A Tale of Two Dunbars: Lady Sophia Dunbar

This blog is from a series produced as part of the AHRC funded   Boundary Objects Project  , a partnership between   Historic Environment Scotland  ,   National Museums Scotland   and the Universities of   Manchester   and   Reading  .

The history of archaeology in Scotland is peppered with fascinating personalities including two late 19 ^th  and early 20 ^th  century female archaeologists – both named Dunbar by marriage – who made significant contributions to finds research. Here, in the first of two features, we delve into the life of Lady Sophia Dunbar (1814 - 1909) – an artist, adventurer and, by all accounts, good company. The second will focus on  Louisa Duff-Dunbar .

This feature compliments the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland’s ongoing  Forgotten Stories  project, which aims to explore the contributions of lesser-known women to Scottish archaeology.

The people behind archaeological research in northern Scotland over the last few centuries are an interesting bunch. Whether famous or less well-known, unearthing details of their lives can help us to better understand the character of the archaeological record that survives today. Information about Lady Sophia Dunbar is currently dotted across disparate archives in Scotland and beyond. By revisiting the available archival material we can build a richer picture of this woman’s life, the archaeology she investigated, and her contribution to wider archaeological research.

Born in 1814, Sophia Dunbar had artistic talent and an adventurous spirit. As an artist exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy, Sophia was best known for her watercolour paintings which included landscapes she visited during travels on the Continent as well as archaeological illustrations of excavated prehistoric sites and finds. Janet Trythall's contribution in Women of Moray by Susan Bennett gives an excellent overview of her life. Alongside her husband, Sir Archibald Dunbar, his brother Edward, and a network of antiquarians, Sophia was also involved in many archaeological discoveries, such as some 3500 to 4500 year old Early Bronze Age cist burials from the area around Elgin in Morayshire.

A letter dated 22 ^nd  of May 1866 helps to stitch together the scattered information about Sophia’s archaeological endeavours. Written in a spikey, near illegible scrawl by Sophia to Sir James Young Simpson, the letter describes the recent excavation of  a cist ‘by the seaside’ . It also mentions three other cists Sophia excavated and her work at the now famous  Sculptor’s Cave , near Covesea on the Moray coast. Simpson was both a fellow antiquarian and, presumably, a close friend as he was present at the birth of Sophia’s son. He is best known for pioneering the use of chloroform as an anaesthetic during childbirth. With a little detective work and the information in the letter, it has been possible to suggest specific settings for two of Sophia’s previously unlocated cist excavations, as well as to track down and link a handful of Beaker pottery sherds and a skull in museum collections to Sophia’s excavations. This has sparked a new phase of scientific investigation on the skull.

Sophia visited the cist she described to James Simpson during a spell of warm weather in 1866. She noted how the yellow, fertile clay surrounding the cist was being removed by the tenant farmer to use as compost and how ploughing had loosened the stones from the cist. By the time Sophia, neighbouring farmers and servants of the tenant farmer reached the cist, it had already been emptied by an overzealous herd boy. Sophia records that the herd boy had ‘dropped’ the fragile urn found in the grave, and that a ‘serpentine ornament’ found alongside the pot was kept by the local schoolmaster in Hopeman. She also reported that neighbouring farmers had carried off the remaining urn fragments ‘as curiosities’. Also, according to her account only ‘gravel and dust’ were removed from the cist and there was no mention of human remains. Unfortunately, the sketches that Sophia says she made of the grave goods are now missing.

However, an article in the Elgin Courant, dated to the 4 ^th  of May 1866, gives an alternative take on what appears to have been the same cist. It announces the discovery of an ancient grave ‘near to the sea at Hopeman’ by an errant herd boy who, having found the cist, had amused himself by pelting its contents with stones! Alongside recording its dimensions and position within a clay burial mound, the newspaper article describes the cist’s architecture and contents. The cist was made of slabs – one ‘at each end, one at each side, and one on the top and the bottom’. Meanwhile, the floor was ‘laid with round white stones from the sea shore’. Curiously, the newspaper article also mentions a body which was laid out east-west, and that the pot accompanying the body was ‘shaped like a flower-pot, and carved on the outside’.

