48 CONTEXT 188 : JUNE 2026 CONTEXT 186 : DECEMBER 2025 45 The inspector-general Dryburgh Abbey. September. 10 am. Deserted. Light rain. Silence. Two unseen crows debate a point. Silence again. Spellbinding. The trees of the Earl of Buchan’s 200-year-old arboretum imbue Dryburgh with a special enchantment. In the shelter of the standing remains of the abbey church there is a plain, red, polished granite chest tomb. The minimal inscription reads, ‘Sir Walter Scott, Baronet, died September 21, AD 1832’. Given this self-chosen simplicity and seclusion, one does wonder what he would have made of Edinburgh’s memorial, the gothic extravaganza festooned with 68 statues of characters from his novels. Trivia question (you’ll thank me in a pub quiz some day): which two antiquaries provided stories for operas by Bizet? I have trailed one. Scott’s The Fair Maid of Perth scarcely survived her translation to the far-too-prosaic Jolie Fille and has had perhaps 50 performances ever. Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen scores possibly a quarter of a million. Scott is chasing with Rossini’s La Donna del Lago and Donizetti’s Lucia de Lammermoor, but Mérimée wins by a distance. Scott was an antiquary of the old school. He collected historic artifacts with abandon, although he was a bit of a sucker for dubious provenances. His house at Abbotsford is still stuffed with them. In his novel The Antiquary (his self-declared favourite) the eponymous axial character, Jonathan Oldbuck, is a satirization of himself and his cronies. It seems plausible to assume that Mérimée styled himself on Scott. Scott was a generation older, but the parallels in both literary approach and antiquarian interests is strong, both seeing national heritage as cultural capital, and both using tangible and intangible historical contexts in their fiction. Mérimée translated Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor into French as La Famille Ashton and, as a polyglot polymath might, translated Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev and Spanish literature. Mérimée’s theretofore lacklustre literary career took off in 1829 when he discovered his metier: the novella, of which he was the first notable exponent. He did not, like Scott, aspire to a long and affectionate marriage. His bachelor lifestyle, in which the wives of illustrious men featured strongly, resulted once in his being runner-up in a duel. Nevertheless, this did mean that he knew a lot of influential people. In 1831 he started a meteoric rise through the civil service of the new bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Mérimée’s passion for heritage was shared by Louis-Philippe and by 1833 Mérimée was inspectorgeneral of historic monuments for France. There followed a 27-year career cataloguing and restoring France’s architectural heritage after decades of neglect, revolution and war. His approach to conservation – restore authentically without invention – aligns pretty well with modern practice, although his protege Viollet le Duc and other successors had more freestyle approaches. By the time of Mérimée’s retirement in 1860, having survived two turbulent regime changes, the official list of monuments historiques had fewer than 3,000 entries. This was because private owners, notably the church, could object to inclusion. Mérimée’s own survey list was much longer, and today the online Base Mérimée contains over 300,000 entries. Mérimée used his tours of inspection and travels abroad to collect ideas for his novellas. In several of these he employs a ‘frame narrative’ in which a narrator (say, a wandering archaeologist) hears a story from a person he meets. Many authors have used this device, one of them being Walter Scott in Old Mortality. Restoration of the great abbeys of the Tweed valley would never have been possible even in French hands, but modern 3D renderings help keep the cultural memory alive, as do Scott’s novels The Monastery and its sequel The Abbot. The eponymous monastery Kennaquhair is most commonly supposed, from its architectural description, to be based on Melrose Abbey. But the first paragraph of The Monastery specifically contrasts Kennaquhair with ‘the no less splendid establishments of Melrose, Jedburgh and Kelso’, and the rest of the description is a better fit for Dryburgh. So shall we let popular opinion have its way about Melrose? That leaves the enchantment of Dryburgh to me, you, Walter Scott and two crows. James Caird Mérimée: a passion for heritage Strange beauties The Cat by Gwen John George Fettiplace was arguably the most prominent of the hundreds of victims of the Black Assizes typhoid epidemic in Oxford in 1577. He was a lawyer, MP for Buckingham and a member of the Council of the Marches. The council’s president, Sir Henry Sidney, had been tarting up the now lost chancel of the round chapel of St Mary Magdalene in Ludlow Castle with heraldry associated with the castle and the council. So George’s arms appear on the recently restored heraldic roll which recorded all the arms involved. The same arms appear on the two Fettiplace monuments in St Mary, Swinbrook, Oxfordshire, in which recumbent effigies of six generations of Fettiplaces are arranged one above the other as if on bunk beds. The effigies are posed uncomfortably on one elbow, and in the older monument seemingly in a planking exercise for their abs. From the heraldry it is possible to deduce that the principal dedicatee of the monument, Edmund Fettiplace, was a third cousin of George. Two miles away is St John the Baptist, Burford, where the superb monument to Edmund Harman, Henry VIII’s barber, depicts, in the cartouche, native Americans in a curiously modern style à la Eric Gill. The church is on Simon Jenkins’s 18-strong, five-star list of English churches despite, or because of, its historic complexity. Fifteenth-century Burford wool merchants apparently had free rein to add their own bits to it willy-nilly. By contrast, St Laurence, Ludlow, the ‘Cathedral of the Marches’ and another of the Jenkins 18, had a 15th-century perpendicular rebuild of great and unifying restraint. This was undertaken between 1433 and 1450 after the local magnate, Richard Duke of York, had gained his two inheritances but before he began his bid for the throne. Ludlow’s grandees took the astute political precaution of ensuring that the bosses on the chancel ceiling had a healthy mix of Yorkist and Lancastrian emblems. Restraint is a word that can equally apply to the work of the Welsh artist Gwen John, the subject of a superb retrospective, Strange Beauties, at the National Gallery of Wales. While her style was one of understatement using ‘the colour that ordinary life wears’, her lifetime body of work was prodigious. Her reclusive lifestyle, lack of interest in personal publicity and limited pool of clients contributed to her slow rise to world prominence. Some commentators now describe her as Wales’s greatest artist. In 1904, when she was 27, John moved to Paris and immediately formed a relationship with Rodin as model, muse and otherwise. By this stage her career was already on a different trajectory to the masculine art of Rodin and all the others who made up the vast majority of the artistic world at the time. Hers was a lifetime of extracting the maximum of feeling from countless repetitions of a limited range of subjects, executed with a limited palette, each in a single or small number of sittings. Before she moved to Meudon in 1911, John lived in Montparnasse. Seven years after her death in 1939, that district saw the arrival of another fugitive from the strictures of English society, Nancy Mitford. She was the eldest of the six Mitford sisters whose childhoods as ‘hons and rebels’ gave rise to an extraordinarily diverse range of destinies. Nancy’s adopted Parisian lifestyle was the launchpad for a literary career satirizing the selfimage of the English landed classes from a distance. The characters in her early novels are very thinly veiled sketches of her family and friends, and she was greatly given to making fun of people in the form of ‘teases’. Nancy’s family coat of arms, Redesdale, depicts moles. Given Nancy’s delight in teases, it seems appropriate that a mole should feature on her gravestone, which is in the same churchyard as those of three of her five sisters. Where? Swinbrook, of course. James Caird
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