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About Scotland

Notes on some differences

I'm quite familiar with churches, graveyards, and cemeteries in England, having (prior to my Scotland trip) photographed 80 places of burial for this website. I live in a Church of England (C of E), or protestant, area of England, and virtually all of my 'establishments' are from that faith. Indeed, I've only stumbled across a single Roman Catholic (RC) church amongst all of my 90+ Churches of England and Scotland churches and non-secular cemeteries.

In Scotland the faith is Church of Scotland (C of S). I would be stepping on dangerous ground to attempt to explain what that means in reality - I am entirely non-religious, and it's irrelevant to the purpose of UKGraves.info, but suffice it to say that C of S is not much different to C of E. Certainly C of S is closer to C of E than it is to RC. Enough of religion.

The idea of this page is to talk about what I discovered in Scotland, and to mention a few differences I noted between the English and the Scottish ways of laying to rest and of organising churchyards and cemeteries. I'll also mention some interesting findings I made.

1. Not all gravestones in Scotland are above graves
   • The evidence is that many apparent gravestones are in fact memorial stones, and the body lies elsewhere.
2. There seems to be a higher cemetery to church ratio in Scotland than in England
   • I saw tiny cemeteries in tiny villages which don't have churches. In England the local cemetery would be much bigger and located at a bigger centre of population, possibly some miles away.
3. Gravestones and memorials are left undisturbed for longer in Scotland
   • The oldest reliably readable gravestones I've found in England date back only to the mid 1700s. I don't really see many which could be older. In England I see evidence that graveyard space is reused, with the stones taken up and used for paving, or simply stacked up somewhere. In Scotland however, I saw some apparently much more ancient, though by now unreadable, stones still in place.
4. The Scots like their stones and memorials BIG and much more ornate, and upright
   • I suppose the average size for normal gravestones in England is around the 3 foot (1 metre) mark. You can double that figure for Scotland, and triple the ornateness and decorativeness. Almost invariably the stones are upright in Scotland, against the common flat on the ground tombstone type so often seen in England. Iron fencing around graves, so often seen in England, is very rare in Scotland.
5. Many Scottish stones and memorials are broken into two pieces, horizontally across the middle of the stone
   • Why is that? I have no explanation. I can merely guess that it has something to do with the much colder weather there than in my South of England, and caused by frost damage, but that's a wild guess. On the other hand there may be some special significance to purposely break a stone in two. If you know, please let me know.
6. Many Scottish churches don't seem to have names
   • In England it's always St Mary's, or St Andrews, or Holy Trinity, etc, as you will see from my main list. In Scotland, however, churches very often seem to be referred to merely as The Parish Church. There are exceptions of course, such as The Kirk of Lammermuir, in Cranshaws, but in Whitekirk, for example, it's just known as The Parish Church.
7. Skulls
   • A skull, often accompanied by crossed bones, is a reasonably common gravestone decoration or insignia. I have never seen a skull in England

The above are a few of the differences I noted during just two or three days spent in only the south eastern corner of Scotland. For all I know things are far different in the north western part. Maybe I will find out next year. Meanwhile, please enjoy my pictures of some breathtakingly lovely churchyards and graves. There is a Scotland section in the main list on the home page, but here is a very brief rundown of the 13 churches, abbeys and cemeteries I saw:

• Whitekirk has a church which, contrary to the name of the village, which means white church, is constructed of the red sandstone which is common in the area. There are several stones which look extremely ancient indeed.
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• North Berwick is an attractive little town on the coast, in the rough vicinity of Edinburgh. Quite by chance I stumbled across a large and very interesting ruined church, known as the second St Andrews, I understand. Its large graveyard contains many old stones.
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• Bonkyl (one of a number of different spellings) has a small church, with a small graveyard, neither of which are particularly outstanding other than for the presence, next to the church, of a peculiar and very large building, which must be a memorial to somebody, but I couldn't find out who.
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• Duns is a small town which has a large, well kept, and orderly cemetery. I have 17 pictures of it here, but would probably have taken a few more had I not filled my three memory cards.
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• Ancrum is a small, rather sprawling, village quite near Jedburgh, in the heart of The Borders. In the centre of the village is the new parish church, which is featureless, graveless, and uninteresting. The real gem, however, is the abandoned and ruined old parish church, just outside the village, which is certainly one of the most peaceful places ever. Its graveyard is quite large, with some interesting stuff in it, including the grave of Beatrix Potter's brother. This is a wonderful and glorious place, one of my best ever.
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• You drive round a bend on a little winding country road, apparently miles from everywhere, and there, down in the bottom of the valley, you simply cannot miss the tiny and delightfully named Kirk of Lammermuir in Cranshaws. Not many graves, but all very neatly kept. A real picture-postcard treat.
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• Cockburnspath is a busy little village just off the main A1 road which leads to Edinburgh, and not very far from the coast. Its church, one of two in the village, is St Helens, and is mentioned in guidebooks for its peculiar cylindrical steeple. There are some interesting and unusual graves to be found in its graveyard.
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• Chirnside, a village or some size, or even a little town, has a very large graveyard with some large and interesting stones. There's what seems to me to be a large number of the broken stones I've mentioned above.
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• Literally only yards from the English border, on a back road, lies Foulden, which appears to be no more than a couple of cottages, a farm, and a tiny cemetery.
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• Jedburgh's ruined abbey, dominating the town's skyline on its slightly raised part of the town, features a small number of graves in an attractively unkempt little graveyard, as well as a handful of very old tombs within the abbey ruins itself.
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• My hotel in Kelso overlooked the expansive and pleasantly shaded graveyard of one of its several churches, a very unusual octagonal building, apparently much newer than most of its gravestones. The graveyard is right next to the ruined abbey, which has its own graveyard. Both of these places of burial are separately featured here.
  View the church album
  View the abbey album



• Lastly, you'll find the pictures from my visit to St Mary the Virgin Church on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. OK, OK, I know Lindisfarne is in England, not Scotland, but I did visit the island during my Scotland trip. Holy Island, with three or four churches, a ruined abbey, and apparently about 28 million tourists, is quite interesting in that it is reached via a road on a causeway which is underwater at high tide, so you have to time your visit carefully in order to avoid getting stuck there for 6 hours between low tides! A careful check of the tide tables prior to visiting ensured this didn't happen to me.
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