Holy Rood: Norman McBeath and Robert Crawford

Holy Rood presented a series of 7 photographs by Edinburgh based photographer and printmaker Norman McBeath RSA that ran alongside a long form poem by Robert Crawford. Holy Rood is a translation of the untitled Old English poem ‘The Dream of the Rood’. The collaboration between Crawford and McBeath sees the photographs resonate with the ancient poem and its associations with the Ruthwell Cross (Dumfriesshire) and with the ruins of Holyrood Abbey (Edinburgh). The oldest, fragmentary text of this poem survives carved in several runic inscriptions on a sculpted 8th century cross at Ruthwell in the south-west of Scotland.