St Giles Cemetery

Fintray, Aberdeenshire

Address: St Giles Cemetery, Hatton of Fintray, Aberdeen, AB21 0JN

Latitude: 57.236777

Longitude: -2.269220

Find A Grave Link: https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2533993/st-giles-cemetery256 memorials

Website: -

Description: The Chapel Kirkyard at Fintray continues in use as a cemetery, but in what can only be considered a gross act of vandalism, it appears (according to a source quoted by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland) that: “The graveyard has been cleared of the old stones and extended, and is now the new parish burial ground”. RCAHMS dates this event as “before 1961”, but to judge by the style of the memorials, and the earliest dates recorded, the western extension to the cemetery seems to have come into use in the 1940s. As the two parts of today’s Chapel Burial Ground are fronted by a uniform wall, both the “clearance” and the “extension” probably happened around 1940. Fortunately, John Henderson, compiler of “Aberdeenshire Epitaphs and Inscriptions” (1907) had recorded a few of the stones thus bulldozed out of existence. He writes: “There are about two dozen tombstones in this graveyard, the larger proportion of them being of modern date.” Like many of the earlier recorders of inscriptions, Henderson was principally interested in those stones which commemorated “important” families, or which exhibited examples of longevity or other “curiosities”. The inscriptions he deemed worthy of his attention were: