Earlier this month I spent a few days exploring part of Lanarkshire, the ‘Orchard country’, which was home to my mother’s family: the Scott’s.
Whilst in Lanarkshire I visited Leshmahagow, where I had my lunch. I then wandered around the auld Kirk yard. I found it neglected and forlorn, with the Kirk up for sale.
On one of the boundary walls I noticed this empty niche:
On top of a nearby tablestone tomb, somebody had taken the trouble to piece together the memorial tablet that the niche once contained. I guess, in an ‘exercise’ that might be described as a ‘puzzle of the past’:
Not all of the inscription survives [bits of the puzzle being missing]:
You can however make out some details, just enough to begin to tell a story. This memorial was to William Steele. It dates from March 1862 [but the last digit of this date has not survived complete]:
The memorial was erected by William Steele’s ‘messmates’ of the HMS Vanguard.
The tombstone puzzle reveals enough for us to understand, that whilst in harbour in Malta, aboard the HMS Vangaurd, William Steele contracted cholera and that he died young as a result of this.
HMS Vangaurd in Malta Harbour:
A newspaper report from 1868: