Campaign to honour 'Dunbar martyrs'

Historian calls for memorial to Scots soldiers who died as prisoners of English

NEAR the north-west door of Durham's magnificent cathedral rises a mound topped by a memorial to the Boer War.

Legend has it that the mound contains the bodies of hundreds of Scots prisoners, who died of disease and starvation, in a little-remembered 17th century chapter in British history.

Now, after a one-man campaign by amateur historian George Wilson, cathedral officials are to consider placing a memorial to the Scottish soldiers who died there.

The prisoners were Covenanters captured by Cromwell's troops at the disastrous Battle of Dunbar in 1650, and then forced to march south.

Last October, Mr Wilson set out to have the "Dunbar martyrs" recognised with a memorial. He even called for their bodies to be exhumed for a Christian burial.

The cathedral administrator, Paul Whitaker, said a memorial could bring closure to the issue.

But he insisted that excavations and an extensive search of cathedral records shows no evidence of the Scottish soldiers' remains in the mound or anywhere else nearby.

"There's absolutely no evidence of any mass piling of bodies. We can't put a memorial saying here lie the remains of so many Scots."

Mr Whitaker said the cathedral spent a "lot of time and effort" trying to uncover the facts.

In 1650, according to the Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland, about 3,000 Scots were killed at the Battle of Dunbar and 10,000 taken prisoner. While the numbers are impossible to verify, it is suggested that about 4,000 were marched south, destined for transportation, with 1,500 dying or disappearing en route. Anywhere between 300 and 1,600 are said to have died at Durham.

Mr Wilson, a human resources manager, became fascinated by the story when he moved to Dunbar recently.

"These soldiers died in the place of their imprisonment which was considered at the time as a foreign land," he said. "It seems very odd that this whole chapter in history is unknown to Scots."

He claims the backing of local historians and the Scottish Covenanters Memorial Association, and about 200 people who have signed up on his website, including an American descendant of one Durham survivor.

One supporter is Dunbar historian and author Roy Pugh.

He said: "Now is the time to lay the ghost and say sorry with a memorial service and a symbolic Christian burial to mark the grave there."

REMINDERS OF BLOODY BATTLES

MEMORIALS to the deaths of Covenanters, the Scottish Presbyterians who signed the National Covenant in 1638, are dotted across Scotland.

After the Battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679, about 400 were held in Greyfriars Churchyard for months with little more than bread and water, before being transported or executed. Many died and were buried there.

In East Kilbride, a memorial remembers not just hanged men, but also 200 people who drowned when a convict ship was wrecked off Orkney.

The award-winning Scottish historical novelist James Robertson set his book The Fanatic in the period. A similar incident to the Battle of Dunbar unfolded in 1645 at Newark Castle, near Selkirk, after the Battle of Philiphaugh between the Marquis of Montrose and Covenanters, he said.

The Covenanters won, and up to 1,000 Irish soldiers and their families along with Montrose were slaughtered.