This is my favourite gravestone in Cathcart Cemetery. I'd like to tell you about it.

It marks the grave of the architect William Gardner Rowan (1845-1924) and his family. @CathcartCem

My kids and I have spent some of lockdown cleaning off the moss and muck. This pelican was always visible but you can see her blood-hungry chicks now.

The stone is about twelve feet long by six high. It is red sandstone. Rowan designed it himself, I understand.

It is loaded with so much Christian symbolism that it goes beyond appearing like a statement of faith and feels more like something obsessive, feverish, uncanny.

I like this eagle.

To call the style neo-gothic doesn't do it justice. The writing is *so* gothic it's very difficult to read. This bit's quite easy, though: "Worthy is the lamb that was slain."

This panel says: "I am the way the truth and the life. I am the resurrection and the life." Big Stone Roses fan.

This one is covered in lichen and *very* hard to read. But my eldest boy cracked it: "I am the lord of life. I am the vine. Ye are the branches."

Around the cross it says: "I am Alpha and Omega". The arms read: "I lay down my life for the sheep. And other sheep I have which are not of this fold them also I must bring and they shall hear my voice."

That verse continues down the right-hand side. "& there shall be one flock, one shepherd."

The left-hand panel, transcribed by @OurJoanne, tells a sad story: William Gardner Rowan died in 1924; his wife Elizabeth in 1904; their daughter Mary Agnes, in 1890, not quite two; their daughter Catherine, in 1894, aged two; their son John R Neill, in 1906, at almost nine.

The last name on that side is their son George Neill, who was born in February 1886, survived into adulthood, but was killed on the first day of the Battle of Loos on 25 September 1915. I think his body must not have been found as he is commemorated on the Loos memorial.

The right-hand panel commemorates people who I think must be Rowan's parents and siblings. His father John, mother Janet, brothers Archibald and Andrew, and sister Catherine. It's quite worn, so we're not certain about this bit.