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Westminster Abbey. Why didn’t the monks recover the Stone from its hiding place once Edward
had departed? For fear of retribution once he knew he had been tricked is the rationalization of the
myth. By the time it was safe to bring it out of hiding, the monks had forgotten where they put it. In
the eighteenth century there was a local legend that, after a violent storm, a farm lad discovered an
underground cavern which had been exposed by a landslide triggered by the torrential rain. The lad
entered the cavern and found a stone covered with inscriptions, as indeed the original Lia Fail was
recorded to have been. Thinking it of no importance he did not speak of it until years later when he
heard the story that the monks had switched the stone. Alas, when he returned to the spot, he could
not find the cavern entrance, presuming it to have been once more covered by a landslide. This all
sounds very unlikely, but stranger things have happened and I am reminded how the prehistoric
caves at Lascaux, in the Dordogne, the walls of which are covered with the ancient paintings of
bison and reindeer that our ancestors hunted 20,000 years ago, were discovered by accident by
another farm lad at about the same time. So perhaps Lia Fail really is still there, waiting to be
rediscovered.
Meanwhile, the Stone in Westminster Abbey remained resolutely where it was, beneath the
coronation throne for every English monarch since Edward II, up to and including the present
Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. That will be the last time, for in 1996, 700 years after it was taken to
London, Lia Fail was returned to Scotland. In an elaborate procession along the Royal Mile, lined
by 10,000 people on St Andrew’s Day, the Stone was taken from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to
its new home in Edinburgh Castle. To the sound of a twenty-one-gun salute from the castle
ramparts, the Stone was laid to rest in the Great Hall. The strength of feeling which energized the
campaign to return Lia Fail to Scotland after 700 years was formidable. The ceremony which
attended its return was in many respects the assertion of an ancient Pictish connection, in the same
way that Up Helly Aa celebrates the Norse identity in Shetland.
From a genetic point of view, I wanted to see whether I could find a parallel in the living
descendants of the ancient Picts. Was there, hidden deep within the cells of Scots still living in the
Pictish heartland, a signal of their ancient identity every bit as real, or perhaps more so, as the
Stone of Destiny itself? We began our search for Pictish genes at Auchterarder, 15 miles south-west
of Perth and temptingly close to the famous golfing hotel of Gleneagles, but I am sad to report that
our research budget did not stretch to that level of subsistence. Auchterarder was the first of many
visits that my research team paid to blood-donor sessions.
Three months before, in the spring of 1996, I had spent a week travelling all round Scotland
visiting the directors of all the Scottish Blood Transfusion Service centres, enlisting their help in
our project. It was never difficult to explain why we wanted to do this work, but there were a lot of
details to be sorted out in getting permission from the donors’ representatives, as well as formal
permission from the Transfusion Service itself, ensuring we did not compromise the confidentiality
of the donors. We also had to agree a way of collecting the blood that would not interfere with the
smooth running of the donor sessions. There was one thing both I and the directors were agreed on.
We must attend the sessions in person. Too many researchers ask for blood to be collected on their
behalf, without actually going to the sessions. This makes extra work for the donor nurses. I also
wanted to be sure we were there to explain our project to the donors and get their consent, and also
to talk to them about their own backgrounds and to get the feel of the place.
You may be a blood donor yourself, in which case you will know how the sessions work. As