In her letter, Sophia carefully outlined the location of the cist in relation to other prehistoric sites known at the time at  Tappoch of Roseisle  to the south, the ‘Cairn of the  Hill of Covesea ’ to the east and a cist at  Inverugie . This information suggests that the ‘seaside cist’ was close to Hopeman village, which also makes sense of the local schoolmaster who was said to have kept the ‘serpentine ornament’. And there is another clue to the fragments of urn that were removed, as an Ordnance Survey record of 1871 notes that eight fragments of a beaker pot from a cist at Hopeman were donated to Elgin museum by a Mr Nicoll, also in 1866. Is it possible that a diligent member of Sophia’s excavation party thought better of pocketing the urn fragments and instead donated them to the museum in Elgin?

Other cists excavated by Sophia are better known because they feature in her artworks or were reported by fellow antiquaries. The cists at Roseisle and Inverugie were removed after excavation and reassembled at Sophia’s nearby home at Duffus House, but were sadly later recycled for building stone in the 1960s. Sophia’s brooding watercolour paintings of the  cist  and the associated fragments of Food Vessel urn, from Roseisle, now in the collection at Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum, as well as a livelier watercolour and sketch of the cist and jet spacer-plate necklace from Tappoch of Roseisle, are therefore essential to our understanding of these burial sites.

Her sketch of the jet necklace from Tappoch of Roseisle helps to make an exciting connection to a human skull also found there. This was presented to the Natural History Museum in London by Elgin surgeon James Taylor in 1857, during a period when the racial origins of ancient humans were a topic of particular academic interest often with reference to the shape of skulls. We hope that ancient DNA analysis and radiocarbon dating on the skull to be carried in late 2022 will bring us yet closer still to the origins and identity of the person buried with this elusive and beautiful, ornamental jet object. 

Many of the outcomes of Sophia’s archaeological endeavours are now lost, destroyed and/or widely dispersed. However, her industriousness, eye for detail, artistic talent, and association with leading antiquarians have ensured that over 170 years later, her discoveries endure and there is still more to learn from them.

Anwen Cooper has worked in various arenas in British archaeology, most recently as a researcher on the AHRC-funded Prehistoric Grave Goods and Boundary Objects Projects (Universities of Manchester and Reading). Her interests in the prehistoric landscapes, material culture and people (past and present) of north-west Europe have led her on all kinds of interpretative adventures. Her collaborative publication from 2021  Grave Goods: Objects and Death in Later Prehistory  is accessible online. Another recent collaboration, The Must Farm Pile-dwelling Settlement. Landscape, Architecture and Occupation, will be published in 2023. She is about to start a new study of prehistoric wildlife.

To Caroline Dunbar (Duffus House), for information about the reassembled and later recycled cists at Duffus House; to Alison Sheridan (National Museums Scotland) and Heather Bonney (Natural History Museum) for their rediscovery of the skull from Tappoch of Roseisle; to Jacqueline Cahif (Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh) and Janet Trythall (Elgin Museum) for information about archival material in their collections.

Armit, I. and Büster, L 2020. Darkness Visible: The Sculptor's Cave, Covesea, from the Bronze Age to the Picts. Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

 Bennett, S., Byatt, M., Main, J., Oliver, A. and Trythall J. (eds) 2012. Women of Moray. Edinburgh: Luath Press. 

 Innes, C. 1859. Notice of a tomb on the hill at Roseisle, Morayshire, recently opened. Proceedings of the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland Vol. 3 (1862), 46-7.  

Innes, C. 1862. Notice of a cist opened on the land of Roseisle, Morayshire in May last. Proceedings of the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland, Vol.4 (1863), 490.

Roberts, G. 1964. Note upon the opening of a kist of the Stone-age upon the coast of Elgin. Journal of the Anthropological Society, vi-xi.