M249 Memorial seat, Lochranza, Arran

This project is known only from Honeyman, Keppie & Mackintosh's brief job-book entry, which gives a few slight clues to its appearance: the foundations required excavation, and the structure incorporated two seats and a bronze plaque by R. A. McGilvray & Ferris. The memorial itself has not been located, and may not survive. The job-book entry is written entirely in Mackintosh's hand and he may have been responsible for its design, but with no visual evidence it is impossible to be sure.

The client is recorded in the job book simply as 'Robert Bowes Esq.', with no further details. He was probably the Cambridge bookseller and publisher Robert Bowes (1835–1919), nephew and colleague of Daniel (1813–57) and Alexander Macmillan (1818–96), founders of the publishers Macmillan & Co. Previous generations of the Macmillan family had lived on Arran, first at North Sannox and later at Cock Farm near Lochranza; Duncan Macmillan, father of Daniel and Alexander, occupied a farm at Upper Corrie before moving his family from Arran to Irvine in Ayrshire around 1816. 1 Alexander later spent holidays on Arran with his extended family, among his party in 1860 being Fanny Brimley, who went on to marry Bowes. 2

In 1866 Alexander expressed his deep attachment to the landscape of the island's N.E. corner in a letter to his cousin Hugh: 'I could weep with longing after Glen Sannox ... and the great glen over to Lochranza is tender in my memory, like the dear lost friends with whom it is bound up. How I should like a walk with you from Corrie, say, to Lochranza over to the loch and home by the shore'. 3 Bowes may have commissioned the memorial to mark his family's long association with this part of Arran.

Mackintosh made a drawing of foxgloves at Corrie in 1895, and an undated drawing of Bog Violet. 4

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