Hume Castle stands on a prominent site, visible for miles round. Initially, this gave it great defensive strengths, but by the later 18th century the ‘considerable eminence’ was thought the perfect site for an eye-catcher. The ruins of the ancient fortification were pulled down and the stone reused to create a curiously crenellated sham castle.

The original castle is said to have been destroyed after it fell to Cromwell’s troops in 1651. It remained a scant ruin until Hugh Hume-Campbell, 3rd Earl of Marchmont (1708-1794), ‘restored and rebattlemented’ it in the later 18th century. An exact date seems elusive, but it was complete by 1789 when this sketch was executed.

The new and very dramatic tower stood bold on the skyline, and could be seen from Marchmont, the new Palladian house the earl began in 1750 a few miles away.

18th century accounts of the new Hume Castle seem hard to find, but later visitors could be quite scathing. In 1908 Alexander Curle, the secretary of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, wrote in his ‘private journal of a Wandering Antiquary’ that Hume Castle was a ‘ridiculous fantastic erection, a modern ruin raised on the site of the ancient fortress’.

A few years later A.G. Bradley described the castle in his The Gateway of Scotland. He thought the ‘terrible mock battlements’ were not even up to the standards of ‘the comic opera stage’.  Clearly the Earl of Marchmont rebuilt the castle with the view from Marchmont House in mind, and a journalist in 1927 best summed up the situation when he quoted the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell’s line that ‘distance lends enchantment to the view’. There is no denying that at close quarters the giant crenellations are distinctly odd.

In 1970 The Scotsman ran a story by William Chisholm headlined ‘Future of freak castle in the balance’. The Earl of Marchmont’s descendants had sold the castle (as part of the Humehall estate) to the tenant in 1914, and in 1929 it had passed into the ownership of the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries. By 1970 this body was keen to dispose of the castle but both the National Trust for Scotland and the Ministry of Public Buildings declined to take it on.

There was an impasse for more than twenty years, but we can follow the story via Chisholm’s regular updates in the newspaper. In 1981 there was still ‘extreme difficulty’ in disposing of the building, and in 1984 it was announced that the castle was crumbling and in urgent need of restorations.

The hero of the hour was the Berwickshire Civic Society, under the chairmanship of Major-General Sir John Swinton. The society took a lease on the castle and raised £150,000 to stabilise the walls, install a door and replace railings. The project was managed by architect David Mylne from 1985 until completion in 1992. Chisholm could then write in The Scotsman that the future of Hume Castle was at last secure. It is now in the care of the Hume Castle Preservation Trust and the public are welcome to visit.

Marchmont House passed out of Hume family ownership early in the 20th century and became separated from its lands. The estate was reunited by the Burge family in the later years of that century, and a hugely impressive restoration project has seen the house restored and filled with a collection spanning more than five centuries.

Hume Castle is no longer an eye-catcher from Marchmont as mature plantations block the view, but the Flâneuse was reliably informed that it can be seen from the roof.

Marchmont House can be visited on open days and you can read more here https://www.marchmonthouse.com

For more on the castle see https://humecastle.org/

Thanks for reading. Please scroll down to the comments box at the very bottom of the page to share any thoughts or information. 

In the border town of Coldstream a footpath leads from a lodge down to the river Tweed. The route passes an ice-house shaded by trees before a stroll along the riverbank brings one to an elegant stone temple. The Temple ornamented the landscape of a grand Georgian mansion called The Lees, which was largely pulled down in the 1970s.

The Lees (sometimes just Lees) was the seat of the interrelated Pringle and Marjoribanks (pronounced Marchbanks) family. In 1760 a traveller noted that ‘Mr Pringle has built a handsome house, and made a beautiful plantation’: ‘Mr Pringle’ was James, who died in 1769 leaving the estate to his cousin Edward Marjoribanks.

