Memories carved into stone

Michael Alexander meets Perthshire stone carver Gillian Forbes who designs gravestones from her remote workshop

The walls of Gillian Forbes’ bright and breezy purpose-built workshop – attached to her 18th Century cottage high in the remote hills at Path of Condie – are an eclectic clutter of ornate stone carvings, rubbings from gravestones and dried leaves. The floor is stacked with a variety of tables, trollies and a saw bench for cutting up stone slabs, while a giant winch hangs from the ceiling allowing her to lift heavy stonework straight from the back of her vehicle into the workshop below.

Here in the Perthshire hills, at the top of a steep narrow winding road between Dunning and Milnathort, Gillian enjoys the relative solitude of her trade while having relatively easy access to her stone suppliers and customers.

Over the years she has been involved in a number of high profile art projects including the carving of the stone lions at the gates of Glamis Castle, the carvings on the Perth flood prevention scheme on Tay Street and the carving of lettered panels on the Canongate Wall at Holyrood in Edinburgh.

In 2005 she secured the QEST (Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust) Award to study with a French stone carver – Marc Chevalier LaCombe and in 2008 embarked upon a similar project in Italy to learn to carve marble.

Today, however, Gillian concentrates on carving bespoke gravestones for high end customers across the UK and balances this with being a full time mum to seven-year-old son Callum and a wife to Douglas who works for the Forestry Commission at Dunkeld.

“A lot of the time the people who come to me for gravestones have been to a monumental mason and know exactly what they don’t want,” says Gillian. “Often people want designs that incorporate foliage or something that involves a special plant. Some of the carvings can take literally weeks to do. Other times it’s just a few days of delicate incised carving.”

Raised in Edinburgh and Dunfermline, Gillian, 50, studied at Glasgow School of Art. She did her dissertation on Scottish grave stones, and because she was living in Dunfermline at the time one of her subjects was the Dunfermline Abbey and its “amazing” stones in the graveyard.

When she was 21 she went to live in Vienna. Inspired by the architecture and stone, when she came back to Glasgow, she met a monumental mason, now aged 81, who taught her everything he knew.

“It was then I found out about a course in architectural carving and stone masonry at Weymouth College in Dorset,” she says. “It was an amazing course because it was exactly what I needed to find out. Even though art school had been a good grounding, being that little bit older and finding out what I wanted to do was just fantastic.”

Gillian initially set up her business in a rented barn at Milnathort, where her parents live, in 1995.

She moved to Path of Condie shortly after and, 22 years later, she now offers headstones comprising mostly sandstone from Yorkshire and slate from the Lake District, but sometimes Caithness stone and a bit of granite.

“The stones I’m working with will change in colour, will become patinated and will look natural,” she says.

“They are natural stones. Some will have natural faces as in straight out of the quarry and other ones will be shaped but they will always change in colour to some degree.“

While she didn’t always feel that her public art work was appreciated , what she enjoys most about gravestone carving is the relationships she builds with the families of deceased and the fact she is helping provide a personal, permanent memorial for someone. “It’s quite humbling really,” she says. “My brother died last year and I made his headstone. I think until I’d done his I didn’t realise how important it was to really think about what that person would have liked and to make something that somebody can visit.”