Ronald Rae’s Baby Boar sculpture returned to Aberdeen on 14th June 2010. It has been bought by JD Wetherspoon for their new restaurant and beer garden at Aberdeen Airport. The sculpture is sited in the beer garden and quickly become a talking point for visitors while they enjoy a snack and await their flights.

It is appropriate to have this sculpture at Wetherspoon’s Granite City restaurant as wild boar often featured on Pictish and Celtic stones being a symbol of hospitality and feasting. Also the one tonne granite boulder for the Baby Boar was sourced from Kemnay Quarry only a few miles from Aberdeen Airport.

The granite has been isotopically dated at 470 million years old. Kemnay granite is famous not just in Aberdeen for buildings such as the magnificent Marischal College but for major building projects much further afield eg. the Forth Railway Bridge, several of London’s bridges, the Thames Embankment, The Tower and more recently for the cladding of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood. Sadly Kemnay Quarry is now closed.

Ronald Rae has used Kemnay granite for many of his sculptures, most of which have been sold and moved south of the Border. One called St Kilda Wake is privately owned in Aberdeenshire but the Baby Boar is the first sculpture to have a public site in Aberdeenshire returning very near to its birthplace, so it should feel immediately at home there.

The Baby Boar is well travelled being part of the Ronald Rae Sculpture Exhibition in Regent’s Park, London, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Holyrood Park Edinburgh and at The Falkirk Wheel. Coming back to Aberdeen has completed the circle.