3-070-648 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Place of Thomas Carlyle, at Ecclefechan, Dumfries, 1881. The British writer Thomas Carlyle was buried near '...his father and mother, his brother and sisters, in the Carlyle family grave at Ecclefechan. Ecclefechan is a small straggling village of some eight hundred inhabitants...There are few signs of progress in the village, which has not grown in size, nor is it likely to do so. The house in which Carlyle was born is a two-storey whitewashed dwelling, at the foot of the village, and forms one of the tenements of the same size, divided by a covered archway. A mile and a half from the village, and nearer to Lockerbie, is the small farm of Mill-hall, to which the family removed a few years after the birth of Thomas Carlyle. Ecclefechan was originally the name of a parish as well as of a village, but this and the other small parish of Luce have for two centuries been conjoined with the parish of Hoddom, and there is now no place of worship at the old churchyard in which Carlyle is interred. It presents, like most of the country churchyards of Scotland, a rough and somewhat uncared-for appearance...About ten years ago Mr. Carlyle had this family grave inclosed, as is shown in our Illustration, by a low wall and a high iron railing'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.