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Field Visit

Date August 1989

Event ID 1082889

Category Recording

Type Field Visit

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1082889

MAUSOLEUM. A small stone-built enclosure 7m S of the SW angle of the church was roofed by the Ministry of Works in 1956 for use as a lapidarium (infra). It measures 5.3m by 3.5m within 0.75m walls, the side-walls being crenellated with projecting coping-slabs, and each containing a slit-window, while the end-walls were originally flat, but with a raised pediment above the W doorway and a flat -topped projection containing the E window, which preserves a glazing-groove. When it was converted to a lapidarium the inner parts of the side-walls were heightened and gables were formed to carry a glass roof, but it may originally have been open. The door and windows have round-arrised schist dressings which maybe of 17th-century date, but the wall-head was probably rebuilt in the late 18th or 19th century. Above the W door there is a schist panel with a relief inscription within a roughly-sunk frame, incomplete at the right and probably originally a graveslab:

1627 HEIR LYIS MR / NEIL CAMBEL AND CRISTlANE

C[?ARSUEL...]

Neil Campbell, minister of Kilmartin from 1574 to 1627 and bishop of Argyll from 1580 to 1608, married Christian, daughter of Bishop John Carswell (see No. 115), and two of their sons became respectively bishops of Argyll and of the Isles, while a third succeeded his father as minister of Kilmartin. His descendants held the Kilmartin estate until about 1674 (see No. 134) and thereafter that of Auchinellan, and in 1844 it was noted that they retained 'the ancient Caibeal or burial-place of the rectors in the churchyard', and were 'sometimes called by the natives Slioch an Easbuig' (‘descendants of the bishop') (en.11*).

RCAHMS 1992, visited August 1989

[see RCAHMS 1992 No. 68 for a detailed description of 121 funerary monuments in the churchyard, mausoleum and church]

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