Geograph - photograph every grid square

This gravestone is located beside a path leading around the eastern side of the church hall of NS3975 : Dumbarton Riverside Parish Church.

For views of the church as a whole, see NS3975 : Facade and spire of Riverside Parish Church, NS3975 : Dumbarton Riverside Parish Church (where part of the church hall is visible at the left), and NS3975 : Riverside Parish Church. The medieval parish church stood on the same spot, at the junction of the Kirk Vennel (now NS3975 : Church Street) and the High Street (still so called).

According to the book "Dumbarton through the centuries" (I.M.M.MacPhail, 1972), "it was dedicated to St Mary and is first mentioned in a charter of 1320 ... The present parish church was built in 1811, replacing a building which, from its appearance in Paul Sandby's picture of 1747, probably dated from the fourteenth or fifteenth century".

The burial ground around the church used to be considerably larger, but was diminished in several stages. For the details of this process, and of the history of the parish churchyard as a whole, and for a view of some of the other old stones that survive here, see Link

The stone shown in the present photograph caught my attention, not only because of the carvings on its near side, but also because it appears to be one of the oldest of the visible stones in the burial ground.

It also seems to be a typical example of those mentioned by Donald MacLeod in his book "The God's Acres of Dumbarton" (1888); writing at a time when there were many more stones in the burial ground, MacLeod commented that "there are a good many quaint, upright, grey old tombstones scattered through the Churchyard, having as ornamentation death's-heads and cross-bones, hour-glasses, hideously ugly winged cherubic heads – one of the number being further adorned with a tailor's goose and scissors. These stones date principally from the early part of the eighteenth century".

[The artwork on the gravestones may not have been entirely to MacLeod's liking, but it is fairly typical of stones from that period, and is no better or worse than on those found elsewhere.]

The stone shown here bears the initials "P H" and "J M". The inscription on the other side is as follows, where I have preserved the original spelling and line divisions (the stone is slightly chipped at one of the upper corners; hence the missing letter at the end of the first line):

"HERE LYES THE COR[P]
S OF IANET McKNT
YRE SPOUSE TO PAT
RICK HOUSTOUNE W
HO DYED NOV 7 1721"