What are you thinking right now?

[Minty]

Old Scottish gravestones are wonderful, & especially in the countryside there's still so many old kirkyards where the old stones remain. Those in the towns were sadly often cleared & the stones dumped in a far corner to make room for new internments (in England if they were lucky they'd go into an ossury in the crypt).

It used to be that people bought the gravestones ahead of time and had the mason inscribe their name and that of all their family members on them with the dates of birth to save money (as years later inflation would mean it would cost a lot more to do, & masons used to be paid "by the letter", so you still see incomplete stones with no date of death on them but that of the first person, usually meaning the family moved away from the area.

The best ones are the ones where they covered the back with symbols as well, like in the famous Alloway Kirk, usually indicating the trade that person was in.




This one for instance shows the guy was the local blacksmith and farrier.