St Machar's

I spent the afternoon in Old Aberdeen. I had to return some books to the University Library and then I headed off down the cobbled Chanonry to St Machar's Cathedral with its twin steeples. The cathedral graveyard is awash with interesting old gravestones; principals and professors of King's College, medical men, scientists, mathematicians, Greek and Latin scholars, artists, writers, churchmen, lawyers and advocates, lords and ladies, soldiers, tradesmen, they are all there. A few of their gravestones appear as "extras".

The first is inside the Cathedral, a detail of a 17th century memorial, a memento mori, reminding us that we must all die. It shows a seated skeleton, representing death, for some reason wearing a bishop's crown, lifting the shrouds from two dead people presumably at the resurrection.

The others are outside in the graveyard. First, is a memorial to a military family including Dr Alexander Crombie Keith, an army surgeon who died of pneumonia in Sherpur, Kabul, Afghanistan. The Sherpur was a British military camp or Cantonment, the site of a siege in 1879 in the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

Next, a mural memorial to Sir David Gill KCB FRS FRSE to  a Scottish astronomer royal, a student of the great physicist James Clark Maxwell, and best known for measuring astronomical distances, for astrophotography, and for geodesy. You can read more about this great man here.

And finally a fine 18th century memorial to the family of William Wedderburn, a gardener. The stone is very finely carved and topped with symbols of our possible resurrection; the winged soul representing the soul leaving on the body on the day of judgement, a pair of flaming torches representing eternal life and two poppy flowers representing sleep.