Memorials...

I was lucky enough to visit the Kilmun Mausoleum today - I had been invited several times by David MacKenzie who is overseeing the restoration but had been unable to find a date. Ron Simon arranged the visit and it was fascinating - this is a tablet over the door , inside the extraordinary building, and they are lines addressed to the 8th Duke who is interred there and who was a UK Government Minister in the mid 19th century. Of him it was said that " As an orator (he) stood among his contemporaries next to Gladstone and Bright; he was the last survivor of the school which was careful of literary finish, and not afraid of emotion". yet I suppose to most (in fact to virtually all) he is entirely forgotten and unknown. Sic transit..

The community has been raising funds to restore the building and to erect as small visitor centre. It is a fine ambition and the end result will be of great importance to Cowal and to Scotland and a great reminder of how this country has changed. Not least because the mausoleum was the site of the last great aristocratic funeral in Scotland, in May 1914 when the 9th Duke was laid to rest surrounded by thousands of tenants and local worthies as well as national figures. He had of course been married to a daughter of Queen Victoria but it was also as the feudal master of the West Highlands, , Mac Cailean Mor, that he was accorded such overwhelming deference.

Neil Munro reported on it for the Times , as if that type of event would continue for ever. But within months the soldiers marching past were being slaughtered in the trenches of the First World War and the world had changed for ever.