Last week, in the very early hours of Sunday morning, I went for a walk in Garrel Glen. I then followed the “Tak ma doon Road” to Kilsyth. There, wandering in a churchyard with no church, I came across one broken tombstone after another.
This tombstone is an example:
It was a memorial that had been erected by:
Cornelius Carr was an Innkeeper in Kilsyth. His Inn, on Market Place, was once well frequented. Cornelius died on the 13th November 1877. He had just turned forty years of age. His funeral was reported as “one of the largest ever witnessed in Kilsyth”:
In the Summer of 1873, four years before Cornelius died, a fire broke out in his Inn:
In January 1877, ten months before he died, Cornelius was involved in this accident:
In August 1877, Cornelius was involved in yet another “serious mishap“:
10 weeks later: Cornelius died from a brain haemorrhage.
Footnotes:
(1) It is tempting to speculate about the reasons why Cornelius was so accident-prone. But let us resist those temptations!
(2) As I was exploring this field of broken memorials to Kilsyth folk, a semi-naked young man ran through the churchyard. His gait was unsteady and he was ‘singing’ loudly. This would be about 5am. It would seem that he was on the way home after a ‘late night’!