THe Lost STONE OF KIRKMADRINE. 139 
ferently Kirkmadrine and Jaskerton. Jaskerton was the 
name of the estate in which it stands, the manor house one 
and a half miles distant. For over a thousand years men 
gaihered to worship God on this spot, hallowed by the dus: 
of these early missionaries of Christ, perchance martyrs, 
commemorated by these stones. 
Worship ceased being held there about the era of the 
Covenants. There was a church here at the Reformation, 
and Protestant worship held for some years. It is said that 
the first incumbent—a scion of a well-known Wigtownshire 
family—was the only Protestant minister in the Presbytery 
of Stranraer that had been a Roman Catholic priest. 
Though the church was no longer used for worship, men 
around brought their dead to lie under its shadow. The 
building crumbled, and the whole place fell into neglect. 
The first reference thereafter I know of to these stones 
is in 1822, and it is by a Mr Todd. He was a schoolmaster 
in the parish adjoining on the south, Kirkaiden (Maiden- 
kirk). His sympathies and interests were wider than an 
ordinary pedagogue’s, and this led him to make a drawing 
of these three stones, which was afterwards of great use. 
The next known about them locally is that some twenty 
years later two of them were turned into gate posts. The 
churchyard is in the middle of fields, and cattle strayed over 
the graves. This was felt to be unseemly, and it was 
arranged that the minister lately ordained in the parish— 
Rev. Robert M‘Neil, father of the late Rev. C. M‘Neil, once 
of St. George’s United Free Church, Dumfries—should 
preach at Kirkmadrine, and that a collection should be taken 
to erect a dyke round the graveyard to keep out the cattle. 
This was done, and these two stones utilised as gate posts. 
Was the reverence paid to the ground an act of irreverence 
to the stones? Let it be forgiven, for men knew not then 
what we think nor they did. 
Soon after this Sir Arthur Mitchell brought their exist- 
ence to the knowledge of the antiquarian world; but by this 
time the smaller thick stone had disappeared. In 1872 Sir 
John Lubbock scheduled the two gate-posts in his Monu- 
