Ruthwell Cross

Inside the whitewashed parish church of Ruthwell, near the Solway coast south-east of Dumfries, stands a 5.2-metre cross carved in the early 700s, when this was part of Northumbria, and described as the most important sculptural survival of Anglo-Saxon Britain. Two faces show Gospel scenes with Latin inscriptions, among them the Crucifixion, the Annunciation, Christ healing the blind man and the flight into Egypt. The other two carry vine scrolls with animals eating grapes, framed by runes deciphered in 1840 as part of the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood, in which the cross itself tells of the Crucifixion. About 1642 the church ordered it destroyed as idolatrous; the minister broke it up with evident care, and the pieces were reused as seats or buried. Rev Henry Duncan reassembled it in the early 1800s with a new head by a local mason, and since 1887 it has stood in an apse built for it. If the church is locked, the key is in a labelled box outside.