This magnificent class III stone now stands in the Kirk at Dunning and is believed to date to around AD820. The stone is now believed to have been raised by King Constantin Mac Fergus but is carved in a style that differs from the classical type II Pictish stones.
The Picts of Eastern Scotland are an enigmatic people who seem simply to have disappeared from history in the late 8th/early 9th centuries. They were directly descended from the Caledonii -an amalgam of tribes who united to successfully force the Romans out of Northern Britain (hence the reason for the building of Hadrian's wall). Conventional wisdom was that the Gaels of Dalriata conquered the Picts under the leadership of the Alpin dynasty but more recent research now suggests that the Alpin dynasty was itself 'Pictish' and that the Picts and Gaels were united as one but that the Pictish aristocracy adopted Gaelic culture and language -certainly there are a significamt number of places in Fife, Perthshire and Angus which have names containg both Pictish and Gaelic elements (eg Pitlochry).