page_title: Torrs Pony-cap and Horns
section_title: Function
hierarchical_section_title: Torrs Pony-cap and Horns / Function
caption_attribution_description: English: Pictish Stone, Bullion, Invergowrie, Angus. Museum of Scotland
context_page_description: The Torrs Horns and Torrs Pony-cap are Iron Age bronze pieces now in the National Museum of Scotland, which were found together, but whose relationship is one of many questions about these "famous and controversial" objects that continue to be debated by scholars. Most scholars agree that horns were added to the pony-cap at a later date, but whether they were originally made for this purpose is unclear; one theory sees them as mounts for drinking-horns, either totally or initially unconnected to the cap. The three pieces are decorated in a late stage of La Tène style, as Iron Age Celtic art is called by archaeologists. The dates ascribed to the elements vary, but are typically around 200 BC; it is generally agreed that the horns are somewhat later than the cap, and in a rather different style.
  Whatever the original appearance and functions of the objects, and wherever they were made, they are very finely designed and skillfully executed, and form part of a small surviving group of elaborate metal objects found around the British Isles that were commissioned by the elite of Iron Age British and Irish society in the final centuries before the arrival of the Romans.
context_section_description: The pony-cap is normally regarded as a Celtic example of a champron or chamfrein, a piece of horse armour of the type familiar from the late Middle Ages, but has also been seen as intended to be worn by a human in ritual contexts. This was also the view of local antiquaries when the object was found; in its first publication in 1841 it was described as "a mummer's head-mask", though thought to be medieval. It would have been held on by leather straps, with a plume rising from the top of the cap. No other metal champron from ancient times is known, but there appear to be Celtic and classical Greek examples in materials such as boiled leather, including one from Newstead Fort, a Roman outpost in Scotland. Another possibility is that the intended wearer was a wooden cult statue of a horse, which would help explain the small size.
  The theory that the horns were drinking-horn mounts, never joined to the cap in ancient times, was first proposed by Professors Piggott and Atkinson in 1955, and was widely accepted for about three decades, leading to the horns being detached from the cap and displayed separately. The single surviving bird's head terminal is comparable to much later early medieval examples from Anglo-Saxon burials (for example from Sutton Hoo and the Taplow burial) as well as Irish and Pictish contexts, which are either known or assumed to have decorated the tips of drinking-horns.  However the theory depended on the assumption that the holes and rivets used to attach the horns to the cap were all the work of a 19th-century restorer. Subsequent investigation suggested that this was not in fact the case, and "opinion has swung back" to support the original reconstruction, and by the late 1960s Piggott and Atkinson preferred "to think of the horns as yoke-terminals" for chariots. The possibility remains that the horns were made for a different function, but later attached to the cap at some time before its deposit. 
  Though no actual comparable finds have been made, some parallels have been suggested in representations of similar caps, including a figure of the mythical horse Pegasus on a coin of Tasciovanus, the largely Romanized chief who ruled the Catuvellauni from Verlamion (St Albans) between about 20 BC and 9 AD, and was the father of Cymbeline. The Pegasus appears to wear a cap from which rise two knobbed horns. The remains of horses found in the graves of the Iron Age Pazyryk culture in Siberia were fitted with masks in the shape of stag heads, complete with antlers (another example) or horns (another example). In July 2015, an Iron Age burial of carefully arranged animal bones that included a horse's skull with a cow's horn on its forehead was unearthed in Dorset, England.
caption: The Pictish Bullion Stone, with drinking-horn terminated in a bird's head, Angus, 10th century AD[19]
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