I recently visited Aberdeen, and one of the places that drew me in was the Kirkyard of St Nicholas. I have a slightly odd fascination with cemeteries and love reading the sometimes fascinating inscriptions on gravestones.
St Nicholas is the patron saint of Aberdeen, on the north-east coast of Scotland.
The site has been used for burials for at least 900 years and was particularly atmospheric in the dappled early morning sunlight.
There has been a kirk on the site since 1157. It was enlarged in the fifteenth century and was one of the largest churches in Scotland. It is known as the Mither Kirk, the mother church of the city of Aberdeen.
The Kirk was dedicated to St Nicholas as a miracle attributed to him was the rescue of sailors from a stormy sea.
I explored only half of the Kirkyard and sadly never made it into the Kirk itself. There were a lot of angry wasps about that morning and my bravery eventually failed and I bid a hasty retreat!
HistorianRuby: An Historian's Miscellany 
Just one more to go Ruby…
…til your 600.
Congratulations!
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Thanks 🙂 Trouble is when you reach a milestone you then push for the next one! 😉
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Why not? So long as you are enjoying it!
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Thank you for sharing this post and these pictures. I also like cemeteries because they are intriguing. Hope the rest of your day is great!
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I thought it was interesting that they added professions for the John Greens to tell them apart. Are those stone “tables” actually engraved headstones?
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Yes, they were engraved, too. What suprised me with the Scottish cemeteries I visited was that some wives tended to be named under their maiden name (I presume) rather than a husband’s name.
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I have found that in the U.S. sometimes, too. I like to think it was because the women were independent-minded.
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The Scottish have a tradition in which they name a child (usually the middle name) with the surname (or several in the instances I’ve come across) of their mothers or grandmothers’ maiden names. My sis-in-law has her grandmother’s maiden name as her middle name and my bro-in-law has a surname as a middle name as my mother-in-law liked it!
I thought that recognising the wife’s birth name may reflect on family names otherwise ‘forgotten’.
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