IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Whitemoss Road, KIRKNEWTON, EH27 8AF

Viewed at the junction of Main Street and Whitemoss Road on a bright mid-November day.

I looked for Dunallan because 'The Buildings of Scotland' mentions it as one of few notable houses in Kirknewton.

They don't make 'em like they used to! Apparently gravestones like this were all the rage a couple of hundred years ago. So long as you had the cash of course - they must have took some amount of carving. This is the most impressive one I found but there are other more basic ones nearby - they're mostly in a cluster towards the bottom end of the enclosure. The most common symbols are skulls and cossbones, angels/wings, and hourglasses. If the hourglass is on its side, as is the case with this one, it is said to signify that the deceased's life was cut short too soon. Other symbols generally relate to the trade of the person.

This is the old burial ground, and the site of the original kirk of Kirknewton.

The mausoleum is on the site of the choir of the old kirk, and commemorates the celebrated physician, botanist and philosopher William Cullen (1710-1790), and his son Robert, Lord Cullen, eminent judge, elegant scholar and accomplished gentleman, who were of the Cullen family of Ormiston. See http://www.cullenproject.ac.uk/william-cullen/

Swings in Kirknewton park under the heaviest snow fall in years.

There was a church on this site, but no obvious sign of it now, only two burial enclosures, this one from 1864, of the Cullens

The inscription above the entrance to the enclosure notes that it was erected in 1864 as a memorial to William by the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, and his great granddaughter Marion Fenella Marjoribanks. He was born in Hamilton, Lanarkshire, in 1710, and died at Kirknewton in 1790. After an ‘apprenticeship’ in Glasgow, service as a ship's surgeon, and a period as assistant to an apothecary in London, he practised medicine from 1732 in various places in Scotland and in 1747 he was appointed to a Lectureship in Chemistry in Glasgow, and in 1751 to the Chair of Medicine. In 1755 he moved to Edinburgh and held the Chair until 1766. He then became Professor of the Institutes of Medicine (Physiology) and of the Practice of Medicine until his resignation in 1789. So he did not have much of a retirement. He was a man of great personal charm, a lively personality, very articulate, and with a rich imagination, so was a good lecturer. His contributions to medicine and his widely used textbooks earned him an international reputation. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1777 [Information from a biography by W.P.Doyle on the University of Edinburgh’s School of Chemistry website]. Robert, Lord, Cullen, possibly a son [1742-1810], was, according to his plaque, ‘an eminent judge, elegant scholar, and accomplished gentleman’.