ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, September 3, 1996 TAG: 9609030171
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LONDON
SOURCE: Associated Press
CONSERVATIONISTS BELIEVE they've found the mummified heart of Robert the Bruce, the 14th-century Scottish king who freed Scotland from English rule.
Call him Braveheart II.
Scottish conservationists think they have found the mummified heart of Robert the Bruce, the legendary 14th-century Scottish king who heroically resisted the English and won independence for his native land.
Discovered in a medieval casket, conservationists said Monday that the heart proves that Bruce's supporters honored his dying wish to be buried at Melrose Abbey in the southeastern corner of Scotland.
``It is a very important artifact,'' said Doreen Grove, inspector of ancient monuments at Historic Scotland, the government conservation group that investigated the find.
Grove said the king who took up the independence battle from William ``Braveheart'' Wallace will finally get a proper memorial in the abbey grounds, 667 years after he died.
``This has not been a waste of time if we can perform the burial of one of Scotland's heroes,'' she said.
Until now, there has been only a sign stating that Bruce's heart had been buried somewhere on the abbey's grounds. Bruce's bones are buried at Dunfermline, 15 miles north of Edinburgh.
Although the find is not considered momentous in archaeological terms, Historic Scotland says it is highly significant for Scotland's heritage.
A relic of one of Scotland's favorite sons could also provide another rallying point for Scottish nationalists, already elated by Prime Minister John Major's announcement in July that England will return the Stone of Scone, the cherished symbol of Scottish power.
Scotland's heroes already are a boon to tourism.
Tourism officials reported a bumper year in 1995, thanks partly to two 1994 movies: ``Braveheart,'' Mel Gibson's Oscar-winning epic about Wallace, and ``Rob Roy,'' about 18th-century Highlands clan leader Rob Roy MacGregor, which starred Liam Neeson.
On Thursday, archaeologists undertaking a $450,000 excavation of Melrose Abbey's chapter house dug up a modern, cylindrical lead casket.
In a painstaking, two-hour operation Monday, two conservationists from Historic Scotland drilled through one end of the 10-inch casket to reveal a slightly smaller, cone-shaped medieval casket, also made of lead.
Inside the outer casket there was also a note written by the archaeologists who unearthed it in 1921: ``The enclosed leaden casket containing a heart was found beneath Chapter House floor in March 1921 and reburied by His Majesty's Office of Works.''
Those scientists reburied the casket inside the modern casket, probably for protection, but its location was lost, according to Historic Scotland.
Grove said there was no way of verifying that it was Bruce's heart, but his was the only heart reported to have been buried at Melrose. There are no plans to open the medieval container, she said, because the 1921 study verified that it contained a heart.
Born in 1274, Bruce was crowned king of Scotland in 1306 after he led an uprising against King Edward I of England.
Known for his persistence, said to have been inspired by watching a spider painstakingly weaving its web, he led the defeat of the army of England's King Edward II in 1314. In 1328, a year before his death, he signed the treaty of Northampton that recognized both his kingship and Scottish independence.
Bruce had asked that his heart be buried at Melrose Abbey, but on his deathbed, he asked a close friend, Sir James Douglas, to take it first on the Crusades, as Christians fought to recover the Holy Land from Muslims.
Douglas fell fighting the Moors in Spain and, according to legend, hurled the casket at the enemy as he died.
Bruce's supporters recovered it and buried it at Melrose, a Cistercian abbey founded in 1136 that was badly damaged in Scotland's wars of independence. It was extensively rebuilt in the 15th century.
Bruce has not had the same big-screen success as Wallace and Rob Roy: ``The Bruce,'' a low-budget film about his life that starred Oliver Reed, was a flop.
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Conservationist Richard Welander, shown inby CNBEdinburgh, Scotland, Monday, holds the medieval lead casket thought
to hold the heart of Robert the Bruce. color.