Balmerino 

Kirkton Kirkyard

 

 

 

Balmerino Cemetery – A Telephone Connection.

Alexander Graham Bell (the inventor of the telephone) was born in Edinburgh on the 3rd of March 1847. As a child his father told him of spending happy holidays in The Gauldry with his maternal grandfather Andrew Colville. This must have made an impression on Bell as ne named the boat used on his estate on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, ‘The Gauldrie’.

When during a visit to The Gauldry in 1906 Bell discovered that his great grandfather lay in an unmarked grave in this cemetery, he arranged the erection of a large granite headstone. The stone is located at the eastern end of the graveyard and is also a memorial to his great grandmother and Bell’s father.

(From an article by J. Marie Bassett in the Tay Valley Family Historian No. 78 www.tayvalleyfhs.org.uk)