By CHE, licensed under CC BY 4.0
One bleak and wintry day I went into the museum at Whithorn in Dumfries and Galloway. With excitement I made a beeline to see the oldest Christian inscription in Scotland. There it was: a tall pillar of rock known as the Latinus Stone, discovered in 1891 and dated at about AD 450. Writing in Latin can be made out on this memorial gravestone, although some of the letters are worn and faded with time. It reads:
‘We praise thee as Lord! Erected by Latinus, aged 35, and his daughter [age 4]. Here the descendants of Barrovad[us] made the monument (to them)’.
It’s not much to go on, except that Latinus must have been a Roman-Briton because his ancestor was called Barrovad(us), a British name, but because of the Roman influence his descendant was given a Roman name, Latinus. The text at the beginning of the inscription has been inspired by Psalm 146:2: ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul! While I live I will praise the Lord; I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.’