Highland mum's shock at finding 'gravestone' and bones in her garden
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A Highland mum and her kids talked of their fears on discovering what appeared to be a gravestone along with bones in their back garden last weekend.
Mum of four, Nicole Fraser, said she was having work done in her back garden at Anderson Drive in Wick to build a patio when workmen discovered what first appeared to be fragments of a gravestone with names chiselled into its surface.
"It was one piece that was found to begin with on the Saturday and we thought it looked like a headstone for a grave," said Nicole.
"I did contact the police as I was quite shocked to find a stone like this in my back garden."
The following day a similar piece of "headstone" was recovered by the contractor when removing more topsoil from the garden and Nicole found it fitted perfectly with the other piece like a jigsaw.
The children were excited by the find and went digging around in the ground after the contractors left and were soon joined by neighbouring kids.
"Word got out about the stone and we had a lot of kids come round. Kids from Hillhead and Glamis Road were here and digging about looking for more bits of the stone."
All the budding young archaeologists found, however, were a few pieces of rusty broken implements and fragments of bone. Nicole's daughter Brooklyn said she thought they might have been human bones at first and it made them worried they'd uncovered a grave.
When police called to the house they put Nicole's mind at rest and said the stone fragments were more likely to be from a war memorial or suchlike. The bones also appear to have clean cuts on some of them implying they come from butchered animals.
The next part of the puzzle was solved by Nicole when she did some internet research on the names she could decipher on the stone fragments. "It turns out it is a memorial stone that's in my back garden – all the men's names on the stone were in WW1. The area that my house is on was just what we would call wasteland with trees and grass. People also used it as a dumping site."
A neighbour then told her that a man lived next-door to her house many years ago and worked as a stone mason making gravestones and memorial stones.
Further research led her to contact the Imperial War Museum at Duxford where project manager Callum Brogan told her: "There are a couple of options for what this could be, though I think it is unlikely to be a headstone. Having looked up George Ross you will see that he died at sea, his ship having been torpedoed."
Royal Naval Reserve George Ross was the son of Thomas Ross and Helen Bremner Ross, of Seater, Canisbay, and drowned on March 11, 1915, when HMS Bayano was torpedoed by German submarine SM U-27 and sank within minutes killing around 200 of its crew. Twenty-six survivors were pulled from the water.
"The most likely [explanation] is that this is a war memorial that at some point has been moved or forgotten about and has somehow ended up in your garden," added Mr Brogan.
Further analysis shows that the men's names appear on a war memorial at Canisbay and also on a wall-mounted stone that was recently refurbished in John O'Groats Village Hall.
Mark Gibson, vice chair of the John O'Groats Development Trust, said that the Memorial to the Fallen of the First World War was cleaned and remounted in the hall. It was intended to have a rededication ceremony last year but it was postponed due to the pandemic.
"However, in the intervening time the Trust has decided to research each of the names on the memorial [and] perhaps publish a pamphlet giving people a small insight into them. We also intend to give a free talk in the hall, when conditions allow, also based on this research.”
Mark said that he believes Nybster artist and amateur archaeologist John Nicolson did the work on the John O'Groats stone memorial. In reference to the back garden discovery, he said: "This find is fascinating and is a real mystery. Possibly it was a very early version which was updated or rejected for some reason. It would be good to understand the full history of this memorial.”
The men were all local to the parish of Canisbay – which includes John O'Groats, Upper and Lower Gills, Huna and Freswick – and were a mix of Seaforth Highlanders and naval reserves who perished during the Great War of 1914-18.
Nicole said that the children are looking for further pieces of the stone and any other finds from what could have been a midden that was levelled when the street was constructed in the 1960s.
"It's really had the kids in the area all excited and digging about. There could be more bits down there and we're happy to donate it all to the right place."
