In Lennoxtown, if your family has lived here long enough, the village will give you a regal send-off. Leaving St Machan’s Church, your coffin will be greeted by the Commercial Inn which has been seeing off its cherished customers for around 150 years. If you’ve been granted the privilege of a Saturday burial, an honour guard will emerge from the tavern and salute your memory with whisky and beer.
The mourners will bear your body down the main Street and the traffic in both directions will be made to stop. Then it’s up past the Drookit Dug where more drinkers might wave you on your way. Later that day, these two old howffs will welcome your relatives and friends and exaggerate your fortitude and your foolishness.
Then you’ll pass through the stone archway which sits below Campsie High Kirk, the Category A- listed jewel designed by David Hamilton. This has been a ruin for four decades after a fire in 1984, but its majesty will add a touch of Gothic class as you pass from this world . If you’re to be buried here then you’re blessed indeed.
In west central Scotland , no other resting place is as vivid and magnificent as this place whose grave-stones bow down gently to meet the Campsies. These hills have been home to some of Britain’s oldest, continually inhabited communities. They have sheltered, Romans, Picts and Britons and the earliest Christian communities.
At Campsie Glen lies the 11th century ruins of the original St Machan’s church. The saint came here in t.