"Standing-stones"--the old names of which gave their appellations to the
very manors on which they stood--have been repeatedly demolished in
Scotland. An obelisk of thirteen feet in height, and imparting its name
to a landed estate in Kincardineshire, was recently thrown down; and a
large monolith, which lent its old, venerable name to a property and
mansion within three or four miles of Edinburgh, was, within the memory
of some living witnesses, uprooted and totally demolished when the
direction of the turnpike road in its neighbourhood happened to be
altered.
* * * * *
A healthier and finer feeling in regard to the propriety of preserving
such national antiquities as I have referred to, subsists, I believe, in
the heart of the general public of Scotland, than perhaps those who are
their superiors in riches and rank generally give them credit for.
Within this century the standing-stones of Stennis in Orkney were
attacked, and two or three of them overthrown by an iconoclast; but the
people in the neighbourhood resented and arrested the attempt by
threatening to set fire to the house and corn of the barbaric aggressor.
After the passing of the Parliamentary Reform Bill, during a keen
contest for the representation of a large Scottish county, there was
successfully urged in the public journals against one of the candidates,
the damaging fact that one of his forefathers had deliberately committed
one of the gross acts of barbarism which I have already specified, in
the needless destruction, in a distant part of Scotland, of one of the
smallest but most interesting of Scottish antiquarian relics; and the
voters at the polling-booths showed that they deemed a family, however
rich and estimable, unfit to be intrusted with the parliamentary
guardianship of the county, which had outraged public feeling by
wantonly pulling down one of the oldest stone memorials in the kingdom.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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