A salutary tale...

This is the Grange Cemetery near my house. It is packed with the great of Edinburgh society - leaders in medicine, law, the Church. One of its more famous residents is a man called Hugh Miller.

Miller was born in Cromarty in 1802. As a young man he was a stone mason - and his work breaking stones led him to a fascination about fossils, and thus geology in general. He became a noted collector of fossils from all over Scotland, and wrote important books on the subject. He was also an evangelical Christian - and he was at the heart of the events in the Scottish Church in the 1840's where the national Church split in the Great Disruption.

At the age of 54 in his house on Portobello High Street he shot himself. Many claim that he couldn't deal with the internal struggles between his 19th century religious beliefs and the evolutionary evidence he could see in the fossil record. Would you shoot yourself for that? Much more compelling is that he suffered from psychosis - and was terrified that he would hurt his wife and children during a period of delusions. His funeral in this cemetery was attended by thousands.

So far a tragic tale. The twist in the tale is that the police collected the gun from the Portobello House and took it to a gunsmith in Candlemaker Row to be reported upon! The gunsmith looked down the barrel, the gun went off, and he was buried just across the path from Miller on the same day!