Last week saw the statue of Charles II returned to Parliament Square in Edinburgh, having had a much-needed facelift – a sort of Botox for monuments – to repair splits and cracks in the lead. Now back on his horse, Charles is sparkling and shiny despite being Edinburgh’s oldest statue.
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Other petrified animals include a number of penguins in Dundee. These feathered friends commemorate the city’s connection to the South Pole – which is best re-lived with a tour of the RSS Discovery. There, you can walk in the freezing footsteps of Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton as they battled to free themselves during the two long years the ship remained ice-locked in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. Clearances There are monuments across the Highlands to landlords whose names have been associated with the Highland Clearances. Largest of all is the statue of the Duke of Sutherland, which broods over the village of Golspie in east Sutherland. The 30-metre statue, on top of Beinn a' Bhragaidh, is of George Granville Leveson-Gower, who is said to have cleared thousands from his land in order to graze sheep. The vigour with which his agents cleared the crofting settlements, sometimes setting fire to whole villages, has resulted in notoriety for both the Sutherland Clearances and the landlord who ordered them. There have been calls for the statue to be dismantled by those who feel it glorifies a bad deed, and instances of vandalism are not uncommon. A year ago the word “monster” was spray-painted across the plinth in bright green paint. As a counterpoint to statues like this, Alex Salmond unveiled a three-metre high bronze called “Exiles” in July 2007. Situated in Helmsdale, again in eastern Sutherland, it commemorates the many thousands of people who were forced from their homes and left to find a new life overseas. A little bit of India Also in the Highlands is the Fyrish Monument, whose construction is included in the Clearances story. It was built in 1783 by the local laird, Sir Hector Munro – who had just returned from action in India. There are two versions of what motivated the building of the monument. The first heroic version sees Munro returning from India to a countryside in a state of Clearance, with many hundreds starving. He decided to erect the monument on top of a nearby hill in order to provide them with work. Such was his generosity, so it is said, that once the workers had spent weeks carrying the stones to the summit of Fyrish Hill, he arranged to have the stones all rolled back down again in order that they might be employed for longer. The second and more prosaic version points out that as Munro was an avid Clearer, the starvation that so shocked him was directly as a result of his own greed. Either way, the monument – which depicts the Battle of Negapatam, where British troops defeated the Dutch – remains as an example of the complex relationship between landowner and tenant. Freedom fighters There are some pretty dodgy statues to William Wallace around Scotland, in particular one that stands at the bottom of Calton Hill which is probably best avoided. Instead, go west to Glasgow where there is a rather endearing statue known as La Passionaria, dedicated to Dolores Ibárruri, a Republican leader of the Spanish Civil War. She was erected in the 1970s in memory of the British volunteers who fought and died fighting against fascism. Of the 2,000 who fought, 500 died, 65 of them from Glasgow. The statue was controversial at the time of its erection, with the city’s Conservative councillors vowing to demolish if they were ever voted in (it’s still standing). The three-metre statue was meant to have been cast in bronze, but underfunding led to its eventual construction in fibreglass. She stands today on Clyde Street looking out over the River Clyde, arms aloft in triumph, one of the few statues of women in Scotland. Thieving English If the fate of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum has Greeks up in arms, then so too does the "kidnapping" of another famous artefact, which stands as yet another example of the perfidious Englishman’s habit of filching other people’s belongings. Alongside Uig Bay on the Isle of Lewis is an enormous wooden statue of one of the Lewis chessmen – 12th-century chess pieces made from walrus ivory that were discovered there in the 19th century. How they came to reside in London is a long, complex story, but more simple is the Scots’ desire to have their chessmen back. In September of this year a few of them will make it back to their spiritual home as a few of the precious pieces are driven, under police escort, to Uig Museum for a short period of residency before they’re once more taken back down south. You’re ‘aving a laugh We Scots know the benefit of a good belly-laugh, and aren’t afraid to show our gratitude to those that make us giggle in civic fashion. Glasgow is home to the much loved statue of Lobey Dosser (from “lobby dosser", one who sleeps in Glasgow tenement closes) astride his two-legged horse, El Fideldo. These two bampots come courtesy of the comic pen of Bud Neill, who drew strip cartoons featuring these characters, and others, in a number of Glasgow newspapers in the 1940s until the 1960s. Meanwhile in Dundee, one of Scotland’s favourite comic-book characters is remembered in a statue of Desperate Dan. He still features in the Dandy, a cowboy with a fondness for cow-pie and a beard so tough that he has to shave with a blowtorch. Dan and his dog, Dawg, live in Dundee, home to DC Thomson & Co, publishers of the Dandy and the Beano.Want to discuss other issues? Join the debate on our new Scottish Voices forum
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