Sunlight on a broken column

I found myself a bit short of inspiration today and had to fall back on a favourite haunt, the local graveyard.

The broken column mounted on a pedestal is a fairly common graveyard monument in Scotland. Most of them were erected in the 19th or early 20th centuries. The broken column symbolises a life cut short, a memorial to the death of someone who died young or in the prime of life. This broken column commemorates the short life of David as a result of an accident onboard RMS Nile in Southampton Harbour.

The RMS Nile had been purpose-built for the Argentine run with four promenade decks and nearly as many passengers in saloon class as in steerage. She shuttled from Southampton to Buenos Aires and back every eight weeks, crossing the Atlantic from St Vincent in the Cape Verde islands to Pernambuco (now Recife) in Brazil, and calling at Lisbon, Bahia (now Salvador), Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo. She was built at Clydebank, Scotland in 1893 and was scrapped in 1925. During the Boer War she had acted as a transport conveying troops to South Africa.