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5
Scottish NationalWar Memorial
In 1930 a leading travel writer wrote of the Scottish NationalWar Memorial
(Scotland’s Shrine):
When the Menin Gate (inYpres) was declared open, Scots pipers, mounted high on the
ramparts, played the Flowers o’ the Forest. It seemed to me as I stood in Scotland’s Shrine
that the sound of this lament had flown home to crystallise in stone upon the rock of
Edinburgh, the greatest of all Scotland’s laments, with all the sweetness of pipes crying
among the hills, with all the haunting beauty of a lament, all the pride, all the grandeur.
Professor Duncan Macmillan, the eminent Art Historian, wrote in his 2014 book
Scotland’s Shrine –The Scottish NationalWar Memorial
that the building:
articulates with striking eloquence the collective grief of a nation, the aspiration for peace
of its people and the hope that the sacrifice of such a terrible number of the nation’s youth
as had died in the GreatWar should not have been in vain
Its creation was conceived before the end ofWorldWar One and in the words of
John George Stewart-Murray, 8th Duke of Atholl who had seen the project
through from conception to completion, it was
truly Scottish, carried out by Scottish
money, Scottish brains and Scottish hands
.