps as The Lecker Stane (NO089032) (see picture). Young himself calls it the Leckerstone, and it bore a brass plate (now removed) with this word on it.

Aberdeenshire

Yet another interpretation is tentatively offered by SND, based on the Liggar Steen or Liggars Stane, a standing stone just north of Harlaw House, Chapel of Garioch parish, Aberdeenshire. This is that it is connected with Northern English ligger lying stone, especially the nether mill-stone. The author of this entry immediately, and quite rightly, back-tracks from this, stating that some of the stones however are vertical monoliths [as is the Aberdeenshire Liggar Steen], and some are remains of burial cairns. It is not even certain that Liggar Steen is a local variation of Leckerstane, although it probably is. In William Alexanders Place-Names of Aberdeenshire (1952), which remains by far the best survey of Aberdeenshire place-names, he gives another local (and equally misleading) explanation, that it was traditionally the site of the camp of the Highland army at Harlaw, and may be from leaguer camp, while the New Statistical Account of 1845 states that it was reputedly put up to mark the burial place of the females who followed the soldiers and who were slain in the battle. There appears to be only one certain example of an Aberdeenshire place-name containing lickerstane: this is Likkerstone Cairn at Glasslaw, Aberdour parish, no longer shown modern maps, but probably what is now called Law Cairn NJ84 60. However, a likarstane is mentioned in a document of 1578 relating to north-west outer marches of the burgh of Aberdeen, near Craibstone (quoted in DOST).

A New Reference

An important reference to lickerstanes has recently come to light in Linda Dunbars edition of an early record from the Synod of Fife (St Andrews University, MS 30451) dated c.1570, which appeared in Records of the Scottish Church History Society 28 (1998), 217-38. Following an injunction forbidding the playing of bagpipes (bagpypis) at weddings, comes this enactment: Knawin that mony and diverss infantis and bairnis in tymes bipast in silence of the nycht and by the comune plaice of buriall hes beine zeirdit (buried) at Lekkir Stainnis and besyd common streittis the parentis of sic nocht knawin (known). In other words, unwanted children were wont to be buried secretly at night, not in the cemetery but at lickerstanes and beside highways. The enactment goes on to forbid this practice, since such bairns will have been gottin in adulterie, incest or sic wther ingodlie wayes, and may well have been murdered. It forbids all secret, night-time burials, as well as burials which are not at the parish kirk. It ends with the chilling warning that anyone breaking this enactment will be held to have murdered the person so buried, and will be punished according to the laws of the realm.

So in late 16th century Fife lickerstanes were seen as places where bodies could be disposed of. There is in fact no reference earlier than the 18th century which suggests to me that lickerstanes were anything other than a cairn or heap of stones, with two out of the four recorded examples specifically associated with non-Christian places of burial. And it would seem that it was not until the 18th century that this sense began to change.

I have not managed to extend SNDs range from Aberdeenshire to Fife, although I have not looked at detailed studies of the south-west, where according to a book on Galloway written in 1947 the word lecker-stane was known with the coffin-resting meaning (quoted in SND). Nor does it seem to occur in England. This should make us wary of accepting the Old English pedigree suggested by DOST. Gaelic leac (f.), genitive lic(e), Old Irish lecc, means flat stone, slab of stone, flagstone, with a secondary meaning tombstone. Scots certainly borrowed it as leck to mean a slab of rock, flat rock etc. (SND). Could the first element in lickerstane derive from this Gaelic word, with its associations of burial strongly to the fore? Or did the idea of burial come from the fact that heaps of stones, the earliest meaning of lickerstane, were known often to contain ancient burials? Either way, the proposed Gaelic origin of the first element would explain the range of meanings and usage of lickerstane, with the recurring themes of stones and the disposal of the dead. One thing we can be sure of, however, is that lickerstanes had nothing to do with either lecturing or booze.