David Douglas monument, Scone

Finding myself back in Perthshire, I went to have a look for the David Douglas monument that I didn’t find the last time. I got off the bus too early because I was worried about getting off too late, but it turned out that I should have waited for the road sign – it was obviously a more famous thing than I expected.

The monument stands in the grounds of Scone Old parish church, which was originally built in the old village beside Scone Palace in the 1780s, and moved to the site of the new village in 1806, rebuilt from the stones of the original.

The monument is up behind the church, towards the back of the churchyard.

It’s an imposing monument, if very much in the Victorian tradition! The inscription is also very Victorian – and very presbyterian – a whole essay on not only his professional but his personal characteristics.

But affectionate, I think – under the formality, there’s a sense that this is someone who will be missed.

There’s also a much more modern commemoration of his life, at the foot of the monument.

The back of the monument also has an inscription, this time giving a lost of some of his famous plant introductions.

The Dean Bridge

Back to Telford this week, and a local site. The Dean Bridge was one of Telford’s last major projects, completed in 1831 when he was 73.

It’s been a place that interests me for far longer than I’ve really been chasing Telford – I used to work nearby, and wander down to eat my lunch in the valley below.

One if the most striking things about it is the contrast – from above you would hardly know you were on a bridge, because the land on both sides is level, and the bridge itself flat. Only the treetops and the lack of buildings give it away, and since the parapets were raised in the early 20th century it’s not easy to look over to the river.

Down below it is completely different – the arches tower above at a dizzying height.

A plaque on the bridge celebrates Telford’s involvement, put there to commemorate the bicentenary of his birth.

The settlement at the Dean Village – a famous site of mills on the Water of Leith – long predates the bridge, and there are still odd old buildings there, although mixed in with a strange combination of Victorian recreations and modern creations.

Until the building of the New Town the village was well outside the city, although I think this old picture exaggerates the distance – it’s only about half a mile to the castle rock. But by the 1820s the city had spread out as far as Moray Place, and the very steep river valley was standing in the way of further expansion – the old crossing is a bit further west, and means a steep ascent and descent. The bridge was funded mainly by the owner of the land on the far side, who hoped to make a lot of money from opening it up, although the local road trustees were also involved.

It’s not easy to get a clear view of the bridge as a whole – if the twisting valley doesn’t get in the way, the trees do.

One of the most distinctive features of the bridge is the double arches – large central arches carrying the road, and narrower arches carrying the footpaths. (The other really distinctive feature is that the piers are hollow, but you can’t see that from the outside.)

Telford in Eskdale

I set out on Saturday to come up on the ‘back’ of the Ettrick hills from north of Eskdalemuir, but when I got there I found my route blocked by forestry works.

Fortunately that wasn’t the only thing I meant to come to the area for, so I set off on the trail of Thomas Telford instead. Of course, if I had planned to do this, I would have checked more carefully on what I meant to see, but I knew that I had to start at Bentpath where there was a memorial to Telford, and could then go on to Langholm.

(The place names have confused me before when reading about Telford. Westerkirk is the area and the parish, taking in the valley where Telford was born and other places round about, and once including what is now the parish of Eskdalemuir. Bentpath is the tiny village which holds the parish church and the library and the former school, and where Telford went to school, and Glendinning is the farm up at the head of the valley where he was born.)

The memorial is now outside the little Westerkirk library.

The inscription on the left hand panel reads:

This seat was erected in 1928 to perpetuate the memory of Thomas Telford son of the ‘unblameable shepherd’ and to record his fame as an engineer and his untiring benevolence. Apprenticed to a stonemason in Langholm. His creative genius gave to the nation many works of inestimable benefit. He was the first President of the Institution of Civil Engineers.

‘Unblameable shepherd’ is a quotation from Telford’s own carving on his father’s gravestone, but I was unsure about where he was buried, and when I could only find the new graveyard in Bentpath I thought that the older graves must be in Langholm or Eskdalemuir – it turns out that the old graveyard is hidden up beyond the church.

