Robert Paterson

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For the businessman from Pennsylvania see Robert Patterson.

Robert Paterson (1715 - 1801) was a Scottish stone-mason, who suggested to Sir Walter Scott the character of "Old Mortality".

He was born near Hawick in 1715. Through the patronage of Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick, whose cook he had married, he obtained the lease of a quarry at Gatelawbrig, but in 1745 his house was plundered by the retreating Jacobites, and Paterson himself, a pronounced Cameronian, was carried off a prisoner.

He subsequently devoted his life to cutting and erecting stones for the graves of the Covenanters, for 40 years wandering from place to place in the lowlands. He died in poverty in 1801, and a stone to his memory was erected by Scott's publishers in 1869 in Caerlaverock churchyard.

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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.