Gatehouse On Visit To The Castle In Edinburgh Scotland

Tour Scotland travel video, with Scottish music, on ancestry visit to the Gatehouse located at Edinburgh Castle. The Gatehouse at the head of the Esplanade was built as an architecturally cosmetic addition to the castle in 1888. Statues of Robert the Bruce by Thomas Clapperton and William Wallace by Alexander Carrick were added in 1929, and the Latin motto Nemo me impune lacessit is inscribed above the gate. Thomas J Clapperton was born on 14 October 1879 in Galashiels, Selkirkshire in the Scottish Borders the son of a photographer. He studied at the Galashiels Mechanics Institute, then Glasgow School of Art from 1899 to 1901, then the Kennington School of Art in London, England, and then the Royal Academy Schools in 1904. In the latter he was student assistant to Sir William Goscombe John. After further studies in Paris, France and Rome, Italy,, he set up studios at Chelsea and St John's Wood, London, As a sculptor he is famous for the statue of Robert the Bruce at the entrance of Edinburgh Castle erected in 1929. Thomas Clapperton died in Upper Beeding in Sussex, England, in 1962. Alexander Carrick was born in 1882, the son of a blacksmith in the small town of Musselburgh, just east of Edinburgh. In 1897 he enrolled as a student at Edinburgh College of Art and was apprenticed as a stonemason working in the yard of one of the prominent monumental sculptors of the period, Birnie Rhind. He won the Queen's Prize allowing him to go to London to study for two years at the South Kensington College. He established his reputation as a monumental artist working on prestigious construction projects such as the Usher Hall and the Scotsman Building, both in Edinburgh; restoration works at Eilean Donan Castle and St. Magnus' Cathedral in Kirkwall; and also carrying out extensive work in the unusual Saint Conan's Kirk at Loch Awe. Carrick's figure of Sir William Wallace was unveiled in Edinburgh Castle. All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.

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