Last farwell to popular West Calder poet Bella
A community stalwart and poet from West Calder who had her book of poems published in 2013 when she was 87 has been laid to rest.
Family and friends of the late Bella Kirk gathered on December 20 to give her a truly fitting send off.
Sadness was mixed with pride as the funeral cortege left her former home at “Ower the Wa” with mourners on foot behind a horse and cart carrying the seagrass coffin.
Accompanied by a fiddler playing her favourite tunes, the celebrated poet and community volunteer was finally laid to rest.
Bella lived all her life in the Harburn and West Calder area. As a child, she enjoyed the tranquillity of the countryside and developed a love of nature, filling her notebook with thoughts and sights over the years.
Despite a busy family life, with four children, nine grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren, she always found time for her friends and neighbours. Bella had a great sense of community and threw her weight behind the restarting of West Calder Gala in the sixties. She helped create the West Calder Wheelchair Fund and supported the creation of the Workspace from the Co-op Bakery.
All her life Bella had written poems in her own inimitable narrative style and she was a great storyteller. Fuelled by a lifetime of memories, she produced works which are a commentary mirroring the social history of our times, recording family tales, village tales, and poems about the community, the countryside, the environment, events and happenings.
These works of Bella, are recorded in a definitive collection entitled “By Request”.