Sir Walter Scott

Old Mortality

Robert Paterson, Old Mortality, the Balmaclellan stonemason and businessman who has immortalised by Sir Walter Scott.

There are probably more memorials in Galloway to the martyrs of the persecuted Covenant cause than anywhere else in the country, and many owe their survival to a dedicated wandering craftsman.   Robert Paterson was born in 1712 in the little village of Balmaclellan near New Galloway. He became obsessed with the idea that memorials of those slain during the 'Killing Times' might be in danger of fading, so he spent much of his life tramping the countryside in search of untended graves and eroded stones, some in kirkyards, others on remote hillsides. He cleaned them up, added inscriptions of his own, and in some cases even erected new gravestones. Paterson became known throughout the Lowlands as Old Mortality.

It seems that the episode in Paterson's life from which he drew his religious enthusiasm occurred in the 1740s. An army of Highlanders, who had been defeated while fighting for the Jacobite cause, passed near his home. Paterson shouted to a straggler that the army's
retreat might have been foreseen, because the Lord would raise his arm in anger against those who attempted to support the 'heresies' of the Church of Rome. The men plundered Paterson's house and carried him as a prisoner for several miles.

After this event Paterson became a keen supporter of the religious sect called the Cameronians. He frequently journeyed through Galloway to attend their Coventicles and stayed to tidy up gravestones.  Gradually his visits became longer until, in the late 1750s, he failed to return home. After many unsuccessful entreaties for his return, his wife moved to Balmaclellan where she kept their five children by running a small school.

Until his death in 1800 Paterson continued to wander from one churchyard to the next, mounted on his old grey pony, never accepting payment beyond the hospitality offered to him.

Sir Walter Scott met Robert Paterson when spending a few days in the parish of Dunnottar, in the Howe of the Mearns, Scotland. In the 17th century several Covenanters had been imprisoned in Dunnottar. Paterson was cleaning a monument erected by friends of these martyrs to the Covenant cause. Sir Walter Scott exchanged a few words with him, and later depicted him as 'Old Mortality' in his historical novel of that name, which tells of Covenanting times: "An old man was seated upon the monument of the slaughtered presbyterians, and busily employed in deepening, with his chisel, the letters of the inscription, which, announcing in scriptural language the promised blessings of futurity to be the lot of the slain, anathematised the murderers with corresponding violence."