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Restoration plan for historic monument
by Gerard Burke
For more than a century it sat high above Elgin, a symbol of the town's wealth and status.
Now the distinctive monument perched at the highest point of St Giles Church lies in a back yard awaiting restoration.
Soon the historic sculpture, a copy of a classical Greek monument, will be returned to its elevated position overlooking the city as part of a £180,000 project to bring St Giles back to its former glories.
A stonemason will spend more than a month carefully restoring each of the ornate scrolls, carved vines and floral decorations to the condition they would have been in when the monument was first placed at the top of the church's tower about 150 years ago.
Gary Laing, (Picture below) from Rothes, is one of Scotland's most skilled stonemasons and has won the contract to restore the tower's finial, a copy of a 2,500-year-old sculpture in Athens known as the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates.
Mr Laing, who specialises in fine carving, will cut away old weathered sections of the one-and-a-half-tonne monument and replace them with stone from the same quarry at Hopeman.
He will carefully copy the carvings of the original masons, tracing their scrolls, vines and leaves, to make them as sharp as they were 150 years ago.
Mr Laing said: "Carving work is my speciality. It is all hand work. You can't do this with pneumatic tools. It will be done the old-fashioned way. There is no quick way to do this."
He hopes to begin work on the monument later this month and expects the contract to take between six and eight weeks.
It is part of a £180,000 restoration of the whole church which has already begun.
Scaffolding has been erected around parts of the building in the High Street as contractors repair the damage caused by decades of weathering and pollution.
Historic Scotland and the Heritage Lottery Fund have given about £120,000 towards the cost of restoring the church, with the remaining £60,000 being raised by the congregation.
The monument will be raised back to its intended place at the top of the tower during the final stages of the project in December.
The restoration is being co-ordinated by Jim Manson, of the Ashley Bartlam Partnership of architects in Elgin, the church's former property convener.
The original monument was built in Athens, circa 500BC, for a wealthy citizen named Lysicrates to commemorate the day his team of singers won a choral competition.
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