George Walkerly and Andrew Gilmour
This headstone, unusually, commemorates two unrelated men - colleagues, rather than family members. The design and engraving is of particularly high quality, and this may be explained by the fact that both men were stonemasons: it appears that their fellow craftsmen created a thing of beauty in their memory.
Although details are unknown about either man's reason for being in Stoneleigh, it must have been that they were part of the team working on the extensive refurbishments of both the church and the abbey, in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Being a mason was a dangerous occupation and one can only speculate about the cause of each man's death.
All that we know of
Andrew Gilmour (or Gilmore) is that he was born on 14 January 1789 in Torwood, in the parish of Dunipace, near Stirling. He was baptised there on 8 February, the son of John Gilmour and his wife Mary nee Andrews. The circumstances of his death at the age of 26 in Stoneleigh are unknown, but he died on 7 June 1815 and was buried on 10 June. His tombstone gives his age as 28 and the spelling of his surname as Gilmore.
About
George Walkerly (or Walkerley) we know rather more. He was born in approximately 1792 in Ely, Cambridgeshire, as he was baptised in the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral on 23 August, one of the nine children of Joseph Walkerly and his wife Elizabeth nee Youngs. At the age of 24 he married Hannah Virgo on 9 January 1816 at St Peter's Church, Wisbech; they had a son, Frederick, born on 11 December that year, and a daughter, Lucy, born on 4 February 1819, just a few months before her father's untimely death on 19 June.
Some mystery - even scandal - surrounds George's death, as it was discussed some thirty years later during the Leigh Peerage Case trials. The suggestion had been made that he had been poisoned as part of the Leighs' conspiracy to silence anyone who might have witnessed their disposal of vital clues which contradicted their right to inheritance. This was roundly dismissed in court both by his landlady, Sarah Goode, and the parish clerk, Job Jeacock. Job spoke of knowing both Walkerly and Gilmour, the former of whom may have had an accident, having received a cut to his finger, which may, of course, have then turned septic - presumably an occupational hazard for masons. He produced in court a copy of the headstone inscriptions.
It is possible that George and his wife had become estranged, as Sarah stated in her evidence that "his wife wanted to go away" and George therefore lodged with Sarah, who cared for him for several weeks before his death. Possibly Hannah had become part of an influential Dissenters group in Wisbech, as on 12 July 1819 she had her children's births retrospectively copied into its register; the following year she married one of the church's members.
George was buried at Stoneleigh on 24 June 1819, and one assumes that his fellow masons then erected a headstone for both him and Andrew Gilmour, who had both died far away from home. Those who survived were sufficiently proud of their profession to include it after each man's name.