Every time the Members of the Scottish Parliament enter the Scottish Parliament Building they pass by the new Canongate Wall.  Stonecarver, Gillian Forbes, explains the background to this year long project and her role in its creation.

I was commissioned by architects RMJM/EMBT, along with stonecarver Martin Reilly, to collaborate on the Canongate Wall which forms part of the Scottish Parliament boundary wall at the MSP entrance. Our job was to source stones from all over Scotland, representing the wide variety of stones we have in this country.

The project started in April 2003 and was completed in March 2004. We started by selecting suitable and interesting stones from our knowledge of well-known Scottish building stones such as Clashach, Knowehead and Giffnock. We also discovered some beautiful and distinctive geological 'gems' along the way during our travels, one in particular was a piece of conglomerate from a beach on the north-east coast. We visited some fascinating places including a river-bed at the bottom of a gully in Loch Fyne.  The Islands of Easdale and Iona deserve a special mention as we needed a huge amount of assistance to obtain the stones and then get them by boat to the mainland. Other stones were more straightforward being bought from stoneyards and quarries.

The stones were then cut and shaped to the specifications drawn up by the architects and pieces of text were paired to a suitable stone. The previous year the Scottish Parliament had asked the Scottish people through the daily newspapers to submit suitable texts for incorporation into the Wall and out of hundreds of proposals twenty four were chosen including Robert Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid and Gerard Manley Hopkins.  

The text by Walter Scott (see right) reads:

When we had a king and a chancellor and parliament-men o our ain, we could aye peeble them wi’ stones when they werena gude bairns.  But naebody’s nails can reach the length o’Lunnon.

My element of the project was to design the layout of these pieces of text to fit the stones and to cut the letters in as bold a way as possible. This was pretty challenging as the stone size was limited and the brief was to have natural elements without the enhancement of paint. The text stones themselves are pretty subtle being legible only at close proximity. The letters are a mixture of v-cut and raised letters and sand-blasted raised and indented letters. The surface of the stones also varies between finely honed, polished, riven, tooled and sand-blasted.

The colours and figuring on the stones are lovely to note especially when the wall is wet and the stones 'jump' out from the speckly reds of the granites to the sparkles in the Easdale slate and the green mottling of the Glen Tilt marble. The other 'craggy' stones in the wall are a variety of strong Scottish stones - whin, granite and marble - and some have insets of lichen-covered pebbles. Sourcing these thin slabs of stone covered in lichen was another interesting element of the project, and these were sourced from an old Caithness wall. They can be seen at the recessed portion of the wall.

The wall which is cast in concrete is 39m in length and 6m high at the highest point. The wall incorporates an element from Miralles' sketch ideas carried out when he stayed in Edinburgh which are depicted in the cast indented flowing line seen at the north-east end of the wall - a skyline of a Scottish city. This line then becomes a series of more abstract forms as it travels along the wall incorporating  the stones in 'niches'.

I was also commissioned to cut letters in the threshold stone to the Dewar Library. Due to scheduling, the letters had to be cut 'in situ' in the Caithness slab. They were words by John P Mackintosh MP:

People in Scotland want a degree of government for themselves.  It is not beyond the wit of man to devise the institutions to meet these demands.

Gillian recently won a £7,700 Queen Elizabeth Scholarship.  Find out more in our news story .

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