The gravestone of John Traquair

Image: © Lairich Rig Taken: 18 Jan 2013

The churchyard of Image contains some imposing monuments and burial grounds, particularly in its northern and north-eastern extremities. See for example, Image, the Image, the Image, and the Image However, the churchyard is primarily rural in character, and many of the stones display the names of local farms. Some of those names still appear on maps, while others will be less familiar to many modern readers. To give a more representative view of the churchyard, I have pictured a few of the memorials associated with local farmers; for the others, see Image (of Claddoch), Image (of Wester Ardoch), and Image (of Hawthornhill). The pits on this and nearby stones were caused by shrapnel; Image was damaged in the Cardross Blitz of 1941. The stone shown in the present photograph commemorates John Traquair, farmer at Clydebank, who died on the 5th of June 1876, aged 72; his wife Geils Goldie, who died on the 26th of January 1891, aged 90; and some of their family. Traquair is one of several surnames that have a very long association with the Cardross area [see comments on page 16 of Arthur F Jones' "Cardross: the Village in Days Gone By" (1985)]. The Clydebank at which John Traquair was a farmer is not the well-known town of that name(*); instead, it was a farmstead centred on Image, about 2.7 km ESE of here, near the shore. The Farm Horse Tax Rolls of 1797-98 show that a Mr Robert McKenzie was then the farmer at Clydebank. He was apparently the first, because David Murray, in his "Old Cardross" (1880), describes the farm of Clydebank as "having been cut out of the surrounding land at the end of the last century by Mr Robert McKenzie, who was then factor on the Ardoch Estate. It is made up of one of the Lies, the old Fir Park and Plover Bog, part of the Six Acres Farm ... and the ground on the shore called Clerkhill park. The field in which the house was built was part of the farms of Havock and Hawthornhill". On some of the names mentioned above, see Image, Image, and Image (for Ardoch and for "the Lies", pron. [liːz]). [(*) In the 1870s, when John Traquair died, there was not, as yet, a "town of Clydebank" (c.Image), although a settlement had already begun to develop there. The Burgh of Clydebank was not formed until 1886, and it took its name from J & G Thomson's Clydebank shipyard at Barns of Clyde – see Image for further details.]

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