Burial Enclosure at Glengyle House

There is a separate MacGregor of Glengyle burial enclosure just to the west of Glengyle House itself - an 18th-century square enclosure used into the 19th century - which is sometimes confused with the burial ground at Portnellan.¹

Vintage black and white photograph of the weathered stone relief on the enclosure wall, an inscribed panel above a carved central figure flanked by smaller emblems, framed by overhanging foliage. — Vintage photograph provided by Clifford Stinson

Those commemorated here include Gregor MacGregor of Glengyle, “Ghlun Dubh” (Black Knee), Rob Roy's nephew, who was out in both the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite risings; his memorial records that he died on 21 August 1777, aged 88.¹ His son John MacGregor of Glengyle, who died on 30 December 1774, is interred here as well, and the enclosure stayed in use through the 19th century. Also at rest here are Major-General Sir Charles Metcalfe MacGregor, who died at Cairo on 5 February 1887, and the family of James MacGregor of the Queen's Hotel - James, who died in 1870, his son Robert, who died in 1881, and a grandson killed at Spion Kop in 1900.²

Black and white photograph of the burial enclosure's iron-grilled doorway set in a moss-covered stone wall, with conifers and undergrowth around it. — Photo by The Jacobite, Flickr.

Black and white photograph looking through the stone archway of the burial enclosure to a tall cross-headed memorial standing inside against the back wall, with bare trees beyond. — Photo by The Jacobite, Flickr.

Black and white photograph inside the burial enclosure, showing a plain headstone in the foreground, a Celtic-cross memorial to its right, and a smaller inscribed slab against the left-hand wall. — Photo by The Jacobite, Flickr.

A weathered relief on the enclosure wall shows an early form of the MacGregor arms: a central figure holding a vertical sword, with a crown on the left and a vertical tree on the right - where the usual chief's arms have the tree and sword crossed. A worn inscription names P. Bell as the builder of "the burial place of the family of Mac Greggars called Dugald keirs family," and closes with "Forevard and spare not," an early form of the clan motto "E'en do and spare not." The stone is thought to date from around 1708, when the present Glengyle House was being built.² A close reading of the inscription - what the lettering and carving conventions reveal about its date and likely patron - is in Burial Enclosure Inscription.

Location Map

Burial enclosure

Footnotes

Historic Environment Scotland, Glengyle House, MacGregor of Glengyle Burial Enclosure (Canmore site 167538); listed building LB4023. ↩︎ ↩︎
Peter Lawrie, "Glengyle House", Glen Discovery. ↩︎ ↩︎