Good news! 

Readers will remember our report in late November about the 18.5m telecommunications mast newly installed on Broughton Road. 

The siting had caused upset among many locals who felt its positioning next to the Gretna Rail Disaster memorial in Rosebank Cemetery was unsightly and disrespectful. 

One doesn’t expect happy news from a cemetery, so none of what follows should come as a particular surprise. 

These researches are not intended to be intrusively morbid. They have been made in reaction to gravestone inscriptions in Rosebank Cemetery which were surely intended by relatives to trigger memory or spark interest among future generations.

In that sense, these short and melancholy stories constitute polite responses to long-standing invitations.

The Great Storm of 14 October 1881 claimed the lives of 189 men, most of them fishermen from Eyemouth (129) and Burnmouth (24), but 17 originating from  Newhaven. 

Three of those Newhaven men are remembered on adjacent gravestones in Rosebank Cemetery: 

LOCAL MAN'S LAST HOURS RECALLED 

A long wander about Rosebank Cemetery yesterday, and an unexpected glimpse of tempest and terror on the far side of the world. 

Able Seaman John Paterson was one of 27 crew who sailed from Lamlash on Arran on 3 May 1894. Under the command of Captain William Leggat, the three-masted steel barque Cambus Wallace was on her maiden voyage, bound for Brisbane with a cargo of whisky, beer, pig iron, salt, fancy goods and explosives. 

In Rosebank Cemetery, an inscription ends:

SERENE HE SLEEPS

WHOSE SONGS OF LOVE AND HOME

James Simpson, OBE is a distinguished conservation architect with Leith practice Simpson and Brown. On 26th October 2008, he gave an illustrated talk to the Friends of Hopetoun Crescent Garden about the (later successful) project to investigate, dismantle, and remove the historic Botanic Cottage at Haddington Place (see Issues 154, 167, 171) – a scheme in which he had been closely involved. Below are edited excerpts.