Death and roses

The scattering of flowers on the grave of the newly buried is an ancient tradition. This Victorian statue shows a young maiden holding roses in a fold of her gown and scattering them on the grave below. 

Such Victorian sentimentality is in marked contrast to earlier Scottish grave monuments which were often carved with grim symbols and reminders of our mortality; skulls, crossed bones, grave diggers' tools, coffins, deid bells and the like.  

Robert Louis Stevenson in Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1879) wrote: "We Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest among the nations of the world in the matter of grimly illustrating death. We have seen the love for the emblems of Time and the Great Change; and even around the country churchyards you will find a wonderful exhibition of skulls and cross bones and noseless angels, and trumpets pealing for the day of judgment, Every mason was a pedestrian Holbein. He had a deep consciousness of death and loved to put its terrors pithily before the churchyard loiterer; he was brimful of rough hints upon mortality ...."