Dean Cemetery

The Lords Row, Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh

The Dean Cemetery is a prominent cemetery in the Dean Village, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Dean House

Stone carving from Dean House, now part of retaining wall in Dean Cemetery

It stands on the site of Dean House (built 1614), part of Dean Estate which had been purchased in 1609 by Sir William Nisbet, who became in 1616 Lord Provost of Edinburgh. The Nisbets of Dean held the office of Hereditary Poulterer to the King. The famous herald, Alexander Nisbet, of Nisbet House, near Duns, Berwickshire, is said to have written his Systems of Heraldry in Dean House. The estate house was demolished in 1845, and Sculptured stones from it are incorporated into the south terrace wall supporting the edge of the cemetery.

The cemetery

Dean Cemetery, also known as Edinburgh Western Cemetery,^[1] was laid out by David Cousin (an Edinburgh architect who also laid out Warriston Cemetery) in 1846 and became a fashionable burial ground, its monuments becoming a rich source of Edinburgh and Victorian history, for mainly the middle and upper-classes. The many monuments bear witness to Scottish achievement in peace and war, at home and abroad.

The cemetery is privately owned by the Dean Cemetery Trust Limited, making it one of the few cemeteries still run as it was intended to be run. The resultant layout, with its mature designed landscape, can be seen as an excellent example of a cemetery actually being visible in the form it was conceived to be seen.

Notable interments

Bust of artist and photography pioneer David Octavius Hill, sculpted by his second wife

Relief on the gravestone of Lt. John Irving, who died on the Franklin Expedition

Grave of Arctic explorer and surgeon, Robert Anstruther Goodsir M.D. who joined the search for the Franklin Expedition

• Sir Archibald Alison (d.1867), advocate and historian
• Joseph Bell (1937–1911), famous lecturer at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh, personal surgeon of Queen Victoria
• Alexander Black (1797–1858), architect
• Sir Thomas Bouch, railway engineer, designer of the original Tay Rail Bridge
• Samuel Bough RSA, artist, (1822–1878). (monument by William Brodie 1879)
• Isabella Burton (née Lauder), with children, wife and family of John Hill Burton, historian (monument by William Brodie 1881)
• Samuel Butcher, professor of Greek at Edinburgh University, President of the British Academy, Liberal Unionist MP for Cambridge University
• Duncan Cameron, (1825–1901), owner of The Oban Times newspaper and inventor of The "Waverley" nib pen
• George Paul Chalmers (1838-1878) artist
• Thomas Clouston (1840-1915) psychiatrist
• Henry Cockburn, Lord Cockburn (1779–1854)
• George Combe, lawyer and phrenologist
• John Crabbie, founder of Crabbie's Green Ginger Wine
• Patrick Fraser jurist
• Major General William John Gairdner, CB, (1789–1861) a very fine sculpture of his hat under a canopy, with his sword at the base
• Robert Anstruther Goodsir (1823-1899) doctor and Arctic explorer
• David Octavius Hill (1802–1870), artist and photography pioneer, Hill & Adamson. The monument is by his second wife, Amelia Robertson Paton (1820–1904)
• Andrew Inglis (d. 1875), Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and Professor of Midwifery at Aberdeen University
• Lt John Irving of HMS Terror (1822–1848 or 49) who died in King William Island as part of the Franklin Expedition searching for the Northwest Passage and whose body was found some 30 years later and brought back to Edinburgh for burial (re-interred 7 November 1881)
• Lord Francis Jeffrey (1773–1850)
• John Lessels (1808-1883) City architect
• Sir Hector MacDonald, (d.1903), Major General, "The Fighting Mac"
• John Lisle Hall MacFarlane (1851–1874), Scotland rugby international
• Sir John Murray KGB (d.1914) leader of the Challenger Expedition to discover creatures of the deepest abysses of the sea (the inspiration for Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea")
• James Nasmyth (1808–1890), inventor of the steam hammer, an impressive monument by John Rhind
• Joseph Noel Paton (1821-1901) artist
• William Henry Playfair (1790–1857), architect
• A huge red granite obelisk to Andrew Russel, editor of The Scotsman (1814–1870)
• Andrew Rutherfurd, Lord Rutherfurd a huge red granite pyramid, designed by the adjacent Playfair
• Robert Hepburn Swinton of that Ilk (d.1852)
• Thomas Thomson (advocate)
• Sir Henry Wellwood-Moncreiff, 10th Baronet (1809-1883)

Other monuments of interest

Colonel Smith's Monument

• Monument to the 79th Cameron Highlanders marking their role in the Crimean War at Alma and Sevastapol. The rear of the monument commemorates their part in the Indian Mutiny at Lucknow
• Monument to the Edinburgh-born Confederate Colonel Robert A. Smith who died in 1862 at Munfordsville, Kentucky in the American Civil War
• Monument to historian John Hill Burton, who is buried at Dalmeny
• The Cemetery contains the war graves of 39 Commonwealth service personnel, 29 from World War I and 10 from World War II, registered and maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.^[1] The oldest of those buried is Major-General Sir John Munro Sym (died 3 October 1919) aged 80.^[2]

References

External links

• Official website

Bibliography

• The Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh edited by A. S. Cowper and Euan S. McIver, Edinburgh, 1992. ISBN 0-901061-54-9.

Coordinates: 55°57′12″N 3°13′20″W / 55.95333°N 3.22222°W / 55.95333; -3.22222