Plockton is very pretty which is why it is almost never peaceful. It is a number one tourist destination and as packed in summer as the beaches of the Canaries.
That feels very different on a winter’s morning, especially at Plockton burial ground. Even though the small plot is next to a school and only a minute’s walk from the harbour, it can be quiet at wisely chosen times.
The church was, like so many all over Scotland, designed by the architect Thomas Telford, the picturesque village designed and built in 1801 by Sir Hugh Innes (1764 – 1831) to make money in the herring boom and clear the land for the sheep. The crofters were expected to work as fishermen.
His father had been a reverend in Glasgow. Sir Hugh Innes was given the title of 1st Baronet. He was the first and the last because he never married. He died in London but was not buried in Plockton but in Kirkton of Lochalsh. Apparently, he wasn’t much liked by the locals.
His village however, is loved by the tourists and alas crowded in summer.
Then, the burial ground is one of the very few peaceful places in Plockton.
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Scotland is a country full of history, stories and secrets. Often, the three cannot be separated. That is what makes this country so wonderful and unique. The stories of this book have been discovered and gathered for Erkenbach’s blog, Graveyards of Scotland, over many years.
Her main sources were historical travel guides from the 18th and 19th centuries, where the finds were scary, beautiful, funny, and sometimes, cruel.This unusual approach to a country’s history has produced amazing results. You don’t have to share the author’s passion for cemeteries to enjoy this book; only a small number of the stories in this collection take place in graveyards, though they do all end in them, so perhaps it helps.
The fairy hill in Inverness, a nitrate murder on Shetland, a family of left-handers, wolves, Robert the Bruce and William Wallace shown in a new light, the secret bay of the writer Gavin Maxwell, a murdering poet and so many things you didn’t know about Scotland, its clans and its history.
Graveyards of Scotland 
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