The right hand side has a quotation from a poem written by Telford himself as a young man, on the death of a childhood friend.

There ‘mongst those rocks I’ll form a rural seat,
And plant some ivy with its moss compleat;
I’ll benches form of fragments from the stone,
Which, nicely pois’d, was by our hands o’erthrown

The centre has a carved portrait of Telford, and a brief inscription about his life:

Thomas Telford FRS. Born at Glendinning 9 August 1757 President Institution of Civil Engineers from 21 March 1820 to the time of his death 2 September 1834

The monument was put up in 1928 on the centenary of the founding of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and was originally a bit further up the road, near where the Esk and the Meggat Water join.

The Westerkirk library is the oldest library in Scotland still lending out books, and was originally founded by the miners of the Jamestown mine, right by Glendinning. The mine opened in 1793, about 35 years after Telford’s birth, and closed in 1799, and the library moved to the Westerkirk school in Bentpath in 1800, and to its own building when the school was rebuilt around 1840.

Telford left money in his will to be used for buying books for the library, which eventually added up to quite a proportion of it.

I had vaguely planned to walk down to Langholm and get the bus back, but the notice at the library reminded me about Glendinning itself – I could go directly to Langholm easily enough another day, but I wasn’t likely to head back up that long valley, and I figured out that I should be able to go on over the hill to Eskdalemuir, which was more appealing than walking all the way back out again.

The junction of the little road has a sign saying ‘Telford cairn’, although it doesn’t say anything about it still being 3 and a half miles away.

The walk in just follows the road, but it was a lovely valley, little rounded hills and clear burn, until eventually the hills at the head of the valley came into view – Glendinning and Jamestown are just at the end of the main valley, before it splits into two branches.

There’s a little carpark at Glendinning, mostly for the Greensykes bothy, and a board giving information about Telford’s life and a rather dramatic picture of his birthplace.

The cairn itself is a little bit up the hillside, with a wall behind it.

The inscription is very simple:

To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the birth of THOMAS TELFORD at Glendinning on 9th August 1757

I kept on up the hill to head back towards Eskdalemuir, which gave me a good view of the valley below – Telford’s father’s cottage would have been somewhere this side of the farmhouse, I think, and the mine was up the side valley opposite.

Will the real George Heneage Dundas please stand up

(Also mostly a repost from elsewhere.)

I’ve mentioned George Heneage Dundas, the real life counterpart of Jack Aubrey’s friend, here before, but I haven’t posted my attempt to gather together both life stories. The character of the books is fairly classic O’Brian – based on history, but not quite, taken from his own family to become a son of one first Lord of the Admiralty and brother of another, in the shape of the first and second Lord Melville, Henry and Robert Dundas. (Which I think is a shame, because I find his real family far more interesting!)

In real life he was the fourth son of Thomas Dundas, son of Sir Lawrence Dundas. It doesn’t seem to have been a naval family – two of his brothers were in the army and another in the church, so it was presumably just something for a fourth son to do – but in those days it must have been difficult not to be involved somehow with ships, and his grandfather invested heavily in East India company ships and seems to have helped relatives to be appointed to posts on them, while his father was involved with steamship trials on the Forth and Clyde canal, so that the early paddle steamer Charlotte Dundas is named after his sister.

Two Dundas families

The two families involved, descending from Sir Lawrence Dundas, the ‘Nabob of the North’, and Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, ‘The Uncrowned King of Scotland’ were distantly related in some fashion, but certainly weren’t friends.

Both were Scottish families originally – Lawrence Dundas was probably born in Edinburgh, where his father was a merchant, and is buried at Falkirk, but he bought various properties across the country, so that by the time his grandson was born the family was based at Aske Hall in Yorkshire.

There’s a wonderful case study of Aske Hall and Lawrence Dundas, carried out as part of a research project on The East India Company at home, which is well worth a look, either to find out more about the family or for pretty pictures of houses and interiors of the time.

Henry Dundas was born at Arniston in Midlothian and is buried at Lasswade reasonably nearby, and although both of them must have lived most of their lives in London, his son also died in Midlothian and was buried at Lasswade. I don’t know nearly enough about the politics of Scotland between the Union and the Reform Acts to understand the power that the Melvilles had, only that they did – one legacy being the fact that almost every town in Scotland appears to have a Dundas Street!

Edinburgh monuments

The two families meet in St Andrew Square in the New Town of Edinburgh, where a monument to the first Lord Melville dominates the square, and towers over half of George Street.

Lawrence Dundas is represented by Dundas House, now the head office of the Royal Bank of Scotland,on one side of the square – the site was meant to be used for a church, but it was such a commanding site – looking right down the central street of the New Town development – that he just decided to keep it for himself.

The house is built on the point from which the New Town was measured and laid out, and there’s a plaque in the floor of the bank to commemorate it.

I’ve read a story somewhere that the statue on Lord Melville’s monument was deliberately built with its back to Dundas House, but this does seem to be only a story.

The second Lord Melville had to be content with a much smaller monument at the other end of the New Town, which now acts as a kind of roundabout.

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Two naval careers

Dundas’s first appearance in the books, as commander of Calpe at the battle of Algeciras, fits with the historical record, and seems to be the historical character – it’s not until Post Captain that he becomes the son of the First Lord of the Admiralty. (Which can only be true if M+C really does run from April 1800 to an Algeciras in the autumn of 1801, but that’s a whole other story.)

Before the story starts the fictional Hen seems to have spent most of his time in the West Indies, where he was with Jack in both Surprise and Bellephoron, while the real GHLD spent time in the Mediterranean, at least once he became a lieutenant, ending up on Queen Charlotte, where he would have served with Cochrane had Cochrane not been away in charge of a prize.

It was on Queen Charlotte that he became known for his efforts when she went on fire, which led to him being appointed to Calpe.

After Algeciras the stories split again, with the real GHLD mostly in the North Sea and the Baltic in Euryalus, and the fictional one first in the Leeward Islands, and then in England on half pay.

By late 1812 and The Ionian Mission, the real and fictional characters meet up again in the Mediterranean, although with Hen in Excellent rather than his actual Edinburgh – since this is the book where everyone is based on Lord Collingwood, this may be a nod to him – although the time spent on blockade seems to belong more to Euryalus, which spent some time with Collingwood’s fleet in the Mediterranean and later off Toulon, than to the real Edinburgh, which was ‘very actively engaged on the coasts of Italy’.

By Treason’s Harbour Hen has caught up with his real counterpart by moving into Edinburgh, which suggests that O’Brian did still have history in mind. The real GHLD then stayed with Edinburgh and the Mediterranean until the end of the war, but the fictional Hen dots about sometimes as required by the plot and sometimes for no particular reason – heading for the North American station in Eurydice in The Reverse of the Medal, back again in The Letter of Marque, in the ship of the line Orion in the Thirteen Gun Salute, the older and smaller Berenice from The Wine Dark Sea to The Yellow Admiral (apparently because he has upset his brother, now in charge of the Admiralty), Hamadryad in The Hundred Days, and Lion in Blue at the Mizzen.

We’ll never know what the fictional character would have done later on – the real one left the navy at the end of the war and stood on and off as a Member of Parliament, eventually becoming Second Naval Lord and briefly First Sea Lord – the highest naval posts in the Admiralty, as opposed to the First Lord of the Admiralty, who by that time was always a civilian.

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(I’m not sure which name he actually used – he was christened George Heneage Lawrence Dundas, and signs his letters to the Gazette with all his initials – G.H.L. Dundas – rather than the Geo. Dundas I was half expecting. I still suspect that he used George, but O’Brian, who does his research even if he then muddles it up so much that no one can unmuddle it, did get that Heneage from somewhere before he had started playing about with history – he’s Heneage in Master and Commander.

I haven’t (yet) found another George in the immediate family for him to be confused with, or named after for that matter – it’s possible that he was named after e.g. a godfather – there seems to have been a line of George Heneages in Lincolnshire – but that’s only a wild guess.)