Celtic Cross Revival.

Old Scottish graveyards are a veritable cornucopia of gravestones carved with symbols of mortality, immortality and the trades and professions of the dead.

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. .... even around the country churchyards you will find a wonderful exhibition of skulls, and cross-bones and nose-less angels, and trumpets pealing for the Day of Judgement. 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 ...'

Surprisingly, for a Christian nation, following the reformation, gravestones were not made in the form of crosses, and the cross was rarely used as a symbolic carving, probably because it was considered a Papist emblem.

It was only in the late 19th Century that crosses began to appear again in Scottish graveyards, often as copies of the monumental Celtic high crosses of the Mediaeval period.

This huge and finely carved gravestone in the style of a Celtic cross is in the graveyard at Udny Green and is dated 1906.