Folklore and Mythology: Discovering the Story Behind the Maiden Stone

Hello and welcome to the first ever episode of Folklore Mythology. My name is Jodie and I will be hosting your podcast. This podcast is going to be exactly as it sounds, Folklore and Mythology.

I am very much putting a focus on Scottish and Irish folklore. This is because I am Scottish myself and the Celtic folklore is something that's always interested me.

On today's episode, the very first one I thought I would share, one that is very close to my heart, the Maiden stone. Now why is this close to my heart? When I was younger I grew up in a little village called Money Musk.

Monymusk was very close to a town called In Inverurie which is quite close to the city of Aberdeen. About two miles outside of Inverurie there is a stone called the Maiden Stone and that is what I want to talk about today.

And why is it so special to me? My mum used to take me there all the time when I was younger. Now it should be noted that you can only view the Maiden Stone during the summer.

They cover it in the winter to protect it, which is a brilliant thing that Historic Environments Scotland do. So what is the Maiden Stone? Well, it's probably one of the best examples of Pictish stonework with carvings in it that actually still stands today.

It's three meters tall and it's made from a sort of pinkish granite which, you know, granite is what Aberdeen is known for, so it makes sense. It's thought to have been carved around A.D. 700, but there's a few. Quite, quite a bit of debate about that. It's quite interesting.

So it's thought to be one of the last symbol bearing monuments to have been erected in Aberdeenshire and it's thought to stand really close to its original location. On the actual stone itself it has quite a few different carvings.

It's thought that it's quite a biblical thing because there's a cross on the actual carvings of the Maiden Stone.

So on one side of the stone you see a ring headed cross on the bottom and on top of this ring headed cross there's a male figure which has two sort of sea monsters on the side of it. It's thought that this might have been Jonah escorted by two whales, which is where the Biblical side of it comes in.

There's also some ornate carved patterns which are a sort of key pattern in knotwork. On the other side it's divided into four panels which has carvings of a centaur and other animals.

There's also a notched rectangle with a Z rod, a Pictish beast and A mirror with a double sided comb on that side of the stone. Now, as a cross slab, it does seem to be a Christian monument.

And judging by its scale, it was probably intended to be quite a significant landmark in that area.

Now, one of the most intriguing things for me about the maiden stone and is one of the things that a lot of the folklore surrounds is there's actually a part of the maiden stone missing. There's a notch out from one of the sides of the maiden stone. Now, this leads me right in to my first folklore story about the maiden stone.

So there's a couple different stories that surround the maiden stone, but one of the most popular ones, and the one that I was definitely taught when I was a kid, is the one where the maiden stone is the embodiment of the daughter of the laird of balquane, who was turned to stone by God on her wedding morning to save her from the devil.

It's said that when the daughter of the lord of balquane was making bread to serve her guests at her wedding, she was approached by a dark, manly figure. Now, what he did was he posed a challenge to this woman.

So she looked at him and she was like, oh, yeah, I can do that. What's the wager? He said, if I win, you must marry me instead of your fiance. And she was like, okay, whatever. I'll just keep baking my bread.

Inexplicably, the road was built before her baking was complete. Much to her horror, she thought she had it in the bag. When the man approached her and said, I've built my road, she looked at him in disbelief.

She panicked. She knew what was coming next. So she ran. She said some prayers as she fled. Now, there's a couple of variations of the ending of this folklore.

One of them is that God turned her into stone to protect her from the devil. And the dark figure that gave her the challenge was the devil.

Another one is that when she was seized by the devil because of her prayers, she immediately turned into stone. And the part of it that's been broken off one of the sides disappeared at the grasp of the devil.

And one of the other stories that surrounds the maiden stone is simply that it was a memorial to a young woman who was killed as a result of a dispute between two families. And the carvings on one of the sides are all the things that she loved.

Now that is one of my absolute favourite pieces of folklore from Scotland, and it is such a simple one, but it's such a good story. I really hope you've enjoyed the first episode of Folklore Mythology and I'll be back in a couple weeks with another episode of Folklore Mythology.

This one has been a short one, just because the Maiden Stone doesn't have that much around it, but there are other folklore and cryptids and general mythology that I'm going to be going into that are going to account to longer episodes, but I thought I'd keep my first one short and sweet. Thank you so much for listening. Sam.