EWH grant for Greyfriars Kirkyard Edinburgh World Heritage has awarded a grant of £5,000 to the Greyfriars Kirkyard Trust to help repair some of its historic gravestones and tombs.
The plan is to carry our repairs and conservation work to 25 gravestones and tombs in the kirkyard, which date from the 1600s through to the Victorian period. In some cases headstones have fallen over and need to be re-erected, with others features such as finials will be fixed back into place.
Unfortunately some of the headstones have broken into pieces, which will mean a painstaking job of piecing the parts together rather like a jigsaw puzzle. The headstones and tombs present a fascinating picture of Edinburgh social history over 400 years.
Amongst those to be restored are a memorial to Thomas McGrugar, a merchant of Edinburgh who died in May 1799. For many years he led the cause of parliamentary reform, and in 1783 published the ‘Letters of Zeno’, in which he denounced the corrupt system of voting in the city of Edinburgh. At that time the electorate numbered just 25 people.
The headstone of William Alexander Baillie-Hamilton who died in 1873 will also be repaired. He joined the navy aged thirteen during the Napoleonic Wars, and worked his way up through the ranks to become Second Secretary to the Admiralty and then in 1865 an Admiral.
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