Ross-shire's stories in stone: Monumental inscriptions spotlighted in new book launched in Dingwall
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A FASCINATING insight into monumental inscriptions in Highland graveyards has been launched in Dingwall this week.
The Highland Family History Society volume is the result of years of work and will be received with enthusiasm by family historians around the world.
It features over 1600 inscriptions in Fodderty and Kinnettas Burial Grounds.
Monumental Inscriptions – Fodderty Burial Ground & Cemetery and Kinnettas (Strathpeffer) Burial Ground – Parish of Fodderty, Ross-shire.
It's available at Dingwall Museum (www.dingwallmuseum.info) or use the online sales portal Genfair (https://genfair.co.uk/
These stones have been carved since at least the late 1600s up to the 21st Century in memory of family and friends in a long tradition that continues today.
Jonathan McColl of the Highland Family History Society and Dingwall Museum said: “I had thought the 600-odd inscriptions in and around Dingwall – not yet including the modern cemetery up the Greenhill –were a lot but the new book has about a thousand more than that!
"It includes many folk from the surrounding parishes of Dingwall, Urray, Contin and Kiltearn as well as Fodderty itself.”
The volume has been many years in the making.
Within its page readers will find details of the last resting places of figures like constuction engineer Willie Logan, well known in Dingwall and further afield across the Highlands, with its version of a Tay Bridge unit.
It is also the final resting place of A M Ross, a former editor of the North Star, now the Ross-shire Journal's sister paper. It features a star on his headstone.
The oldest readable one may be that of John MacKenzie of Dochcairn, buried in the 17th century. Included in the book is Anne MacInnes’s careful survey of the Kinnettas burial ground in Strathpeffer, adding another hundred or so elements.
The book is for sale through the Highland Family History Society and the Dingwall Museum which opened its doors for the summer this week.
