Fascinating Gaelic Gravestone Inscription

[figheadair]

A number of things about this stone interest me:

1. To find a fully bi-lingual inscription front and back is extremely rare - I know of no other examples. This double inscription would have been an expensive outlay for a carpenter. His son also pre-deceased Donald but his gravestone (early 1800s) in only in English.

2. The Gaelic has a number of spelling errors that suggest that Donald MacGregor whilst a native speaker was not fully literate in Gaelic and so presumably wrote out his approximation based on being literate in English.

3. The Gaelic inscription contains some interesting insights into the structure of female patronymics. Normally these are written Nic from nighean mhicbut on this stone they are written Nich, a variation that I've never seen before and perhaps a local dialectal version.

4. The names of the month are in English - surprised that no-one's picked that up. Whilst there are Gaelic equivalents for all the months including June (An t-Òg-mhìos) and September (An t-Sultaine) it may be that because of the links with some to pre-Christian religious beliefs that the Gaelic church always use the Latin based names for the months of the year.

5. In translation the Anglicised form of the female forenames and surnames are used: Anna becomes Ann, NichCaura - McAra, Catrina - Catherine and NichGregair - McGregor.

6. The Gaelic version of the motto contains an extra word from the standard Eadhon dean agus na caomhain and is rendered Eadhon dean agus na caomhain idir. Idir means 'at all'. Perhaps this is a local version or perhaps this was the original form. Given that the English (Scots) version is on the reverse it is evident that both forms were current at the end of the 18th century. It would be interesting to find the earliest records of both which in turn would be a good indication of which was probably the original form.

7. Cuimhne Am Bas is an unusual Gaelic term and was probably a deliberate translation of the traditional 'Memento Mori'.

For simplicity, if one assumes that Donald was the same age as his wife then they were born in 1740 and so grew up in a time or turmoil and change as the clan system was dismantled. The next task is to try and track Donald's family and determine whether he was local or moved to the area from further west.

This stone is extremely unusual and ultimately the aim must be to preserve it for future generations.