The temple was extant by 1769 when a historian noted Mr Pringle’s ‘modern seat’ as well as the ‘octagonal tempiato’ on the banks of the river. It is shown as an existing feature on a ‘Design for the improvement of Lees’ by the Edinburgh based designer Richard Stephens (?-1821) dated 1816. Stephens’ family business was in ‘draining, irrigating and embanking’, but he also drew up improvement plans for a small number of Scottish estates.

The Temple is named as such on the 1st edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858. The map shows the Temple and the Ice House as well as an array of summerhouses and seats that are lost today, and the surveyors preparing the map noted the ‘considerable and well laid out pleasure grounds’. Historic England Scotland incorrectly date the structure to the ‘later 18th century’ and it is listed as Category B.

By the middle of the 20th century the house at The Lees was in a very dilapidated condition and the then owners were only interested in the fishing rights. In 1975, when all attempts to find a buyer or a purpose had been exhausted, permission was granted to demolish. By that date the house was owned by Andrew Douglas-Home, nephew of the former Prime Minister (which information the Flâneuse shares simply so the headline in The Scotsman can be understood: ‘Doom for House of Home’). The paper reported that whilst the Scottish Civic Trust and the Scottish Georgian Society thought the case was ‘one of the saddest ever’, they accepted that there was no alternative to demolition.

Douglas-Home had a long term plan to build a new house on the site, and for that reason the circular central section won a reprieve and was left standing.

Towards the end of the 20th century it was incorporated into a new house designed by Nicholas Groves-Raines, which has since been further extended.

As briefly mentioned the Tweed is of course famed for salmon, and the wide stretch of river in front of the Temple became known to fishermen as ‘Temple Pool’, as seen in this postcard view (which helpfully points out that in Coldstream the river is the border between Scotland and England).

After the Right to Roam was introduced in Scotland Mr Douglas-Home created a footpath through his grounds and down to the river. Walkers are welcome but are requested to keep to the path and to respect the usual rules of the countryside (and to give Mr Douglas-Home a cheery hello if you see him out and about).

Thank you for reading and do please get in touch if you have any thoughts or comments – scroll down to the bottom of the page to make contact.

Spottiswoode House, was described in 1846 as a ‘stately and elegant edifice in the old English style of architecture’. The estate had been ‘possessed, time out of mind, by the Spotiswoodes’ and was the childhood home of Alicia Anne Spottiswoode. It became her retreat in widowhood and the place where she was remembered for having ‘a weakness for erecting curious stone archways and other little monuments here and there’.

Alicia Anne (1810-1900) was one of the children of the Laird, John Spottiswoode, who built the new house to designs drawn up by William Burn in 1832. Alicia Anne lived a life typical of the age and was educated at home in the arts of literature, drawing, singing and conversational French. But she was also passionate about botany, geology, history and archaeology, and loved to be outdoors.

In 1836 she married Lord John Douglas Montagu Scott, second son of the 4th Duke of Buccleuch. After his death in 1860, Lady John, as she was known, seems to have developed what were generally described as eccentricities, although one article suggests she was seriously disturbed by her husband’s death, and continued to live as if he were alive – writing him letters and having a place laid for him at the dinner table.

In her widowhood Lady John lived mainly at Spottiswoode, and the property became hers for her lifetime following the death of her mother in 1870. She then became known as Lady John Scott Spottiswoode to meet the terms of her father’s settlement. Her motto was Haud Fast to the Past and she had a passion for local history, and supervised a number of archaeological investigations on the estate.

Best remembered today for the song Annie Laurie the ‘most popular of Scottish melodies’, Lady John deserves to be better known for the curious works in architecture with which she bedizened the estate. These included two curious arches which, by map evidence, were constructed between 1857 and 1897. One stands in the tiny hamlet called Pyatshaw (named for the burn, or stream, that passes by).

It has inscribed stones built into the base, of which only one is even vaguely legible today. That which can be read (with difficulty) can be identified as one of the riddles, or ‘ænigmas’ put to Zadig and others in Voltaire’s 1747 novel of the same name. Zadig is asked:

‘What is this thing we receive without being thankful for it, which we enjoy without knowing how we came by it, which we give away without knowing where it is to be found, and which we lose without being conscious of our misfortune’.

