A death at sea.

This is the massive keyhole for the door of Foveran Parish Church, built in 1794 to replace a mediaeval church. The Kirk is no longer used for regular worship but still opens for local funerals.

The small graveyard contains many old gravestones, mostly those of farmers but also those of a number of mariners. One of these marks the grave of Capt. John Thomson, Master of the ship Omar Pasha who died in at sea, in 1861, at Latitude 58 S. Longitude 98 W., just as he was about to round Cape Horn.

The Omar Pasha was a fast clipper ship, launched in Aberdeen in 1854 for use on the Australian and China trade routes. The manifest of the ship homeward bound from Melbourne in 1864 was: 3,550 bales of wool, 14,000 hides, 80 casks of tallow, 20 tons spelter, 4,000 ounces gold and 12 passengers.

The Omar Pasha, named after the Ottoman General Omar Pasha (1806 - 1871) who had defeated the Russians at Crimea and was thus a hero in Britain, had been built by the Walter Hood shipyard in Aberdeen. The Hood shipyard built many of Aberdeen's finest sailing ships, including the clipper Thermopylae the great rival of Cutty Sark.

Walter Hood died in 1862 after slipping in the dark and falling into the Aberdeen harbour. The guns of the Torry Battery, across the harbour, were fired in the hope that the concussion would bring the body to the surface! It didn't and grappling irons were needed to recover the corpse.