What an abandoned mausoleum tells us about the passing of time

How an abandoned mausoleum tells us that a year many dread will pass to better times.

Lady Mary Lindsay Crawford’s mausoleum

It’s a proper winter day in Fife. I walk past fields of frozen floods. As I slip on ice patches walking along back country roads, horses munch at mounds of hay. Skeins of geese fly over, their formations dissolving and reforming. I like to think their cackling is an ongoing argument, derision aimed at the dissident or hapless outliers who can’t seem to fly in formation. You presume the geese know what they are doing, then again one skein was going in a completely opposite direction to the other so who knows. It just takes one deranged leader. Humanity seems to have a lot of those at the moment.

The countryside bears the burden of our food production, our transport system, jobs and leisure. So a walk in the countryside is not just to bear witness to its beauty, but also often to man’s assault and hatred of nature. The hedgerow branches, bare, twisted and dark save for a beautiful green moss, are littered with rubbish thrown from the traffic of the A91 that blasts and roars its way through the peaceful valley. Gunshots echo, a murderous blood lust well beyond the need of something for the pot. The stubbled fields are silent and bare, ground zero for Fife’s intensive agriculture and ecological depletion.

In the woods, I spot the crumbling walls of Lady Crawford’s mausoleum, her final resting place sited to overlook her house, Crawford Priory. What we know about Lady Crawford suggests an unconventional character who was reclusive, religious, fond of animals and generous to the poor. She was perhaps not anyone’s first choice for company during a long Scottish winter. Lord Lindsay in his family history of the Crawfords reflects on “her mind of a masculine order, her spirit high, independent, and unscrupulous, her temper haughty to those who did not understand, or presumed to contradict her prejudices”. 

However, we also should note how an independent, unmarried, powerful woman operating in the 19th century could have been judged with suspicion as someone different, as an outsider. 

Time passes, good times will return

There’s a lot of gloom and foreboding about the turn of this year for anyone with the mildest interest in global affairs, poverty, climate change and politics. But, as a queen once said, whose own age seems to be rapidly accelerating into the past, good days will return. These things pass, both good and bad, and Lady Crawford’s mausoleum is a sign of passing times.

Once, she was mistress of all that she surveyed – fields, farms, coal mines, limestone kilns, farms. Lady Crawford was last of a powerful family that had flourished for 500 years. The mausoleum was a power statement in death by a landowning family.

Now she rests in a neglected and nameless tomb that no longer tells her tale. The crumbling walls and trees growing out of the roof writes a statement of something entirely different. Ozymandias comes to Fife, where nothing remains of the old worlds but its decayed wrecks. Generations of local youngsters dare one another to spend a spooky night within its walls. Once, some intruders even appeared to open the coffins and scatter Lady Crawford’s bones around. 

The violation of Lady Crawford is an exercise in disrespect, just like the despoiling of a beautiful landscape. It is also unwise. Everyone should know that terrible curses that can be unleashed on the land by opening things that should remain closed, or blowing on bone whistles and accidentally summoning apparitions.

I walk across the fields to where some ancestors are buried by a beautiful forgotten church, including my father and grandfather. Clouds forming on the Lomond Hills suggest rain is coming. In fact it starts snowing.

What do I say to the bones in the ground? To the memories that scatter like the snowflakes twirling and swirling across the fields and amongst the gravestones. Do I tell my father of the cousins and family friends who have nearly all died in the last few years? The Priory is in ruins, the mausoleum cracked, the lime kilns closed. Even the old church has been sold off because organised religion is in panicked retreat in Scotland. Like the Crawfords, his world is nearly gone. Half the world I grew up in is nearly gone.The country that my grandfather loved as he governed it on behalf of an empire now, mostly, vanquished to a culture war and legacy, has now sunk into genocide, civil war and authoritarian military brutality.

Should we look at the ruins and despair? Absolutely not. This passing of time is neither good nor bad. Nostalgia is a pleasure, but it’s also a trap. Countries that keep turning to the past get stuck, both reframing a history for illusory glory whilst failing to learn its lessons.

Humanity may seem to be blowing it at the moment, quickly with genocide and war or slow-fast with climate change, but which of us would really return to an age where women or minorities had no rights, where we would lived far more brutal lives, where poverty was far worse, healthcare couldn’t look after us, where the poor had no lawyers to protect them from the land grabs of families like the Crawfords. There’s only one direction we can take.

We don’t always realise how much we strive to build utopia for our children and if we are not, what is the point of us? The problem is always the fight with ourselves. Some of us are picking up that litter whilst others are throwing it away. Some of us want to do good things with AI, some of us don’t. Some of us turn to narcissistic angry old men for salvation, some of us fight for our communities and decency. Some of us want to burn the world down, some of us think it’s worth nurturing and saving it. 

Maybe this blog post will age terribly if we do succumb to far-right forces, global chaos and extreme weather events. Maybe nature will decide it can’t take humanity anymore and expel us from Paradise to heal itself. Maybe, it will be okay.

As I start walking back towards the station, the snow turns to driving, freezing rain. It’ll pass, just like the year and just like the narcissistic angry old men.

At last…a portrait of Lady Crawford?

This blog has visited this part of Fife many times and a surprisingly large number of people, intrigued by the ruins of Crawford Priory and Lady Crawford, have got in touch asking if I have a picture of a portrait of Lady Crawford. There appeared to be none on the internet although no doubt one resides in local Fife library archives. 

Recently I came across this in some family papers. The inscription on the back of the print says “Fig 3. Lady Mary Lindsay Crawford, who built Crawford Priory in 1813.” The mystery and ghostliness seem undimmed by the appearance of her possible portrait, but that’s the passing of time for you.

Portrait of Lady Mary Lindsay Crawford