An unusual memorial

Image: © Lairich Rig Taken: 20 May 2013

The picture was taken in Woodside Cemetery, near the eastern boundary. Given that this particular memorial has such an unusual and distinctive shape, it is disappointing that its inscription is now so worn that few useful details can be made out. The tantalisingly fragmentary inscription on the front appears to read: A[ ] HAMILTON (BORN IN) [ ] DIED AT INVER[ ] FEBRUARY (13?) [ ] The forename is short (the space allowing for just four or five letters, and the most likely possibilities that come to mind include AGNES/ADAM/ANNE/ANNIE/ANGUS/ALLAN, and similar variants). Limited though this information is, it is probably enough to allow the cemetery staff to work out whose memorial it is (not being a relative, I did not wish to enquire on my own account; I have, though, spoken to the cemetery staff about other matters and found them friendly and helpful). I expect there is an interesting story behind this stone and its shape. (Not far away, at the end of the row, is a stone for William Hamilton (d.1872), farmer at Brownside, and his children; a little nearer, not quite back-to-back with the present memorial, is a stone for a James Hamilton who died in 1903. There is not necessarily any family connection, though, between those gravestones and the one shown in the present picture.) Near the base of this organ-topped memorial are five very worn and fragmentary lines of text, whose reading presents a real challenge. The first of them is particularly hard to decipher, but appears to read "—ll we m— —in", which can only be "Till we meet again". Lines 2 to 5 are every bit as patchy, or even worse, but I was able to figure out that they are from Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H.", although with one minor change, namely, from "quiet shore" to "silent shore" (line 1 of the inscription is not from the poem; it has clearly been prefaced to the other lines to indicate hope). The five lines on the base of the monument therefore read as follows: "Till we meet again I watch thee from the silent shore Thy spirit up to mine can reach But in dear words of human speech We two communicate no more." Tennyson's poem (commemorating his friend Arthur Henry Hallam) was completed in 1849, just four years after this cemetery opened, so the presence of the poem on the memorial provides very little additional information about when the stone was erected. However, several others in the vicinity appear to date from the 1870s or 1880s, and this one may be of about the same age. For this general area of the cemetery, see Image

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