Zadig is the only one who can solve the philosophical conundrum – the answer is ‘Life’. A second riddle solved by Zadig describes ‘Time’, and perhaps this was the inscription now eroded from the other stone? Sadly no local historians seem to have transcribed the plaques, although in 1912 a Mr Bradley wrote that one of the estate lodges had ‘a stone bearing a Latin description’. But to the Folly Flâneuse’s great disappointment he continued that it was ‘not worth recording’.

The second arch is close to the Bruntaburn (again named for a watercourse) Lodge, but is easy to miss as it is almost totally engulfed in ivy.

Sadly Lady John’s motive in erecting the arches is not known, but she is remembered as a great philanthropist and they may have been built to create employment locally. If they commemorate individuals or events then that association has long been forgotten.

At one of the entrances to the park stand two matching buildings known as the Eagle Lodges, or the Clock Lodges. The eagles which gave the lodges their name (seen in the postcard below) are no longer in situ, but the ‘clocks’ remain.

Although the lodges are thought to be late 18th century in origin, Alicia Anne is credited with giving them the embellishments which make them so fascinating today. Each lodge has a crenellated gable wall which carries a dummy clock – one always gives the time as 1.53 and the other 11.11 and the story is told that these were the times that the mail coach arrived at Spottiswoode. Each cottage carries two boards giving the distances to postal towns as near as Edinburgh and as far as Portsmouth.

Only a few years after Lady John’s death the antiquarian Alexander Curle, Secretary of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland, visited Spottiswoode and noted the clock lodges and, more vaguely, the many ‘evidences of Lady John’s eccentric tastes’. Not known to survive today, but also a great curiosity, was Lady John’s coach which Curle described as ‘a great clumsy vehicle’ which was modelled on Napoleon’s.

Lady John died without issue in 1900, and Spottiswoode House passed to a grand-nephew. The place was not maintained and by 1912 was already looking ‘forlorn’. Spottiswoode was sold in the 1930s, when it was said that ‘time has played havoc with its wide domain’, and the house was pulled down in 1939. The stable block was converted into a residence in 1996 and a new house built in the grounds at the same date.

Happily the ornaments erected by Lady John survive. The arches are both listed at category C, and the Clock/Eagle Lodges are category B. All can be seen from public roads.

Top marks to anyone who spotted the non-indigenous wildlife in the top image. Here’s the friendly little fellow who adds further charm to the hamlet of Pyatshaw.

If you can add to the story, or wish to share any thoughts, please scroll down to the comments box. Thank you for reading.

On Sunday 18 June 1815 the British and Prussian armies, commanded respectively by the Duke of Wellington and Field Marshal von Blücher, won the Battle of Waterloo. There were immediate demands for monuments across Britain to celebrate this great victory, but none were so quick to respond as William Kerr, the 6th Marquis of Lothian, and his family. By the end of June funds had been raised to erect ‘a monument on the summit of Penielheugh’, a lofty hill on the Marquis’s Monteviot estate.

Actually, the family had been planning a monument to the Duke of Wellington for some months, and the tenants had been asked to provide sand and lime for the construction of ‘Wellington’s Pillar’ earlier in 1815. The architect, William Burn (1789-1870), designed the monument in the form of an obelisk (or pyramid, the words were synonymous at this period). Whilst no drawings are known to survive, a maquette can be seen in the collection at Abbotsford, the former home of Sir Walter Scott, which shows the form monument took.

The foundation stone was laid in June, and by August the Scot’s Magazine could report that the ‘Wellington pillar on the top of Penhillheuch [sic] is in a state of progress’. The masons were instructed to carve the word VICTORY on the east face, WELLINGTON on the north, and WATERLOO on the west. The south side was to carry a dedication to the Duke of Wellington and the British Army (the Prussian army was not acknowledged). These inscriptions can all be read on the maquette.

On the 14th of October the Marquis of Lothian (1763-1825), his family, friends, and tenants gathered on the ‘romantic hill’. The Marquis paid tribute to those who had lost their lives, and to those who had served, and raised a toast to the King, the Prince Regent, the British Army, the Duke of Wellington, the Navy, Lord Nelson and many more before ending with a tribute to his tenantry. Lord Douglas then proposed a toast to the Marquis, and wished health and prosperity to his family. The four inscribed stones were in place and that on the south read:

To the Duke of Wellington
And the British Army
William Kerr
Marquis of Lothian
And his Tenants
Dedicate this Monument
30 June 1815

It is clear from the newspaper reports of this event that the obelisk was not quite finished. The Marquis himself said that it was ‘virtually completed’, but the monument on its 32 feet square base had yet to reach its ‘intended height of 109 feet’. It must however have been fairly advanced, for it was said that ‘for imposing height and grandeur’ the obelisk had ‘no rival in the United Kingdom’.

The monument was well-received, and the Scots were proud that the Marquis was ‘the first in this country to raise a monument to the heroes of Waterloo’. The 1st anniversary of the battle was marked at the monument in June 1816, when the obelisk was ‘decked with the union flag’. What happened next is a little unclear, but soon after ‘either through faulty design or faulty construction’ the obelisk ‘fell with a tremendous crash’. The estate forester is said to have written to the Marquis with the solemn news that ‘Yon muckle stane has tumbled’.

After some discussion, work began on an entirely new structure in 1817. This was designed by Archibald Elliot (1761-1823) in the form of a Doric column, which was considered appropriate ‘on account of its manly form’. Sir Walter Scott dined with Lord Lothian in September 1817, and the monument was sufficiently advanced for Scott to proclaim it ‘simply grand’, and ‘the finest piece of masonry I have ever seen’. The local whinstone was quarried nearby, and probably as a result of a lesson learned, the tower was later described as ‘very substantially built’.

The Marquis pondered whether to dedicate the tower exclusively to Waterloo, but eventually decided to stick with the original wording dedicating the monument to the Duke of Wellington and the British Army. So the tower, although marked on an 1822 map as ‘Waterloo Monument’, doesn’t actually have any inscription naming the great battle.

Work was ongoing late into 1823, only a few months before the 6th Marquis died in April 1824, and although Elliot’s original design showed a viewing platform, it is not certain if this was built. The super-structure carrying a gallery which we see today was not added until 1867, when the 8th Marquis (1832-1870), grandson of the builder of the monument, commissioned John Hungerford Pollen (1820-1902) to design a wooden viewing platform under a lead roof. News of the ‘intended restoration and embellishment’ of the monument soon spread, and the Marquis was hailed as a patriot. A poem was published celebrating the monument as a memorial that would (albeit on the second attempt) withstand the elements and ensure the valiant were remembered:

But thou proud monument, shall stand
A statute in the living land!
And ever rear thy giant head
‘Mid lightnings wild, and tempests dread.

Pollen was a cleric turned artist/architect/curator who had also worked on interiors at the Marquis’s Blickling estate in Norfolk. The builders, Messrs Herbertson of Galashiels, assembled the new balcony in their yard before taking it to Penielheugh for erection, and when complete the gallery, spire, and vane added another 37 feet to the height of the tower.

The tower was restored by Lothian Estates in the early 1990s with the support of Historic Scotland, Scottish Enterprise and the Borders Regional Council. Under normal circumstances it can be climbed, but there is a temporary closure due to Covid. For details visit https://www.lothianestates.co.uk/waterloo-monument

Sharing the hilltop with the Folly Flâneuse when she visited were Mark and Kerryanne of Borders Aerial Photography. They have kindly given permission to reproduce a dramatic image taken in better conditions.

For more of their amazing photo’s of the Borders see https://www.bordersaerialphotography.co.uk

And the monument features in this short film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sROeyfEmevY

For more on visiting Monteviot house and gardens https://www.monteviot.com

For Sir Walter Scott  https://walterscott250.com and Abbotsford https://www.scottsabbotsford.com

This post expands upon, and updates, a paper by Kitty Cruft published in the Annual Report & Bulletin of the Scottish Georgian Society (now the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland) in 1982.

Please scroll down to the comments section if you would like to share any thoughts. Thank you for reading. 

The 11th Earl of Buchan, seldom mentioned without the qualifier ‘eccentric’, bought the Dryburgh estate towards the end of the 18th century. He built a new house and improved the grounds, creating a landscape which featured as its centrepiece that ultimate in garden ornaments: a ruined abbey. Further embellishments included this pretty rotunda on a hillock overlooking the Tweed, and a ‘colossal statue’.

David Steuart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan (1742-1829), was fascinated by Scottish history and founded the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1780.  He was a man of great imagination, and a patriot who loved his country’s history and its heroes, and although his eccentricity was exaggerated after his death, there is no denying that he decorated the environs of Dryburgh Abbey ‘in his peculiar whimsical way’.

Although Buchan was an admirer of Scotland’s most revered poet, Robert Burns, he was particularly in awe of James Thomson, ‘the Bard of Ednam’ (Ednam being the nearby village where the poet was born). Thomson (1700-1748) was a poet and playwright, whose most famous work The Four Seasons, was published in 1730. There’s no explanation for what was practically an obsession on the part of Buchan, but he lobbied for monuments and memorials to Thomson in Scotland and London as well as building his own tribute – the Temple of the Muses.

In Greek mythology the muses lived with Apollo on Mount Parnassus and were patrons of poets, encouraging their creative calling. So in naming his rotunda the Temple of the Muses, and topping it with a statue of the poet, Buchan made himself clear – Thomson’s work was of the highest order, inspired by the goddesses. The story of Apollo and the Muses was a favourite of Buchan, and on one occasion he created a tableau in his Edinburgh drawing room. Nine ladies ‘of the first rank’ were dressed as the muses, and of course Buchan himself was Apollo. All that was needed to complete the scene was Cupid, so to the ‘astonishment’ of his assembled guests Buchan recruited a ‘blooming boy of ten or twelve’ who made a dramatic entrance, naked except for his bow and quiver.

No architect is mentioned in connection with the ‘fanciful erection’, and it seems likely the temple was the work of Buchan himself, working with his favoured mason, John Smith of Darnick, who also worked for Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford.

A grand fete took place at Dryburgh in August 1812 at which the new temple took centre stage. Guests processed from Dryburgh Abbey in the wake of the members of the Masonic Lodge of Newstead – of which Smith the stonemason was Grand Master – and assembled at the temple. Reports of this event include a description of the temple, probably provided by Buchan. The ‘Temple of the Muses’ had nine columns, and on the capital of each was the name of one of the nine muses, inscribed in metallic characters: Clio, Euterpe, Thalie, Melpomene, Terpischore, Erato, Polyhymnie, Uranie and Caliope, the ‘elegant relievo letters’ being the work of John Ruthven of Edinburgh. On top of the dome a ‘beautiful imitation, in stone, of the lyre of Terpischore, found in the ruins of Herculaneum, is surmounted by a bust of Thomson, also cut in stone’.

The celebrations continued at Dryburgh Abbey where a grand feast was served, and then in the early hours the party returned to the temple. Along the way they passed a group dressed in the character of the four seasons, and then marvelled at a large illuminated transparency which Buchan had erected on the opposite side of the river Tweed. After speeches and toasts, and a rousing chorus of ‘Thomson’s grand national song’ (ie Rule Britannia for which the poet had composed the words) there was a ‘brilliant’ display of fireworks.

The newspaper report described the interior as ‘unfinished’, and it would be another 7 years before the central focus was installed. This was a statue of the Apollo Belvedere standing on a ‘circular pedestal with the 9 muses modelled in the die, enriched with laurel leaves’. This impressive piece was supplied by Mrs Coade’s artificial stone manufactory in Lambeth in 1819, at a cost of £119 4s 0d. Sir David Erskine recorded the statue in his sketch book in 1821.

The newly-completed temple (actually an artist’s impression thereof, as it was incomplete) had appeared on the title-page of a volume of Buchan’s writings, published in 1812. The book suggests that at that date the temple was to be dedicated to Thomson and Robert Burns.  Buchan is known to have discussed a statue of Burns with his mason (is that the poet sitting in the temple in this image?) but none is recorded in situ and Apollo eventually took his place.

Opinion was divided as to whether Lord Buchan’s landscape was a triumph or a travesty. A visitor in 1823 praised the earl’s ‘refined and classic taste’ and described the grounds as a ‘little Elysium’. But a year  later a lady dismissed the ‘several odious enormities… and sundry other fooleries.’ Each to their own.

By the second half of the century the temple was dismissed as ‘a very commonplace building’ and one visitor thought it would soon be lost. At date unknown the statue and plinth were removed, and the metallic names of the muses have been spirited away too, and there is but faint trace of them today. The temple survived simply because it became so engulfed in foliage that it was largely forgotten. In 2002, following some remedial work (detail is hard to find), a new bronze statue, representing the Four Seasons, was commissioned from Siobhan O’Hehir (born 1966).

The mason Smith was also responsible for the ‘colossal statue’ (as Buchan himself called it) on the ridge above the temple. It represents Sir William Wallace, the Scottish knight and soldier, who was another of Buchan’s heroes. It was unveiled in 1814, and the striking monument is all the more remarkable as Smith was remembered as ‘a common Stone Mason who had never been taught sculpture’.

For Dryburgh Abbey see https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit-a-place/places/dryburgh-abbey/history/

Thank you for reading. If you can add to the story, or would like to share any thoughts, please scroll down to the comments section below.

The hero of this tale began life in 1787 as Thomas Monteath. By the time he died in 1868 he had taken the name Douglas as a condition of an inheritance, advanced in the military ranks, and been knighted, thus ending his life as General Sir Thomas Monteath Douglas. He had plans to ensure that he would not quickly be forgotten, and had this extraordinary mausoleum constructed.

Driving north on the A68, The Folly Flâneuse had often noted what appeared to be a small summerhouse on a hill, just out of Jedburgh, but she had never found a moment to investigate. Arriving at last, the building turned out to be neither small, nor a summerhouse, but is instead the Monteath Mausoleum, and tucked into the hillside is a monumental entrance, invisible from the road.

The mausoleum was designed by J. Dick Peddie, of eminent Edinburgh architects Peddie and Kinnear, and a design of the ‘mausoleum now being erected’ was exhibited at the exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1865. But Monteath (as he shall be known for brevity) himself is said to have been closely involved in the design and construction, making changes as the build progressed. Having spent 4 decades in India, Monteath would have been familiar with the indigenous burial architecture and this must surely have been an influence on the design, particularly the pierced dome. But Monteath would also have been aware of such a roof much closer to home, for Peddie had recently won great acclaim for his design for a new banking hall for the Royal Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh. The design included an amazing dome lit by star shaped openings.

Work on the mausoleum began in 1864, and the local paper reported in March 1865 that ‘a curious and conspicuous addition to our local architecture’ was in the ‘course of erection’. At that date the central chamber, 16 feet wide, had been hollowed out of solid rock by the contractor, Mr Harkness of Hawick. Two months later the paper noted that the mausoleum was to be built 20 feet higher than originally intended.

The site at Gersit Law would have appealed to the soldier Monteath, for it overlooked the spot where the Battle of Ancrum Moor was fought in the 16th century. Along the ridge from the mausoleum is another curiosity which Monteath would have known – Lilliard’s Stone. Legend has it that Lilliard was a diminutive but determined female warrior who fought at the battle between the English and Scots armies:

Fair maiden Lilliard lies beneath this stane
Little was her stature, but muckle was her fame
Upon the English loon she laid monie thumps
And when her legs were cuttit off, she fought upon her stumps.

Monteath died in October 1868 and ‘the massive and handsome mausoleum’ was ready to receive ‘the remains of the distinguished soldier for whom it was erected.’ It was his ‘express wish’ that two lions should guard the entrance and two angels stand watch over his grave.

The building, which ‘commands one of the finest and most extensive views in the south of Scotland’ was already something of a tourist attraction, being a prominent landmark both from the main road and from the railway line. The poet Thomas Davidson gave voice to the late Monteath in ‘And There Will I be Buried’, which includes the lines:

I’ve been happy above ground;
I can ne’er be happy under
Out of gentle Teviot’s sound –
Part us not then, far asunder.

Lay me here where I may see
Teviot around his meadows flowing,
And around and over me
Winds and clouds forever going.

The locals were very proud of the mausoleum and took great offence when Sir George Douglas of Kelso, a writer and poet, criticised the building in an article in The Scotsman newspaper in 1920. Writing as ‘G.D.’, Douglas called the mausoleum a ‘strange barbaric structure’ and pontificated that ‘doubtless the old gentleman’s views on aesthetics were rudimentary.’ He also suggested that it had become known as ‘Monteath’s Aisle, or ‘Monteath’s Folly’.

A reader was quick to defend the ‘finely proportioned and well-executed structure’ and chastised Douglas for giving readers ‘the impression that … the mausoleum is a rather poor affair.’ ‘J.M.’ also dismissed the alternative names as nonsense (and indeed the names do not seem to have been used by anyone but Douglas).

Soon after this exchange trees were allowed to grow around the mausoleum, and it was largely forgotten. It was revealed anew in March 1946 when the timber was felled for the war effort, but although once again a landmark it continued to deteriorate and in 2009 it was placed on the Buildings at Risk Register for Scotland.

The rescue of the structure, under the auspices of The Friends of Monteath Mausoleum, started out in a rather casual manner but culminated in a magnificent restoration. In the organisation’s own words:

‘On a warm summers afternoon in 2014, a group of friends were walking along Lilliars Edge when they came across the derelict and ivy-covered building which had once been the magnificent mausoleum. With little expectation of success they set up a Friends group and campaigned for its restoration, finding to their surprise that everyone thought it was a great idea. The land owners, the local authority and many local and regional groups supported their efforts and, despite some setbacks, the funding was finally secured in 2018 and work began in October of that year. By the Spring of 2019 the building had been fully restored with new glazed stars in the roof, new oak doors and the whole building made fully watertight. Volunteers then took over to tidy the site, paint the 672 metal railings around the perimeter, and install new pathways to improve public access.’

The restored mausoleum was opened to the public on Sunday 7th July 2019. There are occasional open days when members of the Friends are on site to chat to visitors (move fast to be there on 28 & 29 September 10am-4pm). Or, for a small fee you can pick up the key locally and visit during Lothian Estates office hours. There’s more on the Friends and on access here http://friendsofthemonteathmausoleum.org.uk/index.html

The Monteath Mausoleum seems to have inspired another mausoleum, over the border in England. There will be more on that in these pages very soon.

This part of the Borders is rich in follies and curiosities. As well as the mausoleum and Lilliard’s Stone, there is also the Waterloo Monument at Peniel Heugh, also on Lothian Estates land and beautifully maintained, and the Baron’s Folly on Down Law, sadly currently on the Scottish Buildings at Risk Register.

The final word this week goes to Sir George Douglas, he who dared to criticise the Monteath Mausoleum. Although dismissive of the epithet folly as ‘vulgar’, he couldn’t help but wish there was ‘more of such high imaginative “folly” or impulse in the world and rather less of that wisdom which begins and ends with how many beans make five!’

For Peniel Heugh see https://www.lothianestates.co.uk/waterloo-monument

For Baron’s Folly see https://canmore.org.uk/site/56982/down-law-barons-folly

And for Lilliard’s Stone https://canmore.org.uk/site/57010/lilliards-stone-lilliards-edge

UPDATE 27 July 2020: the Friends of Monteath Mausoleum have launched an audio guide which you can download before a visit http://friendsofthemonteathmausoleum.org.uk/find-it/audio-guide.html