The Deskford Carnyx was discovered at the farm of Leitchestown, Deskford, Banffshire, Scotland in 1816. Only the boar’s head was found by farm workers who were draining a peat bog, which had once been a small lake, 2,000 years earlier. The head was donated to Banff Museum and is now on loan to the National Museum of Scotland.
Until recently the Deskford Carnyx had been the most substantial part of a carnyx discovered anywhere in Europe. However, in 2004 an almost complete carnyx, of a distinctive design, was discovered at Tintignac in southern France. Both instruments are made of beaten bronze, extraordinarily complex in structure and requiring an extremely high level of craftsmanship, as well as an understanding of what we now think of as musical acoustics. Each exhibits local design elements, which suggest a much more complex function than the previously widely accepted designation as simply a “war horn.” The “bell” of the Deskford Carnyx is in the form of a wild boar’s head, comprising a resonating chamber in the upper cranium, separated from the mouth and throat by a ridged “soft palette.” A wooden tongue is mounted on a bronze leaf spring in the throat, and the lower jaw is hinged. This head was complete on discovery, but the lower tubes were modelled on the Gundestrup Cauldron image, enabling the instrument to be held aloft and played vertically.
The lower tubes and mouthpiece were necessarily conjectural and the subject of two years experimentation and research. John Kenny’s design for this was simply a bronze ring, or cushion, of the same diameter as the terminal tube to protect the player’s lips, without the cup and back-bore form seen on all other ancient and modern European instruments. This proved highly effective but remained controversial until the discovery of a mouthpiece with the Tintignac Carnyx, which was of exactly the form adopted 20 years earlier by the Deskford team. This mouthpiece structure is unique to the carnyx family but has also been adapted successfully to reconstructions of Irish Iron Age instruments which no mouthpiece has so far been discovered.
The Deskford carnyx reconstruction project was launched in 1992 directed by Dr John Purser with a team comprising archaeologist Fraser Hunter, John Kenny, acoustician Murray Campbell, blacksmith/silversmith John Creed, and Peter Holmes an expert in ancient brass instruments. A Glenfiddich Living Scotland Award and the National Museum of Scotland jointly funded this project. The craftsmanship of the original is superb, both the materials and the techniques of construction have been painstakingly researched and replicated by John Creed. By using materials and techniques as close as possible to the original he has made three reconstructions. The first reconstruction is now on permanent display in the Early Peoples Gallery of the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh. Two more reconstructions, one funded by the Hope Scott Trust, and the other by the William Grant Foundation, are in the keeping of Carnyx & Co. Both used by John and Patrick Kenny for performances, lectures